Here’s how you can watch the Tiger Woods’ press event live online from the PGA’s headquarters in Florida today at 11 a.m. EST:
ESPN will have live streaming video online. So will CBS News’s USTREAM. YouTube is also broadcasting it live on its politics channel CitizenTube.
Both the PR pros and the sports business types agree: this apology strategy doesn’t fit the typical mold and is not likely to work for Woods. His transgression was not against golf fans; his sponsors and the TV networks want him back; this appearance won’t help that.
If he wants to apologize to those “whom Tiger feels he owes a direct and personal apology,” why do it in front of a media hungry for answers and predictably angered over a “no questions, please” invitation?
Meanwhile, if you’ve yet to revisit Charles P. Pierce’s controversial 1997 Esquire profile of Tiger, “The Man. Amen,” now’s the time. The article’s focus is Tiger and his dad. The “controversy” arises from the dirty jokes Tiger tells. But its real insight lies in its documentation of the idolatry thrust upon Woods early on:
He was rolling now. The women were laughing. They were also still flirting. The clothes were sharp, and the photographer was firing away like the last machine gunner at Passchendaele. And Tiger told jokes. Tiger has not been 21 years old for a month yet, and he tells jokes that most 21-year-olds would tell around the keg in the dormitory late on a Saturday night. He tells jokes that a lot of arrested 45-year-olds will tell at the clubhouse bar as the gin begins to soften Saturday afternoon into Saturday evening.
This is one of he jokes that Tiger told:
He puts the tips of his expensive shoes together, and he rubs them up and down against each other. “What’s this?” he asks the women, who do not know the answer.
“It’s a black guy taking off his condom,” Tiger explains.
He tells jokes that are going to become something else entirely when they appear in this magazine because he is not most 21-year-olds, and because he is not going to be a 45-year-old club pro with a nose spidered red and hands palsied with the gin yips in the morning, and because — through his own efforts, the efforts of his father, his management team and his shoe company, and through some of the most bizarre sporting prose ever concocted — he’s become the center of a secular cult, the tenets of which hold that something beyond golf is at work here, something that will help redeem golf from its racist past, something that will help redeem America from its racist past, something that will bring a new era of grace and civility upon the land, and something that will, along the way, produce in Tiger Woods the greatest golfer in the history of the planet. It has been stated — flatly, and by people who ought to know better — that the hand of God is working through Tiger Woods in order to make this world a better place for us all.
Tiger may be the world’s greatest athlete. That the hand of God was ever working through him, far less likely.