Last month, the president awarded Tiger Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The ceremony took place in the White House Rose Garden, a couple of weeks after Woods’s desperately prayed-for win at the Masters golf tournament.

It was a serene afternoon, but people carped, anyway — about Woods’s age (43 isn’t old enough), about his currency (Hello? He’s still playing), about the ethics of it all (He’s in business with the president), about his sense of morality (Tiger, why this White House occupant?). He and the president wore similar blue suits. So even sartorially, the optics didn’t look great.

The culmination of the afternoon — the part you think about when you think about a moment like this, the part that’ll run in the papers and on the sports sites, the part that’s right there in the name of the ceremony — was the medal part.

When it was time for the president to lay it upon its recipient, Woods looked funny, unusually diminutive, as if he were receiving a bib. As the president finished, you could see that something else was off: The ribbon was twisted up right in front, on his left side, like all the belts I see mis-spiraled around dresses and raincoats. It wasn’t the end of the world. But you see something like that, a flub, a blemish, during what, even for the very famous, enormously accomplished folks who tend to get this honor, is one of life’s grander, more photographed experiences, and you think, Why didn’t anybody fix it?