Consider how swiftly the Olympic runner and nine-time N.C.A.A. champion Suzy Favor Hamilton was vilified after she was caught working as an escort while coping with mental illness. Nike immediately severed ties, as did many other groups associated with her. The athletic a chievements on her Wikipedia page became subsumed by stories of prostitution.

“It was as if I must have murdered someone,” Favor Hamilton said recently. “Never a degree of ‘Well, perhaps something must be very much wrong.’”

For Hamilton, the attraction to vice fulfilled the same thing many elite athletes get from the rush of victory in sport. “It was the buzz I felt as an athlete,” she said. “I have a history of taking things to extremes.”

Most champions do.

Oksana Baiul won an Olympic gold medal in figure skating for her native Ukraine in 1994, and moved to Connecticut with millions of dollars, after having slept alone in an ice rink as an impoverished orphan. A few years later, she had been charged with a D.U.I. and gone through rehab for alcohol abuse. “She appears serious about trying to turn her life around and returning to respectability,” The Times reported in 1998, noting the 17 pounds she’d lost since the previous winter, “when she was drinking and overweight and barely able to land any jump.”

Spoiler: She didn’t return to competitive skating.

Two great female athletes did have major comebacks. But the “setbacks” were totally different. Monica Seles was victimized by a maniacal fan who stabbed her on the court. And Serena Williams is in the midst of comeback — after having a baby. Like Woods, each of these women had physical setbacks. But neither of them made mistakes.

Except Williams has surpassed her male peers and demonstrated the flip side of the extreme, confident and righteous qualities necessary to achieve success — she dared to get angry, and show it, when she opposed what she considered an unfair call at the United States Open last September. The public immediately chastised her. There was silence, and then a lot of Instagram posts about motherhood and her daughter.

No women have the leeway to behave like Woods and get away with it; a black woman certain ly does not. Just imagine the reaction if Serena Williams was caught cheating on her husband, Alexis Ohanian, with numerous men.