If ever we had a shot at bringing Tiger Woods to the PGA event at Turningstone, this should be the year. He  still has a ways to go to rehabilitate his image with the fans even though he is credited with increasing television ratings for the Masters this year by 50 percent..

It’s no coincidence that golf’s premiere American event was book-ended by Tiger in the beginning and Phil Mickelson at the end; the philanderer with the lovely blonde wife losing to the family man with the lovely blonde wife.  In fact, there is a strange physical resemblence between the two women. A year ago, the tabloids might have focused on who is prettier?  This year none of that matters.  It’s all about life and death, love and fidelity, admiration and humiliation.

Elin didn’t walk the course with her husband this year because Tiger didn’t deserve her.  Amy Mickelson didn’t walk the course because she’s too weak from fighting breast cancer.    Going into the Masters we wondered if Tiger would rise or falter and indeed, the early press focused on his strongest start yet at the venerable course.  How fitting that by today, we were all so over Tiger.  Phil Mickelson offered up the better story, the one we can all respect, a man so in love with his strickened wife he goes out and plays the best game of his life.  Love does conquer all, even a tawdry tabloid tale.

On this final day at Augusta Tiger was little more than a footnote.  No green jacket this year.  Just more hard work on and off the golf course.  Much was made of his comfort level at Augusta, yet how comfortable could he be without his family?

That’s why I think this year we have our best chance at bringing Tiger Woods to the PGA event at Turningstone August 2nd through the 8th.  The resort is famously family-friendly with activities for wives and children.  Not that everyone here would even care about Tiger Woods.  He let a lot of people down since his last appearance at the Notah Begay Benefit event last summer, an event where his involvement with an attractive young lady was reported in the New York Post.

Tiger has a good relationship with Oneida Nation President and CEO Ray Halbritter, and fellow PGA golfer Notah Begay. He would do well to return some of the goodwill and invest in the smaller events on the tour as he continues to repair his image.

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.

Here we are again, watching the mighty stumble and fall.  Tiger Wood’s admission today that he disappointed his family with “transgressions” that were not consistent with his “values”, all but validates the rumors of an affair with a 24 year old cocktail waitress.  He says he will now work out his problems in private.  Good luck with that.

Until now, is there anyone who didn’t wish they were Tiger Woods for at least a day?  That gorgeous physique with the killer golf swing and a billion dollar bank account?  What guy doesn’t think Wood’s wife is hot?  Or what woman even?  It was so perfect, it had to go, at least for a little while as the world adjusts to the reality Tiger Woods is really just a guy.

Like so many powerful men it is the people who have the most who risk the most. They approach the game of life as high rollers in Vegas prepared to lose it all.  Is it power?  Greed?  Entitlement?  Could Bill Clinton not have known he would be impeached for infidelity when he had sexual relations with that woman?

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, the lawyer crusader with the smart and pretty wife who was elected in a landslide, lacked enough inside that he needed a call girl too.  It cost him his job and his political future.  I wonder if he wanted it in the first place, or he found himself on a train which was not going to stop until he derailed it.

And here was Tiger, just two months ago playing in the Notah Begay benefit golf tournament at Turningstone.  According to the alleged mistress, Tiger was involved with her for two years.  I watched him eat a sandwich out of his golf bag as another player teed off on the 15th at Atunyote.  He seemed absorbed in the play, but looking back, maybe he was daydreaming about the next liaison with Jaimee Grubbs.

Tiger hasn’t run for office and he doesn’t owe us any explanation about his behavior.  He’s just a hero.  I don’t know any teenager who lamented the folly of President Clinton or Eliot Spitzer but my teenager announced tonight he doesn’t like Tiger “so much anymore”.  Older folks who’ve endured the knocks of marriage and others who didn’t survive and moved on probably have more sympathy for Wood’s situation, but children still believe in perfect marriages along with perfect golf games and cool product endorsements.

Is there a person in the land who would trade places with the guy right now?  He’s probably spending his fifth night on the couch;  no more special than any other guy who strayed from his marriage.  Infidelity has a way of recalibrating socio-economic scales.  A dog house at the trailer park is probably not very different from the dog house at the mansion; they’re cramped places on the outside of everything, the house, the wife, the kids, the respect.  There’s no promise of ever being allowed back in.

Remember the awkward stroll to the Presidential helicopter that first weekend after the news broke about President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky?  First daughter Chelsea Clinton literally had to hold the marriage together for the planned vacation to Martha’s Vineyard.  She stood between her parents and held their hands.  We all watched and squirmed.

We squirmed while watching Silda Spitzer, tailored and composed with her Hermes scarf circled round her neck and bags beneath her eyes two feet behind her husband as he held a news conference about his “transgressions”.

And now we will watch the uneasy repair of the Wood’s marriage.  On his website he said he couldn’t believe the appetite for details of his personal life with the tabloids.  He ain’t seen nothing yet.  It’s one thing to attract attention with a dazzling smile, a perfect swing and a long list of sponsors.  But produce a soap opera in this Age of Reality TV, and you’ll find viewers you never knew existed.

