Tiger again. Really? Still?

Help me understand something, please.

Just read an “alert” letting me know that Tiger Woods will hold a press conference on Friday, February 19. At the event, Tiger will break the three months of silence he has maintained with the press since his unfortunate run in with an obstruction in his driveway.

Well, thank you God. Our long national nightmare is over. Tiger will speak.

Question: Does anyone care what he has to say? Hasn’t he said it all by now? Didn’t he already apologize and tell us that he had to give up golf to become a better man and a better husband and a better father? Perhaps he’s going to tell us all about how he has been rehabilitated and can now be trusted to travel the world and have his zipper remain intact, something new for him.

I’m wondering why he doesn’t just show up on a course at a PGA event and begin to play the game that brought him his fortune, his fame and his dates. Say it with your clubs, Tiger. Finish at 8 under par; remind us of why we know who you are and what you do really, really well. Save the speeches about your tawdry affairs. It’s boring and distasteful. We don’t care how sorry you are, how much you’ve learned about yourself, and how important your wife and children are to you.

Maybe that’s just me. Because there is at least one group who does hope we care – a lot. The folks at DeCapo Press hope that at least a million of us to care when they publish the first ever biography of Woods in May. Promising “exclusive interviews and new details,” the book will no doubt hit the bestseller list immediately.

But wouldn’t it be so great if it didn’t? If it just sort of sat there on front tables in bookstores across the country. If the end caps went untouched, if the sales rank on Amazon.com or bn.com never broke into the top 100 titles, even just the top 100 sports titles, or the top 100 golf titles. Wouldn’t it be so wonderful if Oprah decided not to book him; if Larry King and 60 Minutes and The View also passed on a Tiger appearance? If not one morning show gushed over his revelations?

I don’t wish failure on any publisher or writer these days, given the tough economic times. But I do wish that collectively, as readers and the people who supply readers with content, we could elevate ourselves beyond this kind of “train wreck” mentality and teach ourselves to look away more quickly whenever stories like this capture the headlines and the airwaves.