Vanity Fair’s February cover boy is none other than Tiger Woods. The cover shows a half-naked, intense Tiger lifting weights, but don’t be fooled – this is not an exclusive interview with Tiger or anything like that. Instead, the “cover story” is an essay penned by Buzz Bissinger about the whole Tiger situation. It’s basically an analysis of “how did it go so wrong?” Bissinger opens with something interesting – the idea that this whole scandal is really the first time “we had ever seen him do something human.” My mother expressed the same sentiments – and she even said that no matter what, it was nice to know he wasn’t such a goody-two-shoes (and now you know where I get it). Anyway, the essay is really, really long, so if you would like to read the entire thing, go to Vanity Fair’s site. Here are some of the highlights:

It wasn’t until after the early-morning hours of November 27—when Tiger Woods got into his Cadillac Escalade closely trailed by a golf club carried by his likely very furious wife, drove his car far less distance than he putts a golf ball, and hit a fire hydrant—that the tens of millions of us who admired him suddenly came to a realization: this was the first time we had ever seen him do something human, except perhaps for when, at the Buick Open last year, he was caught on video shaking his leg, apparently farting, and then grinning like a frat boy.

Tiger’s story has been driven by sex, tons of it, in allegedly all different varieties: threesomes in which he greatly enjoyed girl-on-girl, and mild S&M (featuring hair-pulling and spanking); $60,000 pay-for-sex escort dates; a quickie against the side of a car in a church parking lot; a preference for porn stars and nightclub waitresses, virtually all of them with lips almost as thick as their very full breasts; drug-bolstered encounters designed to make him even more of a conquistador (Ambien, of all things); immature sex-text messages (“Send me something naughty … Go to the bathroom and take [a picture],” “I will wear you out … When was the last time you got [laid]?”); soulful confessions that he got married only for image and was bored with his wife; regular payments of between $5,000 and $10,000 each month to keep his harem quiet. It’s all there and more in what is the greatest single fall in popularity of a nonpolitician in the history of public-opinion surveys: a drop in approval from 87 percent in 2005 to 33 percent, with an unfavorable rating of 57 percent, according to a recent USA Today/Gallup poll.

But why? When soccer player David Beckham was rumored to have been in sexual trouble, it may have been disappointing to his fans, but it was hardly surprising. Beckham just had the look of someone who was born to screw around. The same with Alex Rodriguez. The same with Kobe Bryant. (Is there a player in pro basketball who doesn’t screw around?) The same also with Bill Clinton and John Edwards and David Duchovny and Colorado minister Ted Haggard.

But not Tiger Woods. In an age of constant gotcha and exposure, he had always been the bionic man in terms of personality, controlling to a fault and controlled to a fault, smiling with humility and showing those pearly white teeth in victory or defeat, sui generis in the world of pro golf, where even fellow pros and other insiders didn’t really know him, because he didn’t want anybody to know him. With Woods, everything was crafted to produce a man of nothing, with no interior—non-threatening and non-controversial. That was Tiger Woods, all of which made him the perfect man and pitchman for our imperfect times, a charming nonperson.

Nothing was left to chance, not even his wardrobe during major tournaments, a careful mix of dark pants and golf shirt and hat picked out in consultation with Nike. He had the trappings of a life: a beautiful blonde wife, Elin Nordegren, who was a former Swedish model; a little boy and a little girl; an obligatory mansion in Florida, outside Orlando. But so much of it now seems like requisite window dressing, props for the further crafting of image and garnering of those hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsements—Nike, Gillette, Gatorade, Tag Heuer, AT&T. It now seems that when he returned home after a tournament and vanished back inside his gated community, the persona he left behind, the one he so obsessively presented to the public, was as empty as Bingham’s Omaha apartment, pieces of furniture without any meaning, a life without meaning.

Woods, to the bitter end and with a kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance, still felt he could beat the tidal wave back. When he was taken to the hospital for injuries, a fake name was used. When the highway patrol came knocking, he refused to speak to them for three straight days. It was only when his paramours started pouring out of every cupboard like tenement cockroaches that Tiger expressed some sort of awareness that he was in deep shit, though he did not do so in person but on his Web site.

He must have thought the merest acknowledgment of impropriety would be some type of antidote: he was Tiger. For the second time in his life he badly estimated, just as he had a few days earlier when he apparently thought that most fans would accept the story that his wife had a golf club in hand to free him from his Escalade instead of trying to beat the hell out of him for his infidelity. Once again it was sheer arrogance from a 33-year-old man—not “a kid,” as his I.M.G. agent, Mark Steinberg, still idiotically calls him—who continued to think he could fool the world.

With the number of alleged paramours reaching 14 as of mid-December (a figure bound to multiply), it is safe to say that behind the non-accessible accessibility and seemingly perfect marriage to a beautiful woman was a sex addict who could not get enough. There is nothing wrong with that, given that the opportunities for Tiger were endless. But it is hard not to conclude that the only reason he got married was to burnish that precious image even more, family man on the outside and what Logan calls “this whole alternate life” on the inside. Even Hugh Hefner publicly disapproved of Woods’s behavior, decrying not that he had sex with other women but that he tried to lie and cheat his way through his liaisons without manning up to the fact that the marriage wasn’t working.

The swirling question is if, and when, he will return to golf. Most observers think he will, but with companies such as Accenture, Gillette, and Tag Heuer basically fleeing for the hills, he would simply be a golfer trying to win a tournament. His focus is such that he can likely still win, whatever the insanity surrounding him, but life will be different. Donald Trump thinks he will come back “bigger than ever,” a sure sign the opposite will happen.

In the end it was the age-old clash of image versus reality, the compartmentalization of two different lives that inevitably merge at some certain point, whoever you are. He exhibited the same superhuman confidence off the golf course that he exhibited on it, apparently convinced he would never be caught despite the stupid sloppiness at the end—text messages, voice-mail messages. He deluded himself into thinking he could be something that he wasn’t: untouchable. The greatest feat of his career is that he managed to get away with it for so long in public, the bionic man instead of the human one who hit a fire hydrant.

[From Vanity Fair]

The essay also goes into detail about Tiger associations with sketchy doctors, and the hint of crudeness, or arrogance, or inappropriateness that some people noticed early in his career, before he learned how to throw up a nicer image of himself. Oh, and Vanity Fair online has paired this story with their “Mistresses of the Decade” slideshow. Just, you know, something to keep in mind.

Vanity Fair cover courtesy of INF.