The Tiger Woods fallout has been long and arduous.
Pundits and sponsors turned their backs on him, and Brit Hume, in his wisdom, begged the embattled golfer to find Jesus.
Now Tiger’s zombie father is getting in on it.
In a Nike ad released this week, the disembodied voice of Earl Woods, Tiger’s dead dad, asks his son what he’s learned from his mistakes. All the while, a somber Tiger, rendered in stark black and white, stares into the camera until his father finishes the monologue, just in time to fade to black and flash the Nike logo.
Predictably, this set the Internet on fire, with numerous commentators questioning the seriousness of Tiger’s remorse and bemoaning Nike’s willingness to capitalize on the fact that the best golfer in the world is not terribly fond of monogamy.
But all that misses the point. This is Tiger addressing us in the way he’s most comfortable: through the prism of marketing.
Tiger has long been among the least accessible super athletes in the world. He does few interviews and discloses even fewer private details. Instead, we, the prying public, have gotten to know him only through the flurry of sponsorships and ads bearing his name. He was always the peppy wunderkind, happy to charm you so long as you’ll consider buying this new Buick.
Contrast the Nike ad with Tiger’s cloying mea-culpa news conference in February. There, our bumbling, robotic hero ambled through a wide-eyed and unimaginative apology. But with the help of Wieden Kennedy, the new ad gives his downfall a Shakespearian edge, peppering his oh-so-sorry-ness with an inferiority complex and a bit of necromancy. Madison Avenue taught us how to marvel at Tiger, and now it will teach us how to admonish him. Believe it or not, this is the best way to interact with our athletic heroes.
Take, for example, our last multi-tentacled monster of sports marketing, Michael Jordan. The ugly truth was that Jordan was a philandering egomaniac with a serious gambling problem, but that’s not how I want to remember the star of the poster on my childhood closet.
Instead, thanks to the combined forces of Gatorade, Nike and McDonald’s, MJ was a charming, loquacious superhuman, a fearless competitor as quick with a smile as with a game-winning dagger.
And Jordan was the prototype for the postmodern sports star. Tiger and his ilk understand that the clumsy aspects of being a human are simply bad for business. Thus, it’s better to keep to yourself and leave your persona in the hands of the pros.
In some sense, this can make matters worse when a cloistered athlete falls from grace in a loud, messy way. More often than not, however, the protective shield of marketing only ensures that our heroes will endure, no matter the scandal. Just ask Kobe Bryant about Eagle, Colo.
So, don’t take the dead-dad ad as shameless capitalization or as a selfish son boosting his Q-rating on the back of his buried father (even though both are probably true). Instead, look at it as a sign that everything’s OK in Tigerland. The world’s top golfer has found his voice again.
