False idol: Tiger’s fall from grace a lesson for the ages

“From early childhood, I dreamed of being the world’s best golfer.  I worked hard and applied my family’s values to everything I did.  Integrity, honesty, discipline, responsibility, and fun: I learned these values at home and in school, each one pushing me further toward my dream. – Letter from Tiger Woods posted at the web site for The Tiger Woods Foundation.

 

        Tiger Woods is certainly not the first star athlete whose questionable actions spoke louder than his lofty words.  But no star athlete before Woods built such a cocoon of invincibility around himself.  Few falls have been as fast or as shocking.

        It has been 30 years since the three-year old golf phenom one-upped Johnny Carson at golf on national TV.  Woods may have grown physically since then –- has he ever -– but that image of the little kid with the golf club, the incessant stories of the subordinate student/father relationship with Earl Woods and, above all that smile, that galvanizing smile, made it difficult to consider him anything but a kid, albeit a super-achieving one.

        “Tiger Woods Out of Control.”  A headline similar to that just a few weeks ago would have seemed less believable than “Angelina Jolie gives birth to Martian Love Child.”  Woods had been the most controlled athlete, perhaps the most under-control public figure, in the world.  His handlers

had coated him with a heavy veneer of Teflon, and Woods had participated willingly, never giving interviewers anything beyond pabulum analyses of his game and swing, and certainly no insight into what he thinks about the larger world.  Sycophantic announcers (Johnny Miller excepted) drank the KoolAid (and the Tiger Gatorade) in full worship mode.  Nike, Buick, Accenture and so many others validated the notion of Woods’ infallibility with tens of millions of dollars in endorsement contracts.  The upscale Cliffs Communities paid him a reported $20 million to design a golf course even though no golfer in the world has played a shot on a Tiger Woods course.  Jack Nicklaus and Tom Fazio rarely top $2 million.  A gorgeous wife -– and a Swede, at that -– cemented Woods’ reputation as the world’s most prominent athlete.  And when, quite quickly in retrospect, Elin bore two children, the nearly perfect athlete and the perfect wife had rounded out the perfect family unit.

Where have you gone, Tiger Woods?

        Here was the anointed savior of a game whose fortunes, literally, were sagging.  They have continued to sag, despite Woods.  Yes, we can argue that saving golf is more responsibility than one person should be assessed.  But hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings should buy a lot.  The golf world turned its lonely eyes to Woods.

        What has come back in return is a sharp stick in the eye.  It was all a marketing illusion, things being exactly the opposite of what they seemed, the good Tiger coexisting with that other Tiger.  The athlete who worked

out for hours every day -– even practicing in the rain, if you extrapolate from one of the many Tiger commercials –- was also putting in many late hours in bars and boudoirs.  The happily married husband with the dream wife was actually a serial adulterer; and his favorite romper rooms were not in the Woods mansion with his children.

        And while on the subject of children, one wonders how the folks who run The Tiger Woods Foundation are explaining the headlines to the hundreds of Woods’ other kids.  In the course of less than two weeks, those children have gone from lucky to confused.

        When a celebrity falls from grace, the privacy debate always begins anew, and this time is no different.  One side believes that everyone, even high-profile celebrities, is entitled to privacy in family matters.  The other side posits that we buy the products a celebrity like Woods endorses as much because of who he is as how he performs and, therefore, we are owed an explanation, if not our money back (lotsa luck).  The celebrity, of course, is always for privacy and that, of course, is the card Woods played in the early days of the scandal, about nine women ago.

        But by using only his own web site to communicate his limp apologies (“I have let my family down”), he not only thumbed his nose at the media beast, which is never a good strategy, but he made it seem as

if he was purposely building traffic to his web site where, of course, adoring fans rise to his defense.  (“Don’t let them get you down” and “We are praying for you, Tiger” the dominant themes at TigerWoods.com.)  Woods’ initial “explanations,” now deleted from the site, were posted before the reports of alleged payoffs to a witness to his dalliances, payoffs to some of his mistresses and, possibly the tackiest of them all, a report that his wife Elin had been promised tens of millions of dollars on top of a pre-nuptial figure in exchange for staying married to Tiger and playing nice in public.  It does not get much ickier than that.

 

Sptizer, Clinton redemption playbooks won't work

        On so many levels, Woods has failed, and the path to any kind of public redemption will be steep.  We know the customary script from this point on:  His handlers -– he still has plenty of money so he still has plenty of handlers -– are huddling to figure out the best approach, talking to the VPs of Marketing at Woods’ sponsor companies, maybe even quietly

polling the public to figure out the best way back.  They may be looking back at the classic Eliot Spitzer playbook to conjure a way to turn lying and hypocrisy on its ear.  Spitzer, you will recall, was the former tough-on-crime attorney general turned governor of New York who was caught in the arms of a prostitute but has been inching his way back into the public eye.  But it will be difficult to model a Woods comeback based on Spitzer who, after all, fessed up within a day or two of the tawdry disclosures of his adultery and hypocrisy.  In trying to circle the wagons and protect their millions, Woods and his PR people actually have wasted the best moment in the classic strategy to get ahead of a story, admit as much as you possibly can, and never try to cover up (with payments to witnesses and girlfriends, for example; it never works).  The Woods camp has controlled things to a fault.

        Woods’ people may consider the example of the ultimate comeback kid, Bill Clinton, who after all lied about what he did before the truth hit the fan.  And isn’t lying worse than Woods’ “leave us to our privacy?”  But the artful way in which the former President has blazed his trail back doesn’t apply here because his wife stood by his side, albeit silently, and never took up arms -– such as a golf club -– against him.  With two young kids and a world of embarrassment laid at her feet, not to mention the millions of dollars awaiting her, Elin will likely take a much different tack

        At some point, Woods will assess himself a public penalty, look straight into the cameras and confess his humanity, blaming it all on some sort of sex addiction.  The public will insist that he expose himself as human, flawed and deeply apologetic, and then the media will back off; they get tired when the rest of us get tired, and what more will there be to say once Woods throws enough red meat back at us?

 

First stop, the Mickelson home?

        But if Tiger pulls a Mark McGwire and continues to remain silent or testifies that no explanation is owed to all those Nike equipment owners, Tag Hauer watch-wearing executives and parents of kids who adore him, let alone the kids themselves, he will be hounded inside and outside the ropes next year. He won’t be able to give a post-round interview without the personal issues coming up.  He may decide to stop playing competitive golf; he will certainly have enough money to finance a dropout, even after the possible uber-settlement with his wife and loss of endorsement revenue.

        How ironic that Phil Mickelson, who has had the bad luck to be an excellent and exciting golfer during the Woods era, is considered unpopular on tour and a phony by Woods’ acolytes.  Woods himself has never had much use for Mickelson.  Yet in this fateful year for both, it has been Mickelson who has shown true grit and character off the golf course, where he handled his wife Amy’s cancer diagnosis with grace and dignity while Woods treated his family disgracefully.  If Woods is looking for advice, forgiveness and the mantle of true humility, the Mickelson household would not be a bad place to start.