It hasn’t been a great week for Tiger Woods. This time last week he was a clean-cut sporting idol, with some sponsorship deals the size of the GDP of a small country. But a small car accident has seen a carefully cultivated image. Squeaky clean Tiger has been replaced in some newspapers with “serial love-cheat” Tiger and the moral authority that is the tabloid press have started their predictable rallying cry about the importance of sport starts as “role models”. We had the same cry a few years ago when Andrew Flintoff was involved in a heavy drinking incident in the Caribbean.
Why on Earth should we expect brilliant sportsmen to be role-models? Why do we put sporting celebrities on a moral pedestal that we should have no real expectation that they can live up to. Tiger Woods is one of the greatest sportsmen of his generation and (with the possible exception of Jack Nicklaus) the greatest golfing genius of all time. He is famous for being a brilliant golfer. He is not a priest. We have no reason to set moral standards for Tiger Woods or any other sportsman.
The newspaper articles that talk about past generations of sportsmen being great role models conveniently forgets that for every Bobby Charlton there was a George Best, for every Michael Vaughan there was a hard drinking genius like Iain Botham. Tiger Woods should only be a role model for one thing and that is for what he does on the golf course. It is absurd to set expectations of sporting heroes that they are absolutely unable to live up to.
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Hear hear! As Terry Wogan said the other morning, “Tiger Woods – none of our business!”
I’ve always believed that it is in fact the quirk/flaw that makes for the genius. The list is endless – Paul Gascoigne is the one that springs most readily to mind
The reason Tiger Woods has been judged so harshly by the press is because he has made a considerable proportion of his fortune by peddling a clean cut family man image to advertisers. This has not been imposed on him; it is his own construct and he has been happy to reap the enormous financial rewards associated with it. Now that this facade has been demonstrated to be a lie, he bleats that he should be left alone with his family to come to terms with his “transgressions” in private. He is a fully fledged hypocrite. This is the issue here, not whether sportsmen should be forced to assume the mantle of being role models.
Golf is a notoriously conservative game and it should come as no surprise to Mr Woods that his advertisers, the press and enthusiasts of the game in general are disillusioned with him and wish to hold him to account in the public eye.