No one tells Tiger what to do

4 hours with Tiger yielded ... what? Maybe if Feinstein hadn't spent his time trying to convince Tiger that the Feinstein Way is The Only Way, he could have written something other than how the world would be a better place if it adhered to The Feinstein Way.

 

As a "great author"....if you know you are going to have a sitdown with the most popular athlete in the world at the time, why would you not have a recorder with you?

 

John Feinstein calling someone out for a sense of entitlement is the most awesome thing I've ever heard.

 

For years and years, he bitched at the NCAA folks about access and interview time. Now on the Sunday before the championship game, the coach and players are on the podium for 30 minutes, the coach stays another 45 while the players are in breakout rooms during that 45 minutes. If you want to write life stories on all 5 starters, you can. Only it seems now like it's an incredible amount of overkill/time waste for both the media and the participants. But Johnny Boy, he got his way.

 

My favorite part of that excerpt is when Feinstein says he's meeting with Tiger's agents at Augusta and they want to know his sources for a critical story and he tells them, "You can't always get what you want."

Too bad Feinstein never got that lesson in life.

If that book is anything like the excerpt, which seems to have 10 times more of a focus on Feinstein than it does about Tiger, I'll pass. I'll read anything about Tiger, Nicklaus, Knight, Krzyzewski, etc., but I don't give a flying fuck about Feinstein.

 

Clearly, it was Tiger who should have brought the tape recorder.

 

There's a real contradiction at the heart of Feinstein's piece, and if an editor had some balls to point it out, this would have been rewritten. How is it that:

1. No one tells Tiger what to do.

2. But Feinstein is certain that Earl continues to control - from the grave - Tiger's desire to talk to him.

 

That's a bit of a reach...

 

It's not a reach, it's his central thesis.

Feinstein thinks the real problem with Tiger is the way Earl raised him. If so, Tiger isn't exactly his own man. He's a man who overcame his father, but he's still under Earl's thumb - apparently from beyond the grave.

I've often felt like Feinstein assessed a variety of things in that way, though. He's made a nice career out being bold, but that boldness is undercut by equally strong, contradictory assertions.

 

Feinstein seems to have a LOT of public, personal feuds. He feuds with the DC radio station. He feuds with the Navy football team. He feuds with Tiger's people.

 

One of the problems I have with it is the common sense angle.

I get that Tiger is a cocksucker of the highest order and he's made some bad decisions in his professional life (and horrible decisions in his personal life).

But even with all that as a given, if any of us were Tiger, would we take our marching orders from John Feinstein? Would we be fine with him telling everyone who would listen (and profit from a book) about how horrible a person our father is?

I'd bet 99.9 percent of us would have told Junior to get fucked from the start and not even given him the benefit of a 4-hour sitdown dinner to talk about things.

 

What were his bad decisions in his professional life?