Comments on: Riding the Tiger: How to Discuss What You’d Rather Not Talk About

By: Don Fry

Don Fry — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:15:02 +0000

Dear Jason,
Sitting around with family while a story breaks is an old game for us, and usually leads to a point where we start saying, “This story stinks. Why aren’t they telling us what really happened?” And then we’d wait for days for the news media to catch up. With new media, the audience gets there faster, but I’m not sure the traditional media get there faster. They used to cover the coverage for a while before getting their hands dirty. Maybe we need to get rid of the idea of dirty hands.
Good column, good thinking.

By: Jason Fry

Jason Fry — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:33:20 +0000

Hi Katherine,

That’s an interesting angle, definitely. And you’re absolutely right that the rules (written or otherwise) are changing, and in both directions — for one thing, Tiger and other athletes can now put out their own news, unmediated, on their own sites.

Re the difference between Norton, I think it’s more that Tiger’s troubles, to be frank and unapologetic about all this for a moment, make for A GREAT STORY.

Whatever you think of the larger issues, the story itself is just over-the-top in terms of not just money and privacy/celebrity and glamour, but also simple plot theatrics.

A Thanksgiving night attempted getaway? A golf club playing a central role in the drama? The telling, detective-story detail of the BACK windows being broken? The Dickensian names of the alleged mistresses? (Jaimee Grubbs, really?) If you wrote this up as a novel, your editor would send it back to you as too melodramatic and satirical to be believed. Simply amazing.

By: edward

edward — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:19:16 +0000

No conundrum. News is news. The trouble is the Sports section consistently refuses to talk about the private lives of athletes. The contention is that private lives have nothing to do with the game. But in the case of Tiger Woods, he used his position to portray himself as a squeaky clean family man when it is now clear he was one of those bar drunks chasing barmaids. The reality doesn’t match the image, and there’s a correction now underway. It wouldn’t be news if this parade of women (we are either up to 7 or 9) didn’t keep cropping up telling of relationships when his wife was pregnant.
I think Tiger got a pass on other things as well from a sports press afraid to write anything critical that would jeopardize their (limited) access. We have the unreported temper tantrums, and the controls he put on his image.
Now he turns out to be a disgraceful human being and you blame the tabloidization of the press for this. The flaw is in Tiger, not the medium. And his enablers were sports reporters and editors who knew about this, and looked the other way.

By: Katherine Warman Kern

Katherine Warman Kern — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:37:38 +0000

Jason,
It occurs to me that there is another angle on this story that isn’t so speculative or salacious that may be worth covering: Why is the story of Tiger Woods dalliances different than, let’s say, a Greg Norman? Isn’t it the context of expectations. We’ve come to expect Greg Norman to be romping with Las Vegas hostesses. But that isn’t what we imagined Tiger Woods was up to during his free time.

Clearly we want our heroes to be what we imagine them to be. Or the interest in the Tiger Woods story would not last this long. Is it possible to thrive under the pressure to live up to heroic expectations? Why do contemporary heroes seem so prone to falling from grace? Or have heroes been protected from such close examination in the past and we just didn’t know about it? Is it possible that celebrities are discovering that the unwritten rules respected by the press are obsolete with today’s communication technologies?

Has anyone written about this yet?
Katherine Warman Kern
@comradity
@comradity