Running Tiger Woods thread

If you'll recall, he dumped his blonde girlfriend he met st Stanford because she talked to the press.

 

Obviously, I'm missing something and I hope someone can point it out to me. What makes this great? IMHO, it's completely immaterial to everything; unless the current owner is running a side business, selling rides in the vehicle previously owned by Tiger Woods, and at the end of the ride passengers can try to break a window with a 9-iron, this was a waste of time running down this fact.

 

On one hand, sure, Wright reported where the Escalade is these days. On the other hand it hardly added a grain of importance to the story.

Not so sure the ghost thing adds much either.

Hard to truly appreciate the story when there is zero input from Tiger.

That's what made Wright's Manziel story great. He saw it up close and personal. Nothing in the Tiger story comes close to the scene of Johnny's polarity when the Manziels are eating out.

 

Ha ! Seriously ?? You guys are nuts. Those are two outstanding pieces of color.

Ever owned a used car? Ever wonder where it's been ? What it's seen ? The adventures it's had ?

Ever wonder where the car you sold ended up ?

Can you imagine being told your vehicle is part of history, and you had no freaking clue ? (Reading that made me wonder about vehicles from other famous incidents. OJ's Bronco ??)

And the fact that Tiger believes in ghosts is totally revealing. Maybe he thinks Earl's still around.

Maybe when he misses a putt at Augusta, he thinks the ghosts of Amen Corner lurk.

I happen to think both anecdotes added a lot, but even if they didn't, the bottom line is that Wright's so good, he can break all the rules of relevancy anyway.

 

It showed me how deep Wright had been digging despite the lack of cooperation from the subject matter.

 

I think sometimes people forget that narrative journalism is just another form of storytelling, and like any good story—not written, but imagine sitting at a bar and hearing a story—this one has asides and tangents and little nuggets that serve no larger purpose than to entertain. It wouldn't work in an AP newser, but features have their own weights and measures. Does it matter that Tiger's Escalade is in Arkansas? No, not really. Is it kind of interesting and worth a single line in a 12,000 word piece? Sure. And whether someone believes in ghosts is one of those single characteristics that tells you a lot about a person.

Absolutely, when you tell young writers that the details make a story, you risk then reading detail that is superfluous and clutter and needs to be cut. I wouldn't have cut either of those details from this story. I like "And then" storytelling if the story is good enough, and generally speaking, I think that's the right away to tell a story. But I also don't mind a couple of "By the ways" and "Can you believes" somewhere along the way.

PS: You don't know whether chasing down a particular fact is going to be a "waste of time and effort" until you've actually run down that fact. It's the writers who say "that probably won't lead anywhere" who get beat.

 

Thompson is free-lance. Why the hell do you care how much time he spends running something down?

 

Tiger registered for the U.S. Open today. Not that big a deal because the deadline for eligible players to register is Wednesday. I suppose he's hedging a bet but Oakmont is no place for a guy with a broken game and a bad back.

 

Rosaforte seems pretty confident he'll play Quail Hollow.

 

He's not freelance. He's contract. One of the troubling things about the industry is that a freelancer could never do a story like that, or at least it wouldn't make financial sense for he or she to do it, and more and more pages are being filled with piecework. Your hourly wage would be pennies. And so readers are getting short-changed, too.

 

Stating the obvious, but Wright got Jordan.

And he got him to talk about Tiger.

Jordan doesn't do shit these days in terms of interviews.

He must really trust and respect Wright.