Tiger Woods has always seemed peculiarly uninteresting to me. I became aware of the phenomenon of his dullness early in his career. I was out for breakfast on a Sunday, reading the sports page, which mentioned that a kid named Tiger was doing well at the Masters, and the server commented "How about that Tiger Woods?" I was literally at a loss for words. He is very good at golf, but his excellence has always been clinical-easy not to watch.

His recent troubles seemed painful on a domestic level, but hardly worthy of the attention they commanded. I am even tired of people saying they are tired of Tiger Woods.

I've also never had much interest in Nike as a brand. I avoid buying their shoes because of their association with sweatshop labor, but buy other shoes produced, no doubt, under similar circumstances. It's the lazy hypocritical morality of someone (me) who avoids shopping at Wal-Mart, and goes to Target instead.

But this commercial. Tiger's return to golf, and the simultaneous debut of this commercial, seems to put a period to this crisis for Tiger. As Tiger's dead father asks, "have you learned anything"? Maybe so, but it's nothing nice. There are (at least) three levels that the ad works on: literal, pop cultural, and personal.

Literally, it works as a sort of pillory by video. To agree to appear in an advertisement like this is an act of contrition, an act of contrition for the benefit of Tiger's biggest and sole remaining sponsor. As it happens, this week I am getting ready to teach Lauren Berlant's essay, "The Queen of America Goes to Washington City," which treats the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas case, among other things. Berlant does not quote the phrase, but Thomas referred to the proceedings as "a high-tech lynching." Coming from Thomas, the phrase seemed unfortunate on several levels, given the gap between investigating allegations of sexual harassment against a Supreme Court nominee, and the routine murder and sexual mutilation of Black men for the crime of looking at white women. It's not a lynching, but the Nike commercial does recall the custom of ritual humiliation for sexual misconduct that was popular among our Puritan forebears.

This act of contrition raises the question of what, exactly, Tiger owes Nike for their loyalty. He lost his other sponsors when he was caught in behavior remarkably similar to that which gained endorsement opportunities for Joe Namath. It does not seem to be a question of changing mores – much more recently, Tom Brady and Matthew Leinart have been caught in extramarital sexual relations with little damage to their public image. Tiger's philandering, instead, was pathologized as "sex addiction." I am not sure why. His race is a necessary part of the explanation, but I am not confident that it is sufficient.

In a broader popular cultural arena, it's hard to imagine an advertisement that will do more to perpetuate Tiger's humiliation through endless parody. It is Nike's gift to the meme economy. Between when I write this and whenever someone reads this, the number of parodies will have exploded further, so I won't bother quantifying. The static image and the off-camera voice puts a parody within the reach of anyone who owns a computer. The people who do Nike's commercials are well aware of the media landscape the ad inhabits, and it's impossible to imagine that they are not counting on these parodies to proliferate their message.

These first two contexts occurred to me only after the advertisement resonated for me on a painful personal level. As we all know, the advertisement features Tiger standing motionless, listening to the recorded voice of his dead father. I lost my father suddenly on a Thursday in the fall of 2006. As it happened I discovered after he died that I had a saved voice message from my father from the previous Sunday. He was calling about a Patriots win over the Bengals, how to use Picassa to save pictures from a trip, and to tell me that he loved me. I remember the message well, because I had to listen to it to re-save it every 21 days. That ritual was one of the hardest parts of learning to live without my father. As I observed to my spouse, carrying my phone around with me was like carrying a gun where if I pulled the trigger, it made me sad. After about 18 months, I accidentally pushed seven instead of nine, and the message was gone. I was very upset at the time, but ultimately relieved, I think. The recorded voice of a dead parent is just about as close as you can get to a universal abject. It was bad enough for me, and the privacy of my voicemail, in a benign context. I can't begin to imagine what it would be like for Tiger to have his dead father's words reappropriated to scold him before a teeming television audience, and to humiliate him ad nauseam via YouTube.

To judge from the reaction of his wife, Tiger did cause real pain to his family. But the aggrieved party is his wife. Nike chose to reward Tiger for his skill at hitting a little white ball with a stick. The public/private morality question that come up for politicians do not apply here. It's not clear to me why Nike was inclined to insist on humiliating Tiger in a way that must be deeply painful for him on a personal level.

Reading Berlant's article on race and sexuality in the 19th and 20th centuries did raise one disturbing possibility. The advertisement infantilizes Tiger, putting him in the position of the returning prodigal being chastened by his (dead) father. The person we see before us is not a man, but a boy. In making Tiger a boy, Nike mobilizes a rhetoric that has been used for centuries to disempower Black men in America. Even if its targets are white women marginal because of their professions, the threat of unrestrained Black male sexuality makes the white Nike-buying American public uneasy. In making Tiger its boy, Nike desexualizes Tiger in the hopes that he may once again be boring enough to help them sell golf equipment. That's what I learned this weekend.

Jonathan Beecher Field is an assistant professor of literature at Clemson University, and the author of Errands into The Metropolis. He also contributes to The Gurgling Cod.