Carrie and I had quite a laugh on the phone between her newscasts.   She met TV Chef Bobby Flay at the New York State Fair this morning and told me he is as friendly as friendly can be, and tiny.

“Really”? I asked.  “He has such a full face, you’d think he’s kind of big”.

“Not at all” Carrie responded.   “He’s really thin.  He probably has a 32 inch waist.  He looks so much smaller in person”.  We paused and then cracked up.  “It’s what people have been telling us for 30 years”.

So true.  If there’s one thing I heard over and over again in my nearly three decades long career on Syracuse television news,  it’s that I’m so much smaller in person than I was on TV.  Carrie hears it still, as her impressive run on WSYR-TV endures.  Hard to understand because we look just like ourselves to ourselves and to each other, but to people who saw us only on TV, we were small face to face.

I think our belly laugh was fueled by a similar conversation we had just one week ago.  I was at the Notah Begay Foundation Golf Tournament at Turningstone and stood within eight feet of Tiger Woods.  Carrie was working and could not attend so I described Tiger as magnificent and smaller than he appears on TV.  Again, more silence, and then more laughter.

After all these years, with my career on TV now closed out and Carrie still going strong, we think of ourselves as “small” on TV as we are in person.  So it’s a shock to meet someone on TV who isn’t as seven feet tall as they are on the screen. It’s kind of like looking in the mirror and seeing someone who feels 29 looking like she’s 52.

It’s so incongruous and there’s absolutely no desire to reconcile one image with another.

The greeting at the door of Lava at Turningstone read “No Cameras.  No Cellphones”.  That took care of that.  A blog about this region’s most beautiful golf course, a buffet dinner that made Vegas look like cooking school and four of the most talented and ripped men alive, with no photos.  Sorry about that.

I don’t golf, but I recognize the sport as perhaps the most dignified on the planet.  It’s well-mannered and gentlemanly, even among women.  The rules are serious.  If Tiger Woods can be fined for questioning the call of a PGA official as he was a couple of weeks ago, a lot worse things can happen to me for trying to sneak a photo of the players.

In golf, spectators are quiet.  Players are respectful.  Fist pumps don’t come at the expense of other players, but at the course itself.  Who could deny a man the joy of victory over a path of crazy perfect grass?

For the third year in a row I am pinching myself for my good fortune at being named a member of the Empowerment Fund of the PGA event at Turningstone.  Twenty Central New Yorkers who represent politics and government, business, athletics and media, serve at the pleasure of Oneida Nation C.E.O. Ray Halbritter, who also happens to be my business hero.   You can’t be in his presence for five minutes and not realize the man has something.  My fellow committee members, all impressive in their own right, speak of Ray in the same universal way.  The Empowerment Fund is the charity arm of the PGA event at Turningstone and in just the first two years, the Oneidas turned over nearly $800,000.00 in ticket proceeds to various Central New York charities.

Ray summoned all his skills, smarts and connections to land Tiger Woods for a game of golf today at the stunningly beautiful Atunyote course.  Everywhere you walked, the talk was about Tiger.

But in fairness, today was really about a lesser known pro golfer named Notah Begay III, another quality guy with an economics degree from Stanford University and the only full-blooded native American on the tour.  Notah has a Foundation dedicated to helping Native children through golf and soccer, and a longtime friendship with Tiger Woods,  one that precedes their famous roommate assignment at Stanford.  In a question and answer session at the reception at Lava last night, Tiger said of Notah  “He took care of me and he didn’t take care of me.  I killed a lot of brain cells”, which provoked laughter from the invitation-only 300 in attendance.  Did the best athlete in all the world and the greatest gentleman and role model too just suggest he smoked weed?  No!  Tell us you wore the same socks for two days in row why don’t you?  And now stick a fork in our eyes.

In typical pro golf fashion, the four players: Tiger, Notah, Mike Weir and Camilo Villegas all spoke of how impressed they are that Notah has this cause and it’s a pleasure to assist him at Turningstone.  For his part, Tiger said, “anything Notah needs, and I’m there”.  Quite a promise from the person most in demand in all the world since Princess Diana.

After the intimate gathering at Lava last night today’s skins game seemed anti-climatic except for the 3000 fans who stood ten and fifteen deep at each hole, and the media that was finally granted access.  At one point, my son Harry and I stood within eight feet of the players because we skipped ahead two holes and secured a spot at the rope at the fifth tee.

The four players collectively earned one million dollars for the Notah Begay III Foundation.  I’ll bet no one was more grateful than Ray Halbritter who envisioned top notch play on his golf course rolled from native land, where wetlands met limos and pampas grass sprouted bronze sculpture, and where a perfect late summer day saw four talented classy men turn the most accomplished Central New Yorkers into star-struck 12 year olds.