Tiger Woods finally has a story

At 41 years old, ranked the 666th best golfer in the world, Tiger Woods is finding himself.

Tiger Woods grew a line beard last year. A line beard, for those unclear on the concept, is the heavily constructed beard cut to the jawline and no further. It is sometimes known as the chinstrap beard, the jowl-quator, the R&B Lineup, or for Knicks fans, “The Dolan”. It is commonly used like a wire fence across territory lacking natural borders. Everything on one side is face; everything beneath it is surrendered to the body. Like most fences, it requires a lot of maintenance, or else it collapses within months.

Unless you are one of the people currently wearing one, it is universally agreed that it is one of the worst facial hairstyles ever conceived of by mankind.

Tiger Woods had one in 2016. He’s scaled down now to a goatee, which ranks higher than a line beard or Hitler-stache, but still dwells in the basement of facial hair moves. The goatee is THE middle-aged dad choice for men who want to signal that yes, they’re a little too independent to shave every day for The Man, but that they also still put in a little work with the razor.

It, too, is hopelessly outdated for 2017. Even megachurch pastors have deserted the goatee for the Common Hipster Beard, leaving the goatee for “Emotional Noble Everyman Dads In Car Commercials” and “Tom Hanks Playing A Trump Voter.”

It is the kind of decision one could only make if one had spent the better part of 20 years living in their own insanely monied universe, one where whatever you decided was what was decided, where you were handed your own clothes, your own shoes, your own golf clubs, your own look, all by people happy to help you create your own brand, your own very public you.

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It is the kind of decision you could only make if you were someone like Tiger Woods, who has been insanely rich since he burst onto the national scene as a teenager, and equally insanely isolated as a celebrity.

Tiger is very, very far from being the 21-year-old who torched Augusta in a red shirt. He is 41 years old. He has been divorced in extremely public fashion. His last major win happened two Presidencies ago. His sole aim, per his own words this week, is “to play away from pain.” Seven days ago, he missed the cut at the Farmers Insurance Open in San Diego. His namesake video game franchise in 2015 became Rory McIlroy’s namesake video game franchise—the golfer a Nike ad depicted as a child watching Tiger Woods as aspiration.

He is, as of Feb. 1 2017, the 666th ranked golfer in the world.

The fascinating thing is how liberating this all seems for him. Tiger Woods in his competitive prime was, at least on a personal level, a cipher. After giving Charlie Pierce way, way too much in the way of interesting information at the age of 21 in the classic GQ profile, “The Man, Amen,” Woods become a managed, sometimes featureless brand. He gave very little away, other than extremely detailed shop talk on golf, and a general admission to being driven beyond any other golfer on the planet. It was known that he didn’t like certain people, and had feuds with others. Other than a reputation for cheapness when it came time to tip service people, his video game avatar was as interesting as the public person.

I know this because after playing a tour as Woods in Tiger Woods PGA Tour, I started to feel lonely. To fix this, I made my own golfer, a stick-legged, sack-gutted, weak-chinned redneck named Lee John. Lee John had lived through a few things, but his old man swing put the ball in the fairway like clockwork, even on nights when Lee John clearly spent most of the night boiling away his inner demons with the fires only found inside a bottle of Johnny Walker. OK, maybe not Johnny Walker, but like, Early Times.

Anyway: the point is that a ramshackle, thrice-divorced imaginary golfer I made up on the spot was way, way more entertaining than booming 700-yard drives with the real virtual Tiger Woods, because Lee John had something Tiger didn’t: A story, with bumps and tragedies and losses that I had to make up because Tiger had none of that.

Tiger has a few of those now, and maybe did all along. (For instance: Tiger might have screwed up his back running endless training sessions with Navy SEALS in order to emulate his dead father, which: Yeah, that’s a story.) Even if he’s still insanely rich and living in a world where he builds his own bars to hang out in, he’s a more relatable character, and not just because his most circulated highlight of the last couple years or so involves him blading chip shots at the driving range.

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Tiger Woods, in the throes of early middle age, decided to try on the line beard. He does interviews about losing his hair. He buys new, sort of embarrassing sunglasses. He might be meditating using an app he’ll tell you about, or trying on whatever the tailor hands him because—well, because he should try new things, right? You have to keep trying new things, like maybe Instagramming yourself shirtless as “Mac Daddy Santa” and sharing it with the world. Because that’s social media, and Tiger does that now, because that’s something you’re definitely supposed to do in 2017.

A video camera operator knocked out Woods’ front tooth in 2015, and Woods wore a bandana over his face to hide the gap in public. The bandana was branded with Woods’ favorite video game at the time, “Ghost Recon,” meaning Woods, the richest golfer in the world, was probably spending a large amount of time each week trying to shoot 14-year-olds in an online combat game.

It’s watching someone make deliberate choices of taste for themselves for the first time in their life—someone with all the money they will ever need, sure, but still a somebody, someone on the downside of 40 with kids making questionable fashion decisions, playing video games, and trying to figure out what kind of pants to wear, because — well, because what kind of pants do you wear when you’re 41, trying to figure it out in public, and all you’re trying to do is swing away from the pain? That’s relatable. He’s like a baby millionaire fawn, finding his legs as a person while his body and his game crumble. That’s not a great script. It is, however, a much better story.