Do you know how I know Tiger Woods — the No. 1 athletic icon on the planet — has really messed up?
It’s not that the National Enquirer claims Woods had an affair with a New York “VIP host.”
It’s not that US Weekly alleges he had a two-year affair with a cocktail waitress.
It’s not that the New York Daily News says he had a fling with a Las Vegas nightclub promoter.
It’s not that he crashed his car into a fire hydrant and a tree at 2:25 in the morning and that his wife was wielding a 3-iron.
It’s not that Woods is vaguely apologizing for letting his family down and is begging for privacy.
OK, yes — it is all those things. But it’s also this: the caliber of people rushing to his defense.
“I don’t really care what happened between Tiger and … whatever happened. I’m just glad he’s OK,” said John Daly, whose personal life is a cross between a country-western song and a train wreck.
“Everybody made a big deal out of it, but it’s not a big deal because the only one perfect is God,” said Ron Artest, best known for a brawl he started in the stands in Detroit and a man who recently appeared on national TV in his boxer shorts.
Well, Ron, I know you’re so rarely wrong, but it is a big deal, and very surprising. Not surprising as in Wow, Woods is not the perfect person his carefully crafted image would suggest, but surprising as in Wow, he apparently thought he could keep the image while behaving like Bill Clinton on a Viagra drip.
I mean, did he really think he could cavort with a bimbo or three and not have word get out — from the bimbos at the very least? According to US Weekly, Woods left 300 text messages on the phone of the L.A. cocktail waitress — 300!
Though, really, one would have been too many — especially one like the voice mail he allegedly left last week asking the waitress to change the ID on her phone so that his wife wouldn’t recognize it.
Instead, the waitress reportedly sold the sound bite and her story for a hundred large, evidentally surprising Woods, who perhaps had convinced himself he was dating her for her character.
A hundred large, of course, is piffle. Reports are that Woods already has transferred $5 million into his wife’s account and, when not engaged in daily marriage counseling sessions — those must be fun — is rewriting the couple’s prenuptial agreement in a way that could cost him $55 million.
So it’s good news that Nike, Gatorade and other companies Woods makes money for are standing by their dollar — I mean, by their man — for now, anyway. Still, endorsement psychology is based on the idea that the consumer in some sense wants to be the endorser — and I don’t think anyone wants to be Tiger Woods right now.
Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.
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