Tiger Woods owes us an explanation
Tiger Woods owes a better explanation to the public that reportedly help make him the world's first billionaire athlete, Mark Herrmann says. Credit: Getty Images
Tiger Woods, as much as anyone, can appreciate that the learning process never ends. He is the one who famously tinkers with his swing after remarkable success on the premise that if you're standing still, you're losing ground. What he is learning now is how "public" a public figure really is.
He is trying to handle the bizarre one-car crash and its aftermath in the way he handles pre-tournament press conferences and announcements about his schedule: On his terms, on his schedule and, whenever possible, on his Web site. Woods is right when he maintains that he does his part on the course and he and his family deserve their right to privacy when they leave it.
But this episode spilled out onto the street and the police blotter. Florida Highway Patrol officers, who are paid by taxpayers' dollars, are involved. This isn't the sort of thing that can be handled with a release on tigerwoods.com. The TV trucks and reporters holding vigil outside his private gated community near Orlando never will go away until he gives an answer or two about why he ran over a fire hydrant and smacked into a neighbor's tree at 2:25 a.m. Friday. Whether or not there was a private issue inside the Woods household, the accident was a public incident.
All of us learned a little something while following this case. We found out that Florida law does not require a person involved in such a crash to meet with police and is obligated to give only the basics: license, registration, insurance card. Woods did that.
I personally learned from a report by Rex Hoggard of Orlando-based Golfchannel.com that a highly regarded Florida attorney always tells his clients to avoid voluntarily meeting with authorities because no good usually comes out of it.
So Woods is well within his rights to turn away the highway patrol, whether we like it or not.
But it is not just a matter of saying that Woods should have his privacy and the rest of the world ought to just leave him alone.
Again, the accident did have a public component, and so does Woods' whole life. A large part of his vast fortune - and he is reportedly the first billion-dollar athlete - has come not just from his sublime golf game but because people are intensely interested in him.
He makes vast sums from Nike, Gatorade and a developer in Dubai who is paying him handsomely to design a golf course there. Those companies pay Woods to be the person the public wants to see and hear from. It evidently helps sell products when Woods tells people to buy them. The world's greatest golfer and most famous athlete has won the public's trust. He can't tell his public to go jump in a lake now.
Despite the conjecture about "what this might do to Tiger's image," I don't think he has much to worry about in the long run. David Letterman's ratings seem to be doing just fine. And this is not to say there is any proof that Woods did anything like what Letterman did. Of course, Woods' golf game won't suffer in the least. He always finds a way to channel any event, every emotion into his art (for him, it's more art than work).
The public just deserves something other than a press release on a Web site that, incidentally, advertises a Woods DVD and the Tiger Woods Scorecard challenge. Just a little appearance in front of independent cameras, a personal explanation or apology. He owes some respect to the public that reveres him so.
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