NBC Fires Matt Lauer

People might have known. I reported on him pretty hard, and I didn't know. I was hardly a beat guy, but there was no casual talk that I ever heard about Tiger stepping out on Elin, let alone with hundreds of women. That's not to say there wasn't. But this wasn't like Harvey Weinstein.

 

Sorry. Just saw "I don't care if the president cheats on his wife, and no one else should care" and felt like that was a little sweeping. Because I do care.

 

Very true.
But Nike marketers were building that content around a narrative that the media had already been pushing since he was pretty young.
You can blame Earl Woods if you want, but he didn't have a content-delivery platform. The media jumped on board before Nike because the story was so good it wrote itself.
I don't have the actual research on this, but how many times was Tiger in the news before he turned pro?

 

To a degree. But golf is a much smaller set of regular beat guys in a sport that gets the mag glare every so often. By way of comparison, if someone like Jeter were married and acting similarly, I think it would have come out earlier in the arc, if that makes sense.

 

I know the Herald covered him when he won the national Jr. Amateur. Admittedly, it was held in Rhode Island, but we'd never covered the damn thing before (or since).

 

Not by the baseball guys. By the same guys who nailed Tiger.

Again: Baseball players talk about this stuff. In the clubhouse. In front of reporters. With reporters.

 

I don't know. He didn't enter my field of vision till the 1997 Masters, but I was still in school and not watching all that closely.

I'm not at all saying that the "media"—although I'm loathe to use so general a term—didn't play a role in the myth making. There is plenty of fault to go around. But some journalists, like Charlie Pierce, cut through it early on. "The Man. Amen." was published in 1997, I believe. Those dick jokes were the last of Tiger's real self that we saw. The truth is, if people have enough money, they can afford to live a very private life.

 

Even Roger Dorn knew better

 

Seemed like there was a lot, especially the year or two right before he turned pro. But it was a long time ago now, and memory is bad evidence.

I get what you're saying, but playing up the golf color barrier is not the same as presenting as paragon of virtue.

 

He put out this picture. It was pushed by his people and it ran everywhere. Let's not pretend it had some other purpose other than marketing him as a family man. This was DEEP into his time humping everything.

I mostly agree, but let's not pretend he and IMG and Stienberg just went along for the ride the media took them on

 

That border collie knew.

Didn't say anything because Tiger's neck always tasted like bacon from Perkins.

 

Of course, no illusions on that front. He's also well into his career at that point, married and with children.
At the launching point, the 'I am Tiger Woods' and 'Hello World' point, Nike wanted to push him as changing the world.
And so did the media. Tiger WILL change everything. Tiger WILL win more majors than Jack.