Gatorade is now the third company to break completely from Tiger Woods in the wake of his epic collapse. The previous two were Accenture and AT&T.
Two other sponsors have not cut contractual ties entirely, but have removed his image from ads: Swiss watch-maker Tag Heuer and razor-maker Gillette, a division of Proctor & Gamble. Two others that have stood by him steadfastly are Nike and EA Sports, the two youngest, yet least affluent demographics of the many Woods saw as a pitchman.
The revelations by several tabloids and reported as fact by the mainstream media of of Woods’s addiction to pain medication are of far more concern to everyone: Tour, sponsors, and fans alike. Woods’s health is at stake far more seriously from drugs than by philandering. Prescription drug abuse can cause death or serious deterioration of vital organs, shortening life greatly, when not taking it altogether. We should all take particular note of the government’s recent ban on many pain drugs such as Oxycontin and Vicodin which have been recently banned afters of being prescribed willy-nilly to our population. The cost in health care from this mistake – letting them pass in the first place, when they were both dangerous and highly addictive – is measurable more in lives lost and shattered than money.
Woods deserves deep sympathy for this, and questions should be asked directly to Woods’s advisers as to whether this situation could have been averted. After all, agents devalue their clients and their clients’s contracts when they fail to act in pointing their charges toward recovery, not abuse.
