I gotta agree with Rufus’s point about the price of fame—and endorsements. Also, the media has done very well by him in the past. He comes in 9th in a tournament, and you have to read down to the sixth paragraph to discover who won. I don’t follow golf much, but that irritates me, and he’s the beneficiary of that, too.

the thought many men were thinking last Friday is, “Well maybe I can’t hit the ball like Tiger, and maybe I can’t marry a Swedish eau paire like Tiger and maybe Tiger’s gutt doesn’t hang over his belt buckle, but at least I haven’t cheated on my wife with a New York hostess and had my wife come at me with a 9 iron.”

Now, that’s the kind of manliness that practically guarantees a spot in the Wanks Hall of Men.

But I don’t care if the media is hounding Tiger Woods, or not hounding Tiger Woods because Tiger Woods chose to accept a salary of around $100,000,000/year to be a celebrity. The reason sponsors pay him $100,000,000/year is because they want people to associate him with their golf clubs and clothing and sports drinks and automobiles. Tiger Woods signed every one of those contracts and understood he was surrendering a little bit of privacy with each one. Is there a down side to it? Sure. I don’t think anyone of us has a job that does not have components that we hate, but how much cr*p would you put up with to earn $100,000,000/year?

JohnFN, I agree with all you wrote, and sincerely hope the breaking wind to disrupt Vijay’s putting story is true, however if you expect anything to change you’re in for a long wait. Also, if you think folks were any different prior to this decade(s) you’re mistaken. Sports reporting was different, there was a gentlemen’s agreement among writers not to print the juicy stuff, but athletes were not. I’m sure you know the old chestnut about a naked woman running through the press corps on a train carrying the New York Yankees to an away game. The reporters were in the middle of their usual poker game when a naked Babe Ruth followed after her. One of the reporter’s quipped, “I hope he doesn’t catch her. We might have to write something.” It wasn’t unusual for baseball players to play games drunk and once drugs became more readily available athletes were no better than the rest of the population at resisting temptation. How many times was Babe Ruth married? Look at the Fatty Arbuckle scandal! It makes Jennifer and Brad look absolutely tame.

There is a large segment of society who will always lap this stuff up. Have you ever seen any of the “True Crime” periodicals from the ’30′s and ’40′s? They’d make Larry Flynt blush yet housewives bought ‘em and read ‘em religiously. How many of Shakespeare’s plays are based on scandals of one court or another, and weren’t those courts simply the celebrities of their day?

I’m sure you know the elements of story structure. The most classic form is a hero is found, he fights a struggle against a foe or foes and he is brought down by a woman, greed, ego or all of the above. The best stories end with the hero realizing his humanity, seeking redemption and growing wiser and more humble. I’m sure you also know the media loves short hand. They cover the stories they know how to cover. Even if there is no fall from grace for Tiger that’s how they will cover this because it’s the easiest way to report it. The script is already written. Then, a year or two, or three later Tiger will do something good and the media will haul out the redemption script.

We eat this stuff up because it makes us feel better about ourselves. I think the thought many men were thinking last Friday is, “Well maybe I can’t hit the ball like Tiger, and maybe I can’t marry a Swedish eau paire like Tiger and maybe Tiger’s gutt doesn’t hang over his belt buckle, but at least I haven’t cheated on my wife with a New York hostess and had my wife come at me with a 9 iron.”

Funny you should say this. I was just reading an old Dave Barry book (“Bad Habbits” – 1986)and he mentions that “News” used to mean “Important stories that affect everyone,” and yet nowadays it simply means “things we can show our reporters standing in front of.” TV news being a visual medium, obviously the flashier, more sordid stories get better ratings, which is why every local news program in the US has done at least three 26-part investigative reports on strippers stripping in strip-clubs, whereas more pressing things like federal redistricting or school funding tend to go unnoticed.

Which, I guess, makes perfect sense. NBC is owned by General Electric, which produces many of the machines of war we use in Afghanistan, and many of the industrial robots that take jobs from UAW workers and whatnot. Obviously, NBC can’t be trusted to accurately report on stories that would make their corporate overlords look bad, so – if GE decides to kill everyone in South America, NBC will ignore it in favor of a story about whatever happened to Jessica Simpson’s dog. (“It died!”)