The Whole Tiger Mess

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Ok, we're all going to have plenty of chances to be sick of hearing about Tiger Woods (and his ho-bag retinue) over the next couple of weeks, so I'm going to try to keep my comments confined to this post. At least until the next stupid/horrible revelation or train wreck press conference.

-- First, the headline from The Onion: Tiger Woods Announces Return to Sex

-- People who liked golf had a lot of admiration for Woods, because, if he dropped dead today and never accomplished another thing of the golf course, you could make a legitimate argument that he's the greatest player who ever lived.  But they also liked him because he seemed to have everything together. You never heard bad things about him, never saw him drawn into controversies, as so often happens with successful young athletes.  But, turns out that what we thought was a strong character was just an extraordinarily well-choreographed media campaign.  For the former fans of Tiger who are mad at him now, I think that's the number one reason for their anger: they don't like his infidelity, but they really don't like being played for suckers.


-- I thought that press conference (press release? fireside chat? reverse-intervention? whatever...) was a complete waste and PR disaster in the making for the Woods camp.  It was stilted and forced and awkward.  A friend of mine in the PR business said that she thought it looked like someone had given him an ultimatum to make some kind of public apology, and he was just fulfilling his corporate obligation.  Now we're going to get a conga line of prostitutes and cocktail waitresses on TV crying, "Where's MY apology?"

-- And the fireside chat wasn't the first misfire from the PR machine--the whole "sex addict in need of rehab" storyline looked like a desperate Hail Mary from the start.  I know that it's obligatory nowadays for a celebrity in trouble to go into rehab and claim to be the helpless victim of some horrible affliction which he must now heroically fight.  But nooooobody is buying that one.  They would've done better to claim he was under a voo-doo curse or had an evil twin.

-- Tiger will come back eventually, and when he does, he'll probably still be the best player on tour.  But it will never be the same.  At least, it'll be a long time before any guy says, "Go Tiger!" where his wife can hear him.