The Wait is Over...My Take on Tiger (Finally)

Hey, uh, it's me...Tig..um, I mean, Eldrick, no, dammit...Steve. Yeah, it's Steve, go with that.

Is it me, or is this whole thing just a little too convenient, a little too sordid. Ambien? Are you kidding me? The denials, then the immediate admissions? The wall to wall to wall coverage in every single news outlet? For frack's sake, ESPN is now throwing it to an actual ABC News reporter for the Tiger stuff. It just smells funny, is all I'm saying.

Maybe it's late (it is), and maybe I'm just odd (duh), but this whole thing is starting to feel like a rebranding initiative that got off to a little bit of a rough start. Sure, the accident went as planned, but the problem was the first people to run with the story got it a little bit wrong. The Friday after Thanksgiving (perfect time to launch, your entire demo is watching Who Cares State vs. Digested Tryptophan U) all the networks ran the breaking news crawl "Tiger Woods seriously injured in car crash." This is, admittedly, a Major Story. You're left wondering "wow, is he dead? Is he in a coma? Does he have massive internal bleeding and organ failure? Did he lose a limb?" which leads to "is his career over?"

Then the story quickly changed to "treated and released" which always reminds me of the Carlin bit (it really only works with that voice of his) "usually, I'm treated and detained." Then it became "and by the way this was all 12 hours ago." The hell?

There was some idle speculation on Saturday, but it was mostly cleaning up the details. Escalade, fire hydrant, tree, no airbag, not talking to police yet, Elin with a golf club. It wasn't until Monday or so that the "rumors" started. Then the one who was in the Enquirer, Rachel something, gave a pretty convincing (if bat-guano crazy sounding) denial about the whole thing. Combine that with her hiring the lawyer, and it seemed like this was going to go away, maybe. Sure, there were a couple other women playing the me-too game, but whatever.

Then the voicemail. Oh, ok, so this is true, then, eh?

So here's the thing. This all sounds so weird and out of whack that you could make the case that this was an image-rebranding that launched poorly. Imagine:

Minor car crash...check.

Oh crap, they're reporting it as serious, which is causing this to cross over to non-sports media. Abort!


Floodgates open, etc. Quick, what's our exit strategy?

Have the girl deny everything. There'll be some collateral damage, but we can revisit this thing in the spring.

Other women are coming out of the woodwork (heh). And it's not just the sports blogs picking it up. Who is? ESPN? Oh, #%$%&, Access Hollywood. Ok, I guess we're full go with "Operation Horndog Tiger" again. Put Elin in hiding, let's get the marriage counselor on retainer.

I mean, look at the calculation here. First, the lead seems to be "Tiger's squeaky clean reputation ruined!" But is it? Has he lost anything here? Are his sponsors going to drop him? Amex? No, though they're probably the most likely to be hacked off at this. They'll get over it. Nike? For crying out Pete, this was probably Nike's idea in the first place.

Let's face it. Tiger is pretty boring. And he knows it. And so do the companies that sponsor him. Now? Not so much. And when he wins 10 tournaments and 3 majors this year, it'll be hailed as the greatest achievement in the history of achievements, what with the "distractions" as this will officially be known from now on.

If this whole take seems unusually cynical, even for me, I should back up a second. This entire scenario is based in my belief that, with certain exceptions, most celebrity relationships are a complete and utter sham, created by marketing consultants. In the case of athletes, it's even worse. These people are young, rich, famous, and on the road a lot. And you're going to tell me that there aren't certain trade-offs you, as the spouse of an athlete, aren't making? Come on, unless you're completely and totally naive to the world of professional sports (and Elin was a nanny for another professional golfer, let's not forget, so there's no way that's possible), you've got to know what goes on. Put it this way...I'm not a professional athlete, and I know at least three slang terms for the women with whom such extramarital relations happen (groupies, Annies, and Road Beef). When I was in college, the Magic Johnson HIV story broke. It came up in a discussion group, which was filled to the brim with moralizing (I know, you'd think college kids, but no...this was Northwestern. Oy, the repression) when one of my classmates cut in, saying that he played Class A minor league baseball the previous summer, and even they had groupies. And not just a few, either. So go ahead, name a Class A baseball player for me. They aren't exactly what you call mainstream famous. And if they're attracting groupies, can you imagine Tiger's groupies? I'm not defending him or saying he had no control over himself, but come on. What I'm saying is that to not understand the situation, and to suddenly go completely nuts over the revelation of an affair just seems a little fishy. My final piece of evidence that this is a fake? The cocktail waitress. I mean really, Jamie Grubbs? Did you add in the extra "b" thinking we wouldn't notice her last name was a verb that describes what she was doing in selling her story? Amateur hour.

One final point. How many more times does this need to happen before we acknowledge that Tomme Lee Jones was right in Men in Black? The first media outlet on this story, a full 4 days before the crash...the National Enquirer. They were right. Again. Damn.