Miscellaneous articles pertaining to recent issues in sports and sports media.
Randall Mell, The Golf Channel, “Tiger’s Nightmare“
This is Woods? nightmare.
No matter how innocent his explanation as to what happened early Friday morning may be, he?s enduring a media onslaught the likes of which he?s never seen. In fact, it rivals anything golf has ever seen. …
It was a momentous day because it marked the first time the sport?s protective barrier has been breached by celebrity, gossip and supermarket tabloid journalism.
It may be remembered as the day the paparazzi discovered golf. …
The nature of our information age has changed, and nobody in golf is enduring the troubling repercussions of that more than Woods. People are getting their news long before their newspaper hits the driveway or even before the nightly TV news airs before their bedtime, and they aren?t getting it all from traditional outlets.
Celebrity journalism, and the intrusion it brings into the private lives of public figures, is flourishing on the airwaves and on the Web. It?s getting impossible to ignore.
Golf always seemed exempt from that, but not anymore. (thegolfchannel.com)
Dan le Batard, Miami Herald, “When Tiger Woods and scandal collide, truth becomes the victim“
The news-gathering landscape has mutated so quickly and so absolutely, at once enhanced and contaminated by the immediacy of everything from texts to Twitter to TMZ, that America’s most famous athlete this weekend went from suffering a serious injury in a car accident . . . to suffering a minor injury in a car accident . . . to being “fine,” according to his agent . . . to reportedly being unfaithful to his wife . . . to maybe having his face scratched by his angry wife . . . to being rescued by his helpful wife from his crashed car with a golf club . . . to having his car smashed up by his betrayed wife and her golf club . . . to not being any kind of “fine” at all. …
All of this, true or untrue, must be mortifying to Woods, the headlines hurting him as much as anything that actually made him bleed. He is as packaged an athlete as we’ve ever seen. He told a lesbian joke in GQ magazine at the very beginning of his rise, and access to him forever changed after that, publicists and corporate handlers surrounding his image so tightly that they might as well have been accompanied by the sound of jail cells clanging to a close.
In the modern age, there have been very few famous people whose face we know more but whose personalities we know less. That has been by design. Rest assured, you haven’t heard from him yet because his handlers are trying to figure out how and what to handle. Forbes magazine reports that Woods is the first-ever billionaire athlete, and that face is too valuable to have scratches from a domestic dispute without explanation. (Miami Herald)
Mike Imrem, Chicago Daily Herald, “Yes, yes, more juicy details on Tiger, please“
As of now we are left to believe what we want to believe: That Woods’ wife used a golf club to break an SUV window to rescue him; or that she swung it in anger as part of an ongoing domestic dispute.
Which brings us back to whether I would mind a minor motor mishap becoming a major image hit on Woods, forcing us to move on to America’s next iconic sports figure.
Well, no, I wouldn’t. To me Woods, Jordan and others are fictional characters in real-life dramas rather than factual characters in fairy tales. Whatever happens merely is the next chapter in a tell-all book destined to become a major motion picture.
The athletic dominance – the sprawling mansion – the billion-dollar net worth – the breathtakingly beautiful wife.
Followed next by the bigger they are the harder they fall scenario – then the return from the ashes to break Jack Nicklaus’ record – finally either the happy-ever-aftering or living in a cardboard box under a viaduct far from a gated community near Orlando.
That’s showbiz, folks, and I’m weasel enough to enjoy every dramatic twist and turn. Wouldn’t many of you admit the same if granted social immunity?
