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" If you talk all the time when you play golf, you probably suck. It&amp;#039;s true. Lousy golfers talk. They get too close and they jabber. On and on. Shamelessly oblivious, they fill the air with what they know of themselves, which is very little. Fact is, bad golfers can&amp;#039;t like their game, so they try to get everyone else on the course \u2014 everywhere, really \u2014 to like them. And a good golfer does nothing but listen \u2014 to coaches, to caddies, to playing partners. Bloodless and dispassionate, yes, but they&amp;#039;re programmed to receive. The good ones don&amp;#039;t talk as much because they don&amp;#039;t care if you like their game; they want you to fear it. This had been the Tiger Woods way since his father first holstered a cut-down five-iron under his diaper pin and dragged him on The Mike Douglas Show like it was a driving range. The kid listened; he could take instruction. Any fool could see he knew how to roll the ball. He listened! And so he learned to do what he was told. Like a sponge, this kid. There isn&amp;#039;t any other way he could have become what he became, not on the golf course anyway: Tiger Woods listened. It was pretty damn fun back when Tiger was cold-bloodedly cutting up the golf populous, because the image we held of him was often simply the one of his very own iconic repose: Tiger regarding the distance, hand to chin, never muttering more than a word or two from behind his fingers. In those moments, as his mush-mouthed caddie threw out the yardages, Tiger listened. He was icy, sure, calculated. A grim cipher of physical execution. Inhuman, somehow. And then, one year ago, Tiger Woods got human. Seedily, somehow unremarkably, human. All because along the way, he&amp;#039;d stopped listening and started giving the orders. He started talking, and, certainly, texting. It didn&amp;#039;t help that the profiteering dimwits and scrapers he surrounds himself with said absolutely nothing worth listening to, contenting themselves to slide over in the back of the Escalade to make room for his latest gooma while BlackBerrying her ETA to the man. And over this past year, with his cooked-up press conferences, his stilted appearance as an amateur Buddhist, his hand-parsed &amp;quot;interviews&amp;quot; with Golf Channel chumleys, Tiger has defined himself by talking, and, certainly, by the fact that he likes to watch. Sure, he kept quiet while competing, but there was no distance in the pose, no mystery or command. The world was up in his business, standing too close. And in this proximity, details emerged, and not just of women&amp;#039;s names. He started looking like a bad golfer \u2014 his hair receded, his teeth got longer, his gut emerged \u2014 around the same time he started talking like one \u2014 going over the details of what just happened, reviewing his performance like anyone should give a shit about a guy who tied for 28th, promising to learn from mistakes he made over and over again.  Now Tiger&amp;#039;s yucking it up on Mike &amp;amp;amp; Mike, in an op-ed for Newsweek, with a resurgently lame and largely empty Twitter feed. The guy is all talk, which makes him worse company for golf \u2014 watching and playing. Because no one likes a babbler. So how does Tiger Woods rediscover repose? First, there are the things he must stop doing: Stop talking. Stop apologizing. Stop explaining. Stop promising. It&amp;#039;s creepy and defeating, all this self-narration. And it makes it clear what we were staring at back when he was winning, what we&amp;#039;re probably still obsessing over now that&amp;#039;s he&amp;#039;s a back-of-the-pack curiosity: We were looking at an illusion.  What&amp;#039;s wrong with a little shame? The earliest notions of shame had to do with humans as uncovered, revealed, shown naked, and vulnerable \u2014 much more so than the comic overstatement of body scanners at the damn airport. And what did these people do? They sure as hell didn&amp;#039;t continue to undress themselves, while emoting regret. They didn&amp;#039;t go on tour with their mundane regret \u2014 like Big Ben, or the dog killer, or the French guy. They covered up. They clothed themselves and they turned away. Tiger Woods needs to go back and embrace his shame. He needs to let that little swoosh become his very own scarlet letter. He should pull back, use the lingering hurt to recreate \u2014 and maintain (however humanly or inhumanly possible) \u2014 that pained distance that once came to define him, and may yet. Tiger&amp;#039;s last hope as a great golfer is to act like a good one \u2014 to retreat and study, to get back to the point where&amp;#039;s he&amp;#039;s listening to one person and not the rest of us. His only hope as an icon is get back there, to the point where he&amp;#039;s standing with his hand in front of his mouth, so far from us that we can only wonder what the hell it is he&amp;#039;s really saying. And then he carves the world with a four-iron. A little wonder wouldn&amp;#039;t hurt him just now.  PLUS: Chris Jones on Why Jocks Cheat and Complete Coverage of the Tiger Woods Scandal "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a8973/tiger-woods-anniversary-3880253/>