It’s Not About Tiger Woods, It’s About Us [View All]

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from Truthdig:




It’s Not About Tiger Woods, It’s About Us

Posted on Dec 15, 2009
By Mark Heisler


Editor’s note: We’re pleased to welcome Mark Heisler, our favorite sports writer, to these pages. Here, he looks at the biggest story in sports and asks “why?”


I thought the Tiger Woods story was out of legs a week ago, even if he later figured out he shouldn’t have tried to get off with mere “transgressions” in his first apology instead of using the word infidelity, while devoting 75 percent of it to asserting his privacy and only 25 percent to actually apologizing.

By then, it was hard to conclude anything other than that he’d been unfaithful and crashed his car after arguing with his wife.

That is, it was hard to conclude anything else if you had to conclude anything.

You could just have put this down as some shit, however entertaining in a voyeuristic way, that happened to someone else—and considered it something between Woods and his wife, regardless of how famous he is.

Instead, the world was living from development to development, suggesting something much more important was going on than any of the old standards being hauled out: the damage to Woods’ image, or his failure as a role model, or golf’s chances of survival without him.

....(snip)....

The real story isn’t about Woods, at all—it’s about us:

What will it take, exactly, before we—the great aggregate we—butt out?

The great aggregate we, the community created by the media and its vast audience, overlap ever more, mobilizing ever greater numbers of people as broadcasters, publishers, viewers, readers, bloggers and tweeters who report, consume and relay the news. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/its_not_about_tiger_woods_its_about_us_20091215/