Tiger scolds media in apology

Sirs, Madames,

When I heard he was in an accident and the mrs was swinging a club I figured he was going hiking in the Appalachians.

You run for office = you're up for judgment.

You cast yourself as a moral exemplar = ditto.

If John Daly knocks over a fire hydrant, etc, it's a footnote. Completely consistent with what he ever portrayed himself as.

Tiger, the good son, the importance of family in his maturation ... it's not the sin but the hypocrisy.

Slagging the media is laughable. The wrong way to go. Still convinced of status as sun king. Of course, no one in his pr camp would tell him different for fear of losing the account. Job one isn't doing what works out best for him ... it's keeping your job. No one will give him the bad medicine.

o-<

 

Word for word, both from ballscribe and ijag.

 

Don't run around like a privileged spastic in public, and you don't have these problems. It's all pretty simple, really.

 

I definitely agree about that. This thing is such a debacle, there isn't a PR firm in the world who could handle it perfectly. Just can't happen. However, the effort his team has put forth, in my opinion, has been pretty good. Not perfect. Pretty good considering the situation.

 

I like the way his PR reps handled the situation, too. I think everything would've begun dying down if not for the voicemail ... and the text messages supposedly on the way ... and the who-knows-how-many other other women waiting to tell their escapades.

Besides that, though, it's been perfect.

 

I'm not sure what the PR team was supposed to do differently. Should he have been at his own tournament, kissing babies, to get that image out there instead of the one of him banging babes? What could the PR have done about the voicemails, texts, etc? Instead of answering each new thing, just don't answer any of them.

Once one woman was revealed, the rest were coming forward, regardless. So might as well hunker down, issue the apology, lay low and wait for it to blow over. Which it will. In today's world, celebrity scandals always do as there will be a new one right around the corner. That's part of the problem with the constant obsession with any bit of celebrity news. A sex scandal or some other event gets the same amount of attention as a death - the day each event happened, TMZ had as many posts about Paris Hilton being taken away to jail as it did Jackson's death. A death and a traffic citation are now of equal importance.

But it's Tiger and he's bigger than everyone else. Yeah. And in nine months, it will still be a punchline but most of the talk will eventually be about his majors, the pursuit of Nicklaus, whether he's losing it on the course, whatever. Maybe there will be a divorce in a few years to bring it all back and he'll again be the scandal of the moment. Then it will pass. It will play out like that no matter what the PR does.

Will people look at him the same? No. Will it be what defines him? No. This is sports, where it's still about winning and losing. What's the endgame here? In politics, a sex scandal ultimately leads to resignation, or impeachment or whatever. If it's a preacher or a priest, they lose their position of authority, get disgraced, are revealed as hypocrites. An athlete? It's news for awhile, but in the end, sports is about the victories, not the sexual conquests and the news of those fade away. There are countless examples of that. Those athletes who are defined by their scandals are guys like Shawn Kemp, who became a punchline on the court before becoming one off of it. Kobe, Magic, Shaq...are the sex scandals the first thing people think about them? No.

Athletes are not telling us how to live our lives and not pushing for laws that affect the way we live, so it's not the same as it is with other famous people. The PR's riding it out. Not much else they can do. As I wrote earlier, the main critiques I've seen from "media experts" were from people who represented: Barry Bonds's trainer, Roger Clemens, Richard Jewell and John and Patsy Ramsay. Yes, let's listen to the PR folks who gave such great advice to all of those folks.

 

I am picturing this written in blue, Bru.

 

Not saying it's right, but I guess a PR firm could be aggressive and go into damage control and offer the pay off the women before they went forward or at least scared the beejesus out of them if they considered released texts or voicemails or whatever.

 

Good post, STG.

 

I thought this column by Dave Hyde of the Sun Sentinel summed things up nicely:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/golf/fl-hyde-woods-1203-20091202,0,2884634.column

 

TMZ is saying that might just happen with creeper No. 1.