Dan Jenkins on Tiger

Entertaining read. But not sure I buy the fond memories of Nicklaus', Arnie's and Player's relationships with writers. In VERY limited dealings with a couple of them, they could be pretty challenging. Maybe not with those in Jenkins' inner circle, but with those who weren't national guys.

http://www.golfdigest.com/golf-tours-news/2010-02/golf-tiger-jenkins-0218

 

I still have a hard time believing that people won't go back to thinking of Tiger the way they used to in the past ... which is to say, the greatest golfer of our generation. I think it would have been far, far worse had he cheated on the golf course.

Clearly, Nicklaus and Palmer, among others, grew up in a different time where there were no (or very few) crumudgeons on the course ... Tommy Bolt, maybe, comes to mind? I feel they all have taken the correct approach by staying out of it (although Tom Watson spoke his mind a few weeks ago.) I am in no way an apologist for Woods but what I've seen is that the American public is pretty forgiving. To me, people are taking their swings now because they couldn't (or didn't) in the past.

Still, thanks for posting the article. I like Dan Jenkins a lot and I thought what he wrote here was very good. But I'm just not convinced that Woods will never, ever be the same.

 

Well, his agent was apparently right. There was nothing to gain by opening up. Not with all the skeletons that might come tumbling out.

 

I love Dan Jenkins.

I've dealt with Nicklaus twice and thought he was very professional and courteous. My first Tiger encounter was his second year on the tour and he was already an arrogant prick. I know someone who dealt with him when he was at Stanford and said he was a complete dick then too.

The truth of the matter is, if Tiger had been a little more accessible and courteous over the years, maybe more people might actually feel sorry for him.

Maybe that's the reason why Lance Armstrong and Michael Jordan never had their infidelities reported.

SI had its world rocked when Jordan shut it out. SI even did a cover mocking itself to essentially apologize to him.

Nobody had that fear with Tiger because he's so miserable to deal with as is that nobody cares if he shuts them out now.

Why should anyone give him the benefit of the doubt on anything?

 

I read this last week and hated it ...
It was essentially an old man railing against kids today and how everything in the old days was better. People were nicer, the sun shine was warm and brighter. People talked.
Yeah right... See Ben Hogan - Jenkins' boy.

:

 

Oddly, that's what jumped out at me too. Unless Tiger was eating the off-brand, in-a-plastic-bag stuff.

 

I'm a generation or so younger than Palmer, Player and Nicklaus, so I didn't start making contact with them until the 1980's----I wasn't out there with those in Jenkins' generation drinking beers with and protecting those guys from the kind of public scrutiny ahtletes now get.

That said, I have had several one on ones on the spur of the moment with all three of those guys, and to a man all were forthcoming and easy to work with. Maybe I caught them on good days--who knows? Who cares?

 

P.S. It would be interesting to see what kind of a book Jenkins would come up with if he ever went full bore digging back through what he knows about Hogan.

 

I agree. Terrible.

And -- hell -- Arnold Palmer had plenty of flaws and was the athlete most responsible for the marketing and branding of athletes. IMG wouldn't exist without Arnie.

So to use him as an anti-Tiger example is flawed.

 

I understand what you are saying, but this says more about the industry than it does about the athletes.

If you are friendly, throw us a couple bones we'll play nice and cover stuff up.

But if you are arrogant, we'll take you down if we can?

 

1. I enjoyed the column.
2. Jenkins is from the era (not so long ago, since it ended when Tiger arrived) when golf, press and all, was a community as much as a sport, where it was presumed everybody was part of the same game and that, in some sense, the big star and the golf writer were equals. In the most crass terms, golfers needed writers to get people to pay attention to them
3. Woods is the first golfer who BEGAN as a capital C Celebrity. It worked great for him, too, until Thanksgiving 2009. Now he's seeing the dark side of what he embraced as a means of becoming rich, famous, and in total control.

To which I say, 5 percent of me kind of feels bad for Woods, and the other 95 percent says "tough shit."