My Ten Least Liked People- Subtract Tiger Woods

Wow, I never thought I'd say that.  Tiger's mere face used to inspire more annoyance from me than Oprah.  Many called him the greatest golfer ever in 2001, long before he approached Jack Nicklaus' record, and despite the fact that he does not dominate like Bobby Jones did.  Basically, if you know golf even as well as me, and I barely know it, then you know that any golfer would have to have a perfect resume into their thirties to be clearly better than Jones, Nicklaus and Snead.  Tiger was marketed like Michael Jordan and may have made more money by now.  This despite dominating a sport that 1) has left it's heyday of competition many decades behind, 2) is using equipment that Jones might shoot a regular 58 with and 3) almost had to be made up by nonathletic, rich royals as if to say "how can we formulate a sport that we can dominate despite our lack of athleticism."  It's baseball without running or swinging at a moving ball.

Then there was Tiger's robotic personality, his overly crafted image and his father likening him to Gandhi.  And his face... just the look on the guy's face reminded me almost of Kobe Bryant.

But that was then.  Maybe I was young, maybe some of that was real.  Now, I think he's pretty cool.  Why?  Because he's a golfer, that's it.  That's what we've lost sight of.  Nobody asked you (sports/news-writer) to publicize things that wouldn't be public about me.  You may argue like a whiny little teenager that it's the public's right to know, but nobody asked you.  Nobody asked marketing people to craft this guy as a perfect person.

Sure Tiger takes money because he's been crafted as a perfect person, but guess what?  There are two things that marketing hacks have never figured out.  First,[B] there is no such thing as the surviving image of a perfect person[/B].  Nobody is perfect.  Therefore, when you try to craft someone to be perfect, inevitably they will prove you wrong by not being perfect.  And if you had the chance to nail the women Tiger Woods had a chance with (or if you're a woman and we were talking men), you wouldn't be perfect either.  Would you have 18 mistresses?  Maybe not.  Would you be perfect?  Not even a chance.  Secondly, you can make money simply by marketing someone as an athlete.  Long before all of this "let's make the big bucks by trying to turn athletes into a 'total person' to craft yourself around" got started, the marketing of Michael Jordan was at insane heights for one reason ... his athletic performance.  Screw his fake smile.  The images of him tomahawk jamming a ball right through two guys, while sending them to the floor, was enough.

At some point, marketing people tried to turn these mere men into someone that you should model your entire self around.  What Charles Barkley was saying when he said "I'm not a role model" ... and when he told people to raise their own kids, is that, "hey, any time you model yourself after anyone completely, you are destined to fail."

Tiger Woods is not my hero.  Even if I liked him he wouldn't be.  I've seen Michael Jordan decapitate people when he still had hair.  Greatest basketball player ever.  As a hero in terms of who he is as a person, he falls short of my Mom by millions of miles.  I can separate the two.  I can appreciate who he is on the basketball court and end it right there.  When he walks off the basketball court he is the same as everyone else to the extent to which none of us are perfect.

If you're a marketing representative and you can't sell Tiger Woods based on one of his amazing drives, then you suck at your job.  When you have to resort to "look at him, he's perfect," you're not selling me Tiger, you're selling me Jesus.  And I don't like people who sell me Jesus for personal gain (hey Vatican, are you listening?).

I have a general rule for sports, and it goes like this:  [B][I]The only thing(s) you can do that I care about other than your performance on the COURT/FIELD/FAIRWAY, are things that would preclude you from playing sports because you'd be in prison[/I][/B].  Yeah, I have a big problem with you if you're Rae Carruth.  Remember him?  Super-talented wide receiver for the Carolina Panthers.  He's rotting in prison right now because many years ago he tried to have his pregnant girlfriend killed.  He shouldn't even be on the field and isn't on the field.  But if you just nailed a hot piece of tail that doesn't happen to be your wife, you can just be "a great athlete, who, as a human being, nailed someone who I would probably nail too."

And before you say it, let me stop you.  "What about the kids?"  1) Most people have no business having kids.  I don't.  2) If I did, I'd tell my kid, "hey, see Tiger, he's a great golfer, but he has 18 mistresses.  If you're say.. a lawyer one day, and you get caught cheating on your wife with 18 women, you might feel really guilty and you might lose half of your money.  Don't do that."  And then me and the kid would move on.

It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that.  Oh, wait.  Unless you're a writer with no creative talent and you can't create a story without having to write about something that's hand-delivered to you.  When you lack the brain-power of a Dick Schaap and you can't come up with ways to interest people based on what is real, then Tiger is probably a great thing to write about.  "I went to Syracuse and I have the creativity of a mule, Tiger is bad!"

Wow, you went to Syracuse and majored in journalism to suck at life.  Congrats.

Tiger Woods shouldn't be going to any sex addict treatment facilities.  He shouldn't be listening to Jesper Parnevic.  He should come out and say "I had sex with a lot of women and I'll still destroy you in golf."

Bobby Knight never dealt with making the kind of foolish "face-saving" decisions that Tiger is making.  Knight is one of the most controversial figures in the history of sport, and when confronted with this, he said "When my time on earth is over, and my activities here have passed, I want they bury me upside down, so my critics can kiss my ass!"

And with that he won.  He became a figure that ESPN sought out to be a color analyst despite all of Knight's very controversial actions at Indiana University.  Why?  Because he ended the game.  He said, "I don't care what you write, and by the way, kiss my ass!"  When you stop caring, the people stop caring and then the media has to stop caring, or they look like they're beating a dead horse.  They always are, they just look like it beyond defensibility.