McNulty: Not so easy to believe Tiger

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Tiger Woods wants us to believe in him.

I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to believe in anyone who waited until now -- until he had made such a mess of his life that nobody will ever see him the same way again -- to realize he's no better than the rest of us.

Not now. Maybe not ever. That's up to him.

But as the world's best golfer stood alone at a podium and asked all of us for a second chance during Friday's staged, made-for-TV public apology for repeatedly cheating on his wife and forever staining one of the greatest careers in sport, he finally seemed to get it.

"I was wrong. I was foolish. I don't get to play by different rules," a glassy-eyed Woods told us, reading from a script but sounding sincere. "The same boundaries that apply to everyone apply to me. I brought this shame on myself."

He said a lot of other things, too, during a surreal, 13-1/2-minute confession in which he blamed only himself for dragging his life into the gutter.

He said all the right things, really, telling us what he needed for us to hear and, maybe, what we wanted to hear from him in the wake of that fateful Thanksgiving night outside his Orlando-area home.

He said he was "selfish" and "foolish" and "embarrassed," and that he has "a lot to atone for." Mostly, he said he was sorry.

"I've had a lot of time to think about what I've done," Woods said. "My failures have made me look at myself in a way I never wanted to before. It's now up to me to make amends, and that starts by never repeating the mistakes I've made. It's up to me to start living a life of integrity."

Were those his words? Did he write this script, which proved to be a far-better apology than anything we've heard from all the other athletes who've cheated in other ways? Or did they come from a hired pen from some slick, public-relations outfit that specializes in damage control? It doesn't matter, as long as Woods was being honest when he said them. Honest with us. Honest with himself.

And, for now, I'm going to believe he was.

I'm going to take him at his word, or whoever's words he was reading. I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt, even though we've all seen too many examples of celebrities saying and doing anything to get themselves out of trouble. I'm going to believe, based on what he said and how he said it, that Woods has learned a painful and costly lesson.

He has lost his good name. He has lost sponsors. He might lose his family.

"I never thought about who I was hurting," Woods said. "Instead, I thought only about myself. I ran straight through the boundaries that a married couple should live by. I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt entitled."

He was wrong. And now, he tells us, he knows just how wrong he was.

I, for one, want to believe him, because I want to believe a man, if he acknowledges his mistakes and truly commits himself to change, can overcome his own bad choices. I choose to believe him, because, for the first time, Woods seems to care about something more than himself and his career.

Think about it.

Woods has devoted his life to surpassing Jack Nicklaus' record of 18 major championships and needs to win only four more to tie. Three of this year's majors will be played on courses on which he won half of his 14 Grand Slam titles: The Masters (Augusta National), U.S. Open (Pebble Beach) and British Open (St. Andrews). Yet, he said he isn't sure when he'll return to golf, if at all in 2010.

Because he's not ready.

Because, he said, he has more important work to do -- to change his behavior, to try to save his marriage, to become a better man.

And I'm rooting for him.

But if Woods wants us to "believe in him" again, he'll first need to drop this silly sex-addiction excuse, which only invites doubt about his sincerity.

His hurtful conduct had nothing to do with addiction.

It's a character flaw, one that can be corrected.

That's up to him.

(Ray McNulty is a columnist for Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers inFlorida. For more of his thoughts on sports, you can follow his blog at www.tcpalm.com/mcnulty. He can be reached at ray.mcnulty@scripps.com.)

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