Soundbite: World Disappointed Tiger Woods Isn’t Actually God

by Glynnis MacNicol | 10:29 am, December 3rd, 2009

» 2 comments

TigerWoods

“Given how desperately we want to believe in a human god, it didn’t take much peddling from Team Tiger for us to accept Woods as a modern deity…And we ate it up….So now that the “real” Woods has been revealed as a wild bone-daddy who behaves more like your out-of-work, alcoholic brother-in-law than an object of worship, we feel cheated.”

– Slate’s Jack Shafer explains what’s really behind the world’s fascination with the Tiger Woods‘ Sherman McCoy-like debacle. He also notes that the reason we can’t get enough of the Salahis is because “they do in maximum what we do in miniature every day.”

Jack Shafer, Slate, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, The State of Journalism, Tiger Woods

http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

I think Jack Shafer is full of excrement.

I don’t think most people gave a second thought to Tiger Woods. He was just a guy who won golf tournaments and when this scandal broke, we learned that we didn’t know much about him and because the media were making it such a big deal, some of us became fascinated to see what we had been missing.

Sure, he was a guy who won golf tournaments, but before a few days ago, how many people knew that he lived near Orlando and for that matter, what percentage of people who became so engaged in the coverage had even realized that he was married.

It was like a peek behind a velvet curtain, nobody knew was there.
He wasn’t a “god” to the average person. He was just a guy who played golf.
Pat Doherty

I normally like Shafer’s work, but he comes off as a blithering fool here. Magister, you hit the nail on the head.