Where will Tiger Woods misogynist behavior fit into his legacy?

The latest stop on the PGA Tour was for the Genesis Open, in Los Angeles. Tiger Woods is playing in his first tournament in 2023. His playing partners for the first round are Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas. On the ninth hole, Woods outdrove Thomas by ten yards. As Woods walked past him, he handed Thomas a tampon. Both laughed at what was supposed to be a private joke between them. One problem, it was caught on camera.

There are a couple of ways to interpret the joke. One, Woods was telling Thomas that he was playing like a girl because a forty-seven-year-old man outdrove him. Two, he was calling Thomas a pussy, for the same reason. Neither is funny unless you’re a thirteen-year-old boy. In fact, both are offensive.

There’s been plenty of outrage over Woods's action. If you click on your Twitter feed, it’s easy to find. You’ll also see the reactions to this with plenty of it’s only boys being boys responses. Plus, Woods apologized, it’s over, let’s move on.

Yeah, it was a very sophomoric joke. It would be easy to accept his not-so-heartfelt apology and move on except for one thing…his history of misogynistic behavior toward women.

We go back to 2009 when a report first surfaced of Woods having an affair with a New York City nightclub manager. In the days after the report, more than a dozen women claimed to have had affairs with him, during the course of his marriage. Look, it wasn’t for nothing that his wife, Elin Nordegren, chased him out of his home while swinging one of his golf clubs at him.

While this last weekend’s behavior may have been close to a nothing-burger, it does add to his reputation of how he acts towards and what he thinks about women.

So, my question is where will all this fit into the final Tiger Woods legacy? We saw an example of this a couple of weeks ago with the death of Hockey legend Bobby Hull. His horrid behavior outside the rink in many cases topped the listing of his on-ice achievements. Now nowhere in Tiger’s history are any reports of violence toward women and certainly, he hasn’t made any racist statements like Hull did, but Tiger’s actions will definitely be part of his overall legacy. The only question is, how high?