Time for me to play my favorite pastime: Speculating on events that I know nothing about and in all reality have no impact on my day to day existence. Today’s topic: Tiger Woods.
Let’s start with what we can actually state as facts. On Wednesday the National Enquirer reported a rumor that Tiger Woods had known a 34 year old NYC woman who was not his wife in the biblical sense. Said woman is also well known for spending much of her time pursuing famous people and uh, looking vaguely plastic based on the pictures. (Seriously, she looks like someone who works the afternoon shift at a strip club.) At 2 in the morning on Thanksgiving night Tiger Woods ran his Escalade into a fire hydrant and a tree on his property resulting in a) his wife needing an eight iron to remove him from the car and b) a trip to the hospital for Tiger. Everything else is officially speculation at this point.
Now I will be breaking this down from various angles over the next couple of days as more information comes out. So far our theories are a) this was a simple car accident, b) he was caught cheating on his wife who responded by beating him up, running him out of the house and knocking the back window out of his car causing the accident or c) which is basically b except that he didn’t cheat on his wife. But right now I want to focus on two aspects of what makes this a story because in reality the entire event should be a non-story.
The reason this caught everyone’s attention is because the story broke as “Tiger Woods in car accident and is hospitalized in serious condition.” I mean, they went to John Saunders in the studio during my Illinois – Cincy game to make this known. This made everyone stop and wonder how badly was he injured or how this would impact his golf game. Those words “serious conditions” indicate to most people that while he wasn’t about to die there was a good chance that he was in surgery at the moment, which wasn’t the case at all. When the story broke he was already out of the hospital. If the story was “Tiger Woods in minor car accident, taken to the hospital for facial lacerations and released” no one would really care. If there really is a cover up at play in the background then Tiger should fire his PR person for making this sound much more serious than it actually is.
But this leads us into the other point, which is why do we care about this in the first place? Again, very few people are directly tied to Tiger Woods so his health and safety, while meaningful on a personal level, has no impact on day to day existence. Tiger falls into a rather interesting category though as he has been for around fifteen years now a constant in the media landscape. He is the pinnacle of his sport made even more of a spotlight as in it is a purely solo sport. The camera is always on him during a tournament. Watching the final round of the Masters is essentially like walking the course for four hours with Tiger. Even Jordan did not have that level of detail as there were always other stars on the court at the same time.
Adding to this are his endorsements, which have made him the first billion dollar athlete. The image has always been one of a clean cut, driven and determined athlete. The only flaws to him are that he is too much of a perfectionist but that is played off via his natural humor. He is the perfect pitchman, excellent in his field and on the screen with no baggage looming in the background. So even a minor accident becomes news and tie that with the possibility that our hero may be flawed and this becomes a feeding frenzy. There is nothing we like to do more as a culture than build up our idols and then tear them down when they fail us even if their failures have no impact on our lives.
I’ll keep an eye on the media circus this week. This story has some definite legs to it.
Best Videos of the Decade: For this last month of the year (ok, we aren’t into December yet but the Christmas season is in full swing so go with me) I will be taking some time to highlight some of the best music videos of the decade. Given that this has been the decade that marked the end of MTV as having anything to do with music this may be a little easier than one would think. There still were some excellent examples of art with first and foremost being the video for Johnny Cash’s “Hurt.” If this doesn’t give you chills you officially have no soul.
The five random CDs for the week:
1) The Blake Babies “God Bless the Blake Babies”
2) Keb Mo’ “Keb Mo’”
3) Guster “Lost and Gone Forever”
4) Old Crow Medicine Show “Big Iron World”
5) Pearl Jam “Ten”
No comments:
Post a Comment