How Tiger Woods changed his stripes

What happens to modern versions of Olympian gods — the superstar athletes whose lives are from early on lived in the glare of television cameras, their singular achievements the focus of constant stories plastered in magazines, their paths so carefully predetermined on the road to global celebrity and success?

As we know through the well-publicised examples of Pete Rose to OJ Simpson, Lance Armstrong and Oscar Pistorius, more often than not these Icarus-like, man-made idols fall from grace — spectacularly, scandalously and with a hunger for proof of inevitable human foibles that bring them crashing to earth.

The story of Tiger Woods has something of the familiarity of those other fallen heroes stories, while also being quite different...