Tiger's silence bad strategy in Internet age
Derek Jeter deserved to be named Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year Monday for everything he has done on the field.
But the weekend brought a timely reminder of the Yankees captain's most remarkable achievement as a 21st century star: avoiding the taint of off-field scandal amid the endless scrutiny of the Internet.
Not so Tiger Woods, previously Jeter's equal in the small fraternity of mega-celebrities who have kept their valuable brands unsullied with carefully managed blandness.
The two-time SI Sportsman of the Year is in the middle of a misadventure that seems like something out of John Daly's playbook; only Daly's life is an open book, and Tiger's usually is a mystery.
What prompted him to go George Bailey and disrupt a quiet holiday evening by crashing his vehicle into a neighbor's tree? I don't know, and neither do you.
But Woods has done himself no favors by stonewalling both the Florida Highway Patrol and the public, turning away the former and offering an incomplete statement on his Web site to the latter.
The question is not whether Woods deserves his privacy and whether we are shameless voyeurs for denying it to him. That ship sailed many trophies and dollars ago.
The pragmatic issue is whether in this era more than ever it makes sense to lie low and thus lose control of the story.
The answer might have been yes in a previous millennium. Not anymore.
In recent years, the public has become more cynical about official sources. It also is more inclined to accept alternative outlets with histories of being right even if they do not follow traditional journalistic procedures.
Hence, most people quickly laughed off the police account of Elin Nordegren rescuing her husband by smashing the rear window of his Escalade with a golf club.
But sports fans quickly twinned reports in the National Enquirer of marital infidelity and on TMZ.com of an argument between husband and wife and created their own, more plausible narrative.
(Another key element of Jeter's scandal-free strategy: He never has married.)
Consumers of information are not the only ones left to their own devices by Woods' refusal to clear all this up.
The mainstream news media itself clearly is conflicted, as demonstrated by the variety of approaches to Gated Community-Gate.
Some, including New York's Post and Daily News, jumped right in, following up the Enquirer's initial report of another woman.
Others, such as Newsday and the Times, were far more cautious, gradually dipping their toes into the whirlpool swirling on the Internet.
ESPN, the nation's most visible sports news outlet, went from playing dumb to referencing "Internet rumors'' to acknowledging "Internet reports'' that Woods was "involved with another woman.''
"My opinion was he needed to address this within 24 to 48 hours, which he did,'' said Steve Rosner, co-founder of 16W Marketing, which represents Phil Simms and Boomer Esiason, among others. "However, he was a little vague, and vague gets people thinking. And when people get thinking, they get to thinking negative things instead of positive things. It's just our nature.''
It is a difficult balance for media outlets that want to be fair and responsible. There comes a point at which ignoring a discussion being conducted by the majority of Americans is just plain silly.
That is why, like it or not, Woods has to help us out by coloring in more of the blanks himself. It might not be fair, but it is the real world even the great Tiger shares with the rest of us.
PHOTOS: Rachel Uchitel, and photos from the Woods crash
