Tiger Doesn’t Owe Us a Thing

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, April 7, 2010)

“If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt.” -- Dean Martin


I am going to pick on a man I have never met.

His name is Tim Dahlberg, a sports columnist for The Associated Press. He has a couple of books out, one about the American swimmer Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 became the first woman to swim the English Channel, and another about the city where he lives, Las Vegas, which he calls “the Boxing Capital of the World.”

He is not, then, a fresh journalism school grad with an inflated sense of the importance of his proclamations to the world of sport; he has been on the beat more than 25 years. But still he seemed more like the former in a piece that appeared online last month.

In the article, Dahlberg was upset that Tiger Woods did only two short interviews on a couple of mid-March Sunday sports shows, opting for the friendly confines of ESPN and the Golf Channel “to answer some questions for the first time since his infamous accident, so he won’t have to answer them again … at the Masters.”

Dahlberg laments that there was no time for “grilling” Woods or any “digging for the truth.” He says that even when Woods is “baring his soul … about … the condition of his marriage,” that he does it with such a cool detachment that “he might as well be talking about the condition of a golf course.”

At the end, Dahlberg says that Woods won’t be able to put the discovery of his sordid affairs behind him without sitting “at a press conference for longer than five minutes and answer(ing) really tough questions from a room full of media.”

By the time this is in print, that press conference will have been held – scheduled for Monday, April 5 – but for the life of me I can’t come up with any “tough questions” that Woods needs to answer, not to a room full of sports journalists anyway, and I doubt the press conference will have revealed anything new.

Woods cheated on his wife with a dozen or so women, had a strange substance abuse problem with a prescription sleep aid, and fooled everyone – his wife Elin, golf officials, companies and brands he endorsed, reporters and his fans. Then he got caught, and now we all know way too much about the made-for-the-tabloids saga.

What tough questions are there to ask?

The argument always thrown up at this point is that celebrities can’t have it both ways, that they can’t reap the awards of fame and renown without sacrificing their privacy. But that argument is most often made by journalists and other cogs in the ever-grinding publicity machines of modern media. And the same argument is taken up by a public that believes awe-filled worship entitles it to full access to its deified objects of adoration.

Yes, Woods has earned millions from golf and millions from endorsements, and he’s likely to continue to do so. Yes, he had a squeaky-clean media image that was profitable to himself, the golf tour, sports television and the companies paying him to be the face of their products. Yes, he soiled that image, and all those parties have suffered financially, but why does that mean he should submit to a “grilling”?

What happens between him and his wife is essentially private, except for whatever the muckrakers can glean from gossip, hearsay and court documents; and what happens between him and his employers has already happened – some have fired him, and others, including Nike and the PGA, have decided he is worth giving a second chance. That is, they have determined they can still make money from him.

Now Woods could certainly choose to babble about all this to a room full of journalists or to Oprah and Larry, and we the public have gotten so used to (being sickened by) these public sacrifices of those previously on pedestals that we have started to think of ritual humiliation as normal.

But in reality these celebrity “gods” are under no obligation to behave as their worshippers wish them to.

Woods doesn’t have to say anything to anyone other than what his promoters and the people who employ him for name recognition want him to say. That may be good PR or bad, but it doesn’t actually make any difference to most of us if Woods drops into some post-scandal, Ambien-hazed obscurity with a porn star at each limb … or if he resurrects himself with a miraculous comeback at the Masters, for which competition rounds start Thursday, April 8.

Either way, all Dahlberg and other sports journalists who have been beating on Tiger since November really want is an exclusive interview. I bet all would be forgiven.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi