Two weeks and a dozen mistresses later, Tiger Woods is in a free fall.  I feel so badly for him.

When the first escort went public I wrote a column about how typical it is for some powerful men to want it all; the prestige, the wife, the cute kids, the mistress.  But this is different.  Tiger’s wife Elin is rightly getting all the support.  In seclusion, away from adoring fans and advertisers but no farther from what he has done than his own pulse, Tiger Woods must feel quite alone.

I’m as much absorbed in the coverage of Tiger’s predicament as I am in the drama itself.  For once, every supermarket tabloid with Woods and his wife on the cover seems worth the $3.99.   The brainy ABC news anchor Charlie Gibson finds Tiger’s story intriguing for its elements of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy.  The women on The View debate whether Tiger should consent to an interview to repair his image.  Financial channels discuss how the PGA will survive without the man who is the sport of golf.  Saturday Night Live did a hilarious satire last weekend of how other unfaithful men like former Presidential candidate John Edwards, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer are bitter because their stories of infidelity don’t get attention anymore.

Some advertisers are now dropping Woods because he no longer represents what they sell, like the financial house Accenture trying to build trust with its customers in a recession.  Of the many adjectives that describe Tiger Woods, trust is probably at the bottom of the list now.    On the other hand, a 30-something amateur golfer proudly wore his Tiger Woods hat on the links the other day.  Interviewed on the news he said he wears the hat because of Tiger Woods the golfer, not Tiger Woods the man.

The gorgeous foreign-born wife, the stricken, hospitalized mother-in-law, the voice mail begging a mistress for help covering up because the wife is calling unfamiliar phone numbers, the $12,000,000.00 post-nuptial agreement, and the confounding expectation Tiger Woods thought he could keep his dalliances a secret indefinitely: How about those kiss-and-tell mistresses?  Tiger told each one he loved them most and they seemed to believe it.  Why?  Was it the Midas touch or something completely lacking in the girls, or both?  Combine the realms of corporate with marriage, athletics with sex, hero status with money and jeez, there’s something for everyone in this mess.

Unlike people lashing out with anger on message boards,  I’m fascinated by the pathology of what happened to Tiger.  How could a man  so disciplined in his sport be so utterly sloppy with his love life?  Dismissing it as sex addiction or steroidal powerful-men-who-lust  touches the branch but not the root.

When psychotherapy uncovers the reason for Tiger’s behavior, it will surely be the one element of this story Tiger manages to keep to himself.  Against a flood of personal and embarrassing revelations, at his core, Tiger Woods is still a man of mystery.

Sometimes the news is darn depressing.  And it doesn’t have to be a gigantic event like the World Trade Center attack or the Christmas Tsunami to bring on despair.  It can be the report about the family pet who died outside the burning home even after firefighters fashioned some sort of mouth-to-snout resuscitation.  Or the elderly man who wandered away from his home and was found frozen to death in the woods just beyond his back yard.   Sad tale upon sad tale, every night on the TV news.

You’d think it would drive the news staff crazy to be subjected to this as a line of work, but it’s really the opposite.  I’m living proof that news anchors and reporters really are crazy, but in this way, they’re the sanest people around and we can all learn something by their example.

As anchor of the evening news on WTVH-TV in Syracuse, New York for nearly three decades, audience members  often asked me if I got depressed reporting so much sadness and crime every night.  The answer was no.  I had therapists all around me in the form of other anchors.

Once the commercial hit, we started started talking about everything that wasn’t the news.  Sometimes it was our plan for the dinner hour, but many times, it was about what we had just watched on the program.  We talked and we shared.  Sometimes we got momentarily weepy, often we were outraged, but we always got it out.

We did the weather segment, and then the sports segment, but as those commercials kept coming  so did our feelings.  By the time we got home to our families we were all talked out.  No more anger and grief.  Our feelings were in their rightful place, the guy next to us.

Seriously, you can’t get stuck with something if people take it from you, and in that way my news colleagues were my therapists, and I like to believe I was theirs.  We took the stress away from each other. I used to be surprised my non-news industry friends so often felt blue about the news and now I know why.  Without the benefit of the other anchor and the meteorologist and the sports guy, the news can really get to you.

So if you feel down about what’s happening in the world, and you can’t find a news anchor, or a weatherman or a sports guy, pick up the phone and call a friend.  Tell them what you just saw and heard.  They’ll take it from you.  And if you do it quickly, you’ll still have time to catch the last story of the newscast, the one about the water-skiing squirrel in Iowa.