Teal wrote:RallyMonkey wrote:This thread looks like a bunch of women discussing the latest Oprah show...
And yet, much like women to Oprah, you can't get enough and keep coming back!

Yeah, but I'm the one who keeps on insisting that it's STILL nobody's business. If he bet on golf, then yeah. But he put his tool in someone else's shed...has nothing to do with why he has a public persona in the first place.
But it has EVERYTHING to do with what made his public persona appealing to sponsors. There's much more to the Tiger brand than success on the golf course.
Before last Thursday night, the guy was seen as a machine of perfection. Perfect golf game. Perfect diction (other than cursing after errant shots). Perfect appeal to all multiple races, age groups and both genders. Perfect home life, with beautiful wife, two children.
Companies flocked to Tiger because he was perceived as NOT being "one of us." He was immortal, super-human. That WAS the Tiger Woods brand.
And now that brand image has been sullied. And it makes him a lot less appealing as a marketable brand. Now his appeal is just golf. And I'm not sure if companies will consider that worth $80 million per year, his estimated income from endorsements.
One of my favorite sports writers, Richard Williams, wrote an excellent column about this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/20 ... ds-apology
Teal, you're not a voice of reason in this thread. You're a vision of blurred optics.
This isn't 1930, where reporters kept Babe Ruth's peccadillos under wraps because they wanted to stay friendly with him and not dent his clay feet. This isn't 1962, where reporters didn't divulge Jack Kennedy's blowjobs from starlets in the back of limos because they didn't want to embarrass the most powerful man in the world.
This is 2009, where citizens have more media power than once-mighty media barons and their companies. It's a constant news cycle, just as it was five years ago. But unlike five years ago, regular folk are driving that news cycle much more than the mass media through Twitter, Facebook, blogs and the Web.
These issues become stories because that's what the public is talking about. That's what the public wants to know more about. People probably whispered about people's foibles in the 30s and 60s, but those whispers didn't have fiber-optic worldwide legs to carry them to all corners of the globe.
The water cooler now is as big as the planet.
Mayberry is burned to the ground; Ward Cleaver was buried in his perfect, pressed gray suit at least a decade ago.
Take care,
PK
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