DATE: Sunday, April 27, 1997                TAG: 9704250806

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS

                                            LENGTH:   63 lines

TOO MANY PEOPLE TRYING TO TUG THE TIGER'S TAIL

In a shop where I once worked, on a Saturday morning, the maintenance guy from the local Catholic church stopped by to pick up some supplies. He was in a hurry, he said, 'cause he had to get home and root for Notre Dame's football team.

Sid, my boss, who was Jewish, shook his head and chuckled. ``You Catholics,'' he said, ``always rootin' for Notre Dame.''

The other guy stiffened his jaw and said: ``Yeah? Well, all you Jews root for Temple, don't you?''

Sid and I had a good laugh over that when the guy left. And Sid, who was a better philosopher than he was a merchant, treated me to a half-hour discourse on the futility of ethnocentric mindsets - his own culture's included.

Which brings us to the futility of the latest such debate: ``Who owns Tiger Woods?''

Lynn Feigenbaum, my friend and colleague, talks in her column this morning (Page J5) about a low-grade Melanin War that broke out at the newspaper last week when a cutline below a photo described Woods as ``African American.''

``Hey, he's half Asian and he's only one-fourth black,'' sputtered the Asians. ``Hey, just look at the guy,'' countered the African Americans, ``and tell me he's not black.''

While all this huffing was going on, Woods showed up on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where he tried to cool the soup by giving his own views on the subject - and pretty much insisted that he'll decide for himself what he sees in his mirror every morning.

This oughta close the case once and for all, as Oprah is accepted as the Mother Confessor and ultimate social arbiter by the whole wired world - black, white, yellow, red, plaid, you name it. (This has left Ann and Abby to settle such crises as whether newlyweds can ask for cash in a wedding invite, or whether the toilet paper should be set for ``over'' or ``under.'')

I once saw a panel of black college students in a televised discussion, and one of the young men was nearly beside himself in rage that whites had the gall to play jazz. ``Jazz was invented by blacks,'' he thundered. ``Any white who plays it is ripping off our culture. We shouldn't allow it!'' His friends nodded, sagely.

The Mr. White Guy in me couldn't help but yell back at the TV: ``Oh yeah? When you give us back basketball, I'll burn my Chick Corea albums. Deal?''

Problem is, if we start dividing up the who-owns-what of American culture, then we have to kick Oprah off the air (Heaven forbid!) because she stole her gig from Ann and Abby and Donahue, and every white kid in the world will have to flip his ballcap forward and turn in his CD collection because all of rock and jazz came, indeed, right out of the African soul of the Delta blues.

The result would be slow-foot, 1950s whiteboy basketball, music shops full of nothing but John Lee Hooker wannabes, and even more air time for Regis and Kathy Lee. All cultures should join in a communal shudder at the thought of such a world.

As Sid told me, ``You see the futility in all this, don'tcha?''

Jazz, like basketball, belongs to whoever can play it well enough to draw a crowd. Pride in Tiger Woods' accomplishments belongs to whoever has faced the same obstacles he faced in fighting his way to the top.

But there is a big difference between admiration and ownership. Remember: Any fool with enough money can own a mountain, but he can never claim to own the view.

No one can rightly say of Tiger Woods, ``He's mine.'' The whole world is entitled to a view of the man, but in the end, the man belongs to himself.

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