http://golf.fanhouse.com/2010/03/31/tiger-woods-inc-greatest-sports-marketing-swindle-ever/
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Tiger Woods, Inc.: Greatest Sports Marketing Swindle Ever
In 1998, Ken Starr released his report on
the tawdry details of President Bill
Clinton’s affair with White House intern
Monica Lewinsky. I was in Washington,
D.C., working on Capitol Hill the day the
report was released. After months of
breathless coverage and leaks, suddenly all
the sordid details were public. Everyone in
the congressman’s office quit work for the
day and spent hours poring over the explicit
details. From the cigar to the telephone
calls with congressmen during the time he
was engaged in sexual acts, to the blue
dress and beyond.
Ken Starr’s report was so detailed it
made everyone wince. Especially anyone
who thought about what life might be like
for Chelsea Clinton, then in college at Stanford
University. Suddenly her father’s detailed
sex life is available for review by
everyone living in her dorm?
It was every teenager’s worst nightmare.
Until this winter, Bill Clinton could lay
claim to the title of most sexually investigated
person in the history of mankind. No
longer. Because Wednesday’s blockbuster
Tiger Woods revelations from Vanity Fair
magazine, The Sporting News version of
the Starr report, make Bill Clinton look like
a sheepish choir boy hiding a Playboy under
his mattress.
From sex with menstruating waitresses
against his car, to paying for escorts, to following
in the celebrity lifestyle of Michael
Jordan and Charles Barkley when it came
to gambling and women, the Tiger Woods
that we were sold and turned into the
world’s first sports billionaire was nothing
like the real Tiger Woods.
Indeed, let’s call the marketing of Tiger
Woods what it is, the greatest individual
con job in the history of sports.
And that’s really where things get interesting.
Because what we’re now learning is
that everyone knew about Tiger Woods’ affairs,
that Woods surrounded himself with
a team of enablers, men who covered for his
flaws. This wasn’t a surprise, it was a conspiracy
of silence.
From his agents to the employees of his
foundation, to the travel agents to the
women who procured other women for
him, it was impossible that everyone in
Woods’ inner circle didn’t know what was
going on in his life. But here’s the deal, we
don’t make a playboy cheater sports’ first
billionaire. And we don’t make these same
employees of a billionaire, multi-millionaires
if Tiger Woods’ affairs become public
knowledge.
So what ensues?
Everyone enables the Tiger that lays the
golden egg. Because they have to. In fact,
and this is where it gets even more interesting,
those close to Tiger actually owe their
jobs to the fact he has these foibles, that he
needs someone to help cover up his personal
indiscretions.
Get him help?
Hell, every time Tiger gets into a deeper
mess, these handlers become even more indispensable.
They know where the bimbo
eruptions are buried. Tiger, Inc. can’t make
him better with his iron play or help him
with reading the greens, but they are in a
position where his character flaws directly
benefit them. By acting as Tiger’s “fixers” in
his personal life these men, paradoxically,
establish their value with Tiger. Amazingly,
they need Tiger to have issues to be relevant,
and everyone at Tiger, Inc. becomes
complicit in the great sporting swindle.
Who also needs Tiger to be a success?
The PGA golfers on the tour. In 1996, when
Tiger went pro, just nine golfers made a $1
million or more. By 2009? Try 91 earning a
million or more annually.
Meet the green wall of silence, golf’s answer
to the police officers’ blue wall of silence.
Tiger Woods has made less than $100
million — $93 million to be exact — from
his on-course golf winnings. But he’s a billionaire.
Where has the rest of his money,
the other $900 million, come from?
From selling an artificial image to golf’s
fans via off the course falsehoods.
Think about this for a moment, Tiger’s
made 9x as much money off the course as
he ever has on it. Golf is almost incidental
to Tiger’s earnings power. It’s why he releases
photos of his newborn children posing
with Elin and the Labradoodle, it’s why
his family needs to be standing off the 18th
green every time a tournament ends.
While Tiger Woods has clamored for privacy,
his money, conversely, depends almost
entirely on the lack of privacy. Tiger
didn’t have to sell this image, he could have
eschewed the extra money and focused entirely
on golf.
But that wouldn’t have made him the
first sports billionaire.
Enter the greatest individual swindle in
the history of sports marketing.
We, the American public, didn’t buy
Tiger the golfer. We bought Tiger the family
man who dominates in golf.
Everyone at Team Tiger who has seen
Tiger’s revenue stream knows that he can
only directly impact a small percentage of
his earnings via his performance on the golf
course.
The rest?
The rest has to come from creating the
falsest image in the history of sports marketing,
a multicultural family man without
flaws, Jesus with a putter, to sell to a clueless
public. Anything that threatens that
image has to be combated because it devalues
the brand.
The result?
http://golf.fanhouse.com/2010/03/31/tiger-woods-inc-greatest-sports-marketing-swindle-ever/
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It’s not just that Tiger believes he’s entitled
to whatever he wants, it’s that Tiger’s
created an entire industry of sycophants
who owe their millions to ensuring that
Tiger is entitled to whatever he wants because
the brand has to be protected.
Tiger wants it?
Just do it.
So the reason Tiger Woods is such a fascinating
story isn’t because Tiger Woods
has character flaws, it’s because the public
has been sold a flawless Tiger Woods. And
never in the history of sports, as we’re uncovering,
has the reality of a sports star’s
life been more different than the image we
were sold. Sure, lots of people knew of this
falsehood, but by the time the gap between
reality and artifice became a chasm, everyone
had too much money at stake to ever allow
the truth to come out.
So they lied.
All of them.
Until, amazingly, one of the most disreputable
media outlets in the country, the National
Enquirer, killed the Golden Tiger
and set loose the death spiral, the slow unraveling
of the facade of marketing lies that
Tiger, Inc. had spent 15 years creating.
And what we’re learning today is that
Tiger’s collapse isn’t the story of one
individual’s failure, it’s the story of an entire
industry’s conspiracy against the truth.
Enron meet Tiger, Inc