Lots of people these days believe the old joke, “Insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result.” On that note – Quick! – someone decide quick whether to reserve a Bellevue bed or straight-jacket for Woods, Agent Mark Steinberg or both because New Tiger looks and sounds just like Old Tiger: new year, same disingenuous sound bites…
…and the media and response to the new product rollout has been as popular as Nancy Pelosi and health care.
The gravest questions of Woods’s integrity swirl around him, yet he steadfastly refuses to be honest with anyone, least of all himself, and give reasonable answers to the people he seeks to win back: the friends, fans, and sponsors he betrayed. This whole media campaign is both a precursor to a pitch to win over sponsors and a veneer under which he can hide while claiming that he’s “already spent a year answering those questions” even though he never answered the question in the first place. He sounds just like a politician, and we’re fed up with our politicians and their failure to take responsibility.
First, Tiger wrote a supposedly “reflective essay” in – HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! – Newsweek. The self-aggrandizing title – no doubt thought to be “introspective” and “poignant” to his panderers and enablers – blares at us in all it’s boundless magnificence: “How I’ve Redefined Victory.”
My girlfriend took one look at the title and asked, “What?! Did he write this before last year?”
Just like “The Appalling Apology” we got in February – where he nebulously apologized over and over again without telling us what he was apologizing for, then even shook his finger at us for believing things he only obliquely denied, but gave us no proof – the piece reads like an 8th grader’s homework. The title should have been “How I’ve Had to Redefine Victory.”
The he went to the reddest of the red-light districts – ESPN, and in particular the vacuous and over-hyped Mike and Mike show – to let them ask some questions but not others and no follow-ups, while he picked and chose what he wanted to answer, and they just had to sit and take it.
That’s who gets the interviews…the guys that play by the athlete’s rules. Is this the new media? Is this journalism in the 21st century? It was as much a pathetic ho-down – as in ESPN whoring out journalistic credibility and principles for the right to chat up the jock – just as much a pathetic ho-down as LeBron James, Jim Gray, and “The Decision.”
TWEETS FROM A TWIT
Wanna know what makes Twitter suck so badly? It encourages vapid dingbats to say think that anything they say is worthy of public expression.
Now comes the news that Tiger will be tweeting…presumedly to show what a human, regular guy he is.
Fat chance. It’s no better than his other miserable forays into social networking, nothing but a storefront for Nike and TW merchandise. You know what pearls of wisdom our 14-time major champion bestowed upon us in his magnificence?
“The best thing about phone interviews is getting to wear shorts!”
There you are. Some more deserving kid lost his Stanford spot so that Woods could get a free ride and dazzle us with that brilliance. It’s a good thing for us he’s not a doctor.
I’ll bet you even-up that in the next three tweets we get one about his kids and one about the Chevron World Challenge. What did you think we were going to get? “Was listening to The Police’s ‘This bed’s too big without you” and started missing Elin?”
That’s the best our Stanford-educated, model-marrying, do more for the world then anyone in history billionaire could do?
Shoot, the guy playing fake Tiger is far closer to the truth,,,and the tome of coice in real life. (READ: Tiger is still widely regarded as the most vulgar mouth in PGA Tour history…both on and off the golf course.)
On this same note, from the “in the right place, at the right time” department, I had the good fortune to recently date one of Tiger’s tutors from Stanford.
“He was always polite and kind, but he never did his work,” she said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He’d have assignments to do, but instead of working on them or talking about classes, we’d just sit and talk until the hour was up. He was perfectly nice, a gentleman at all times, but had no interest in doing the classwork. So we’d just talk, and then he’d leave.”
It’s a good thing that Stanford has higher academic standar
