Tiger Woods' stellar image unravels

Tiger's on the prowl.

That used to be a good thing. An awesome thing. The multimillion-dollar bag of gold kind of thing. Headlines screamed it. Fans and sports writers admired it. It evoked the spectacle of beauty on a golf course. A magazine cover.

A golf wunderkind turned supergolferman.

His face was synonymous with a multitude of high-class, sophisticated advertising campaigns. As ubiquitous as Tony the other Tiger. A man with a story, and with talent enough to skyrocket to the top of the branding heap.

His worst flaw? He was publicly aloof, largely because he was so focused on golf that he noticed nothing else.

But that was a lifetime ago. Was it only Friday when this began to unravel? Now, the image is Tiger on the prowl off the golf course, texting away and supposedly leaving voice mail.

It's sordid. And so delicious. Another dive from the high knickknack shelf of celebrity in a sex-and-betrayal scandal that keeps on going.

No matter what happens, it won't change the public appetite for heroes who are expected to be squeaky, shiny clean. And almost bloodless. We expect them to be fairy-tale people, living picturebook-perfect lives. In so doing, we deny them humanity; but they willingly - and thanks to marketing deals, profitably - take us up on the offer.

It works because everybody loves a winner, especially if he is rich and handsome or beautiful and hardworking and talented.

Which is what Tiger the Brand and Tiger the Man have in common.

But Tiger the Brand would never run away from anything in the dead of the night. Or lose control of a car.

We may never know what happened that evening between husband and wife. There are reports that Tiger called a friend before he left the house, saying that his wife had "gone ghetto" over a National Enquirer story about another woman and that he had to go to the jewelry store for a "Kobe special," which he supposedly went on to explain, was "a house on a finger."

Tiger the Brand could never cheat on his wife. (Or read the tabloids and have to go to Zales, where, according to the friend, Tiger said he planned to find the Kobe special.)

Tiger the Brand would choose his friends more carefully. And he never would leave incriminating evidence on a cell phone.

But Tiger the Man, captain of the good ship Privacy, apparently doesn't realize that privacy in the Internet age is practically extinct. And it never existed for someone who embraced his brand so completely without letting us in on the man.

We embraced Tiger's perfection. We created his brand. We did it with Tiger's full knowledge and complicity. And now, Tiger the Man has managed to knock Tiger the Brand off that precarious pedestal.

Tiger Woods has worked hard - and met with unusual success - in cleaving his public persona from his private one. But the melding of the two, even in scandal, has one advantage.

Redemption sells, too. And chances are it won't be long before he'll be Tiger the Brand once again, fresh off a win or a charity event. Chastened perhaps, but with a rehabilitated image.

Besides, there's something edifying in knowing that the greatest golf player in the universe puts his pants on - and pulls them off - one leg at a time.