By Janet Singleton

In my mind Tiger Woods is a multiethnic, polysyllabic, whatjamacallit, just as he said. “A Cablinasian.” He called himself that in a 1997 appearance on Oprah and disappointed some black people. But I have no problem with that, particularly now. It’s just that the controversial Vanity Fair magazine cover posing Tiger as “thuggish” and therefore presumably blacker, we are invited to consider that issue once again.

I found out about Mr. Woods’s unfortunate circumstances last month as I waited for a cab in the lobby of a small town Colorado hotel. The people at the front desk were conservative, folksy, and white, as Coloradans have a tendency to be. A middle-aged man shot the breeze with his two younger colleagues: “Poor guy,” he said. “He’s got to pay off all those mistresses and his wife.”

It seemed they were having a conversation about Donald Trump or some such person. Then I opened up a USA Today, and a big colorful picture of Mr. Woods popped up as zanily as any jack-in-the-box. A headline about him apologizing to his family accompanied the image. That I was shocked was a testimony to the marketing of the young golf great as a sanitized commodity; it made no sense to be astonished by the multiple marital infidelities of a perfect stranger, whether they were nosing into the double digits or not. Logically, one does not harbor vivid expectations regarding the personal behavior of unknown subjects, that is, unless one is an FBI profiler. But in this ad-soaked society, we are being imprinted by promotional image-flashing even when we think we are just minding our own business.

And advertising aside, it was impossible to ignore the 20-year-old prodigy in the late 90s as he confidently walked across golf courses where few, if any, persons of color had ever played and seized dominance of the sport; he was a supernatural baby snatching candy from a sloppy, slumbering giant. Before he appeared, golf seemed to be the only sport that could be played posthumously. It contained more old dead white men than did five hundred years of English literature. But Charles Dickens would have never left home dressed so terribly, in Bermuda shorts and ill-coordinated t-shirts. Even the more put-upon of his characters, like stricken, ragged Tiny Tim, had better fashion sense than golfers, pre-Tiger.

A revolutionary figure, he dug golf out of its hole. Then that Cablinasian statement neutralized my vicarious pride. Though it may not have been his intention, he seemed to be saying that he would rather be anything but black. Considering certain horrific realities, that is hardly baffling. An ancient complaining Louisiana great uncle of mine, too, rued his blackness, saying “I’d rather be an alligator.” I was too tiny when I heard that to contemplate the advantages.

Last month, as I read of Mr. Woods amusing and appalling woes—the best Christmas entertainment since Holiday on Ice —his racial amorphousness became a comfortable distancing tool. I did not want to think of him as black. Enough bad stuff happens to black people. But those Cablinasians, I do not hear of anything bad happening to them, so they have some woe wriggle room. It’s only fair.

However, as I sat in front of MSNBC streams and reviewed the various “news,” cartoons, and skits—that great Saturday Night Live bit showing a bandaged-up fellow with a golf club fitted to his head, trying to send the message “help me” as a huffing Elin-like blond stares him down— I came across a clip that bothered me. On TMZ an interviewer asks someone if perhaps the media is being unduly hard on Mr. Woods because he is an “African American.” How could that be? For the media to be hard on a person because he is African American, he’d have to be African American in the first place.

One article accompanied by pictures of Mr. Woods’ alleged girlfriends showed a flattened Rubiks cube of boxes filled with Aryan females, not a multiethnic, polysyllabic, whatjamacallit among them. Sixty-five years ago it could have passed for a pictorial roll call of the Women of the S.S. Not even one Cablinasian smiled up at us among them. Isn’t Mr. Woods at all attracted to other Cablinasians?

His group may be a harem of infamy—one toe-head sex kitten allegedly hails from the porn world— but, still, he has his standards. And the lack of diversity inspired for me a surreal mental image of Mr. Woods being chased across a landscape by some the world’s most beautiful women of color: Kerry Washington, Naomi Campbell, Lucy Liu, Eva Longoria, Pocahontas (the Disney version) and for good measure Avatar’s stunning Dominican-American, Zoe Saldana. Say, for some reason they wanted to get a kiss. I picture him fleeing to the nearest cliff and flinging himself to his death, as Flora did to avoid black Gus’s repugnant advances in Birth of a Nation.

Back in the 90s, Mr. Woods said Cablinasian was a combination of Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian. Sadly, all belong to the brother- and sisterhood of human fallibility. I am just concerned only the second fourth of him will take the fall in the public’s mind.

Why should anyone bother with ethnic categories, anyway, when we have here perhaps the most aptly named man in America? He is simply Tiger, a wildcat, among whose descendents are voracious alley-raiding male strays.

When asked about race back in the 90s, Mr. Woods should have simply said, “I’m a tiger.” Oprah Winfrey might have looked at him quizzically and said, “What do you mean by that?”

“You’ll find out,” Mr. Woods could have said. “You’ll find out.”

Janet Singleton is an award-winning journalist.