Why the Woods Scandal Resonates (Think Madoff)
By LisaB on December 20, 2009 at 8:05 PM in Current Affairs
Tiger Woods is the Bernie Madoff of sports images. He sold an untruth to as many and for as much as he could, all the while knowing there was virtually no truth to that image, talent notwithstanding.
Like many others, I’ve followed the Tiger Woods story – at a distance. I’m not terribly interested in all the details – the women or what happened when he crashed his car. No, what interests me is how he managed the deceit. That took organization, planning and help. The sheer scale of the deception directed toward Woods’ wife, the general public buying his merchandising and possibly his sponsors as well is breathtaking.
Gerald Posner, in TDB reported Woods had a business team and a scandal team. If you’re interested in how Woods managed scandal, it’s a good piece.
Over the course of numerous interviews over several days, The Daily Beast has pieced together a snapshot of Tiger’s double life. It’s a dichotomy that included two separate sets of employees: one that dealt with Tiger’s billion-dollar brand, and another to crisis-manage any fallout from extra marital affairs and personal indiscretions.
———–
. . . Lavely & Singer, a Los Angeles-based law firm that describes itself on its Web site as “one of the world’s premiere talent-side entertainment litigation firms.”
The Times (UK) has a brief article about fan anger. I’m not seeing many Tiger defenders, and that’s intriguing. Why might that be?
In today’s NYT, Frank Rich ties Woods into the many massive scandals of recent past. It is a great piece. He begins by saying Time magazine got the Person of the Year wrong. It’s not Ben Bernanke, it’s Tiger Woods.
If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far.
That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).
———–Indeed, if we go back to late 2001, the most revealing news story may have been unfolding not in New York [9/11] but Houston — the site of the Enron scandal. That energy company convinced financial titans, the press and countless investors that it was a business deity. It did so even though very few of its worshipers knew what its business was. Enron is the template for the decade of successful ruses that followed, Tiger’s included.
What makes the golfing superstar’s tale compelling, after all, is not that he’s another celebrity in trouble or another fallen athletic “role model” in a decade lousy with them. His scandal has nothing to tell us about race, and nothing new to say about hypocrisy. The conflict between Tiger’s picture-perfect family life and his marathon womanizing is the oldest of morality tales.
Rich also mentions something I’ve wondered about. Didn’t Woods scam the companies he was associated with? I’m guessing many, if not all, of those companies had no idea Woods was so far off the reservation with respect to the reality behind the image he so readily sold them. Weren’t they taken in as well? And will there be any financial fallout or suits from that?
Ah well, but then Rich draws our attention to the deceit as a syndrome in our financial, political and social world.
As cons go, Woods’s fraudulent image as an immaculate exemplar of superhuman steeliness is benign. His fall will damage his family, closest friends, Accenture and the golf industry much more than the rest of us.
But the syndrome it epitomizes is not harmless. We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over. A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth.
Here, Rich mentions such scammers as John Edwards, David Vittter, Larry Craig, Bernie Kerik and Eliot Sptizer, with special attention to Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay and:
. . . those titans who legally created and sold the securities that gamed and then wrecked the [financial] system.
But he returns to Woods as the simplest and easiest to mark exemplar of the wholesale fraud going on. If it weren’t for Woods amazing talent in golf, he’d be the Bernie Madoff of sport.
After his “indefinite break” from golf, Woods will surely be back on the links once the next celebrity scandal drowns his out. But after a decade in which two true national catastrophes, a wasteful war and a near-ruinous financial collapse, were both in part byproducts of the ease with which our leaders bamboozled us, we can’t so easily move on.
However, Woods may not be the biggest “hollow man” out there. Rich says there may yet be another and even bigger one.
This can be seen in the increasingly urgent political plight of Barack Obama. — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it).
The truth may well be neither, but after a decade of being spun silly, Americans can’t be blamed for being cynical about any leader trying to sell anything. As we say goodbye to the year of Tiger Woods, it is the country, sad to say, that is left mired in a sand trap with no obvious way out.
Suspicion? Perhaps for Rich. I’ve always thought Obama was a hollow man.
by Ronald Scott
* More novels by 
* 
(
)
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
Pingback: uberVU - social comments