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I Am Not Tiger Woods

by Christian Huebner 

Last fall, a week after the Tiger Woods infidelity scandal broke, I passed by one of Accenture’s “Be a Tiger” posters, at that time ubiquitous in airport terminals.  I considered snapping a picture of Woods’ statuesque image, knowing that the days of such ads were numbered.  The thought gave me a perverse kind of gladness.  Surely, now we would learn something about the difference between the mythology of advertising and reality.

The Myth of Tiger Woods, after all, like most modern myths, was a story told through advertising.

I still remember the first Tiger Woods ad I saw, fourteen years ago, just after Woods debuted on the PGA tour.  A montage of raggedy, inner-city children lugged burlap bags of clubs out to ratted driving ranges, and chewed up public links.  Spliced among these images, we’d get close-ups of the kids, one after another, looking into Nike’s camera and saying, “I’m Tiger Woods.”  At the end of the commercial we saw Him, smilingly serenely, clad in new apparel. Then he launched a three wood in slow-mo: “I am Tiger Woods.”  Swoosh.  Hero proclaimed.

Thus began the deluge.  There were the early Champion of Social Progress ads, like his Nike debut.  There was a proliferation of Father-Son Wisdom Literature, about Tiger’s training at the hands of his father, Earl Woods.  There were the Demigod-at-Play ads, like when Woods bounced a golf ball off his clubface for 30 seconds straight, then whacked it out of midair into the horizon.

With so much to be gained by association with the Tiger Myth, companies, including “news” media companies, rushed to fill in – and fill out – the story.

The Myth evolved somewhat, but in time it settled on the theme of Transcendent Focus.  This was most perfectly expressed in a popular Nike ad unveiled during the 2008 U.S. Open.  It featured the voice of the late Earl Woods, reminiscing over old home video clips and new pro highlights, recalling the psychological pranks he, the Wise Father, used to test Tiger the Son during his formative years.  The Father closed with the memory of a conversation: “I said, Tiger, I promise you that you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life. And he hasn’t. And he never will.” Swoosh again.

That commercial seemed prophetic, because the 2008 Open was the site of the most awe-inspiring victory of Woods’ career, when he played the last two rounds and an additional 18-hole playoff on an injured knee that shot pain through his leg with every shot.

That win inspired David Brooks to turn an entire New York Times op-ed column into an advertisement for the Myth. “Woods, the inevitable victor,” wrote Brooks, “has risen above mere human status and become an embodiment of immortal excellence.

That frozen gaze of his looks out from airport billboards, TV commercials and the ad pages. And its ubiquity is proof that every age finds the heroes it needs.

In a period that has brought us instant messaging, multitasking, wireless distractions and attention deficit disorder, Woods has become the exemplar of mental discipline.

Woods, he continued, “is famously self-controlled. His press conferences are a string of carefully modulated banalities. His lifestyle is meticulously tidy. His style of play is actuarial.”  Woods was the one who had smoothed out all the wrinkles, who had subjugated life in orderly service to Transcendent Focus and its promised victory.
 
That was the Myth.  Then, last fall, we found out it wasn’t real.
 
The most important revelation of the Woods scandal was not that he was a flawed human after all, but how thoroughly we had been convinced by the story the advertisers had spun. We believed that Tiger Woods the man was the same as Tiger Woods the Myth.  The turn of one news cycle revealed the true disconnect. The Tiger Woods of the advertisers’ Myth, simply was not real – never was.

All last winter, the advertisers and mythmakers scattered. During that time, there was probably more gossip about the fate of Woods’ sponsorships than his marriage. It was as if we were tacitly acknowledging that the man’s real collapse would be measured not by the loss of his family, but by the crumbling buttresses of his ad campaigns.
 
Then, in the first week of Easter, the advertisers returned.
 
After a pause for therapy, Woods announced that he would return to play golf in the Masters tournament. As if on cue, the media began to gather up the frayed strands of the Myth and weave them anew. Would Tiger return as the New Man, humbled for a season, but remade, and better for it? 

Nike, Woods’ most effective mythmaker, joined in with a splashy new commercial.  The Resurrected One, somber in black-and-white, looked silently into the camera while his father’s voice again called from somewhere beyond. “Tiger,” the Voice says, “I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was; I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything?”

The ad was beautiful, artful, and, to my mind, sickening. If it worked, if it would signify just how badly we like sheep are gone astray, led by the stylishness of false stories. It would have yet again confirmed Plato’s ancient fear of poets, dangerous because they can manipulate the stories of the people by the pretense of beauty.

Mercifully, the advertisements seem to have failed. For now. 

There is something particularly fitting about this, at Eastertide. This is the season when another story is proclaimed, what C.S. Lewis called the True Myth. As St. Paul recognized twenty centuries ago, the difference between this story and all others is that here man and myth are the same; or rather, the Man-God is actually greater than the Myth. 

The skepticism about Woods now is that nothing’s really changed. Of course not. The True Myth cannot be based on a concocted change of heart, wished for after a quick feint into therapy, but on a Resurrection preceded by a full-fledged death.

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)