Looking at the the Tiger Woods episode unfold in the last few weeks, I must tell you I am quite amused and entertained. Just that picture of him screaming & running away from his wife, who chased him with a golf club into a car which he later out of sheer fright crashed into a tree, cracks me up. Apparently,he was so doped that, after the crash he slept on his neighbour's lawn until the police found him. There was also fluttering news of him losing a tooth after his wife hurled a mobile phone at him to shut his face. Guess it is going to be a while before he endorses products with that big wide grin of his. He'll have annoying kids running around him in circles calling him "The-Toothless-Tiger". If the companies do stick with him for endorsements then some of them like Nike who use tag lines like "JUST-DO-IT" will definitely need to do some hasty tweaking to their marketing strategies or else it will be out there open for interpretation. The repercussions of his escapades are not only bound to the companies but even at my own place. One of these days my mom walked into my room, quite evidently miffed & pointed at a very old Woods poster on my wardrobe that I had completely forgotten about and asked "What's he still doing up there? Guess you want to be like him, huh?". I had to promptly tear it off before she made any more snap judgments . There is a school of thought that believes that the entire hoopla that is being created is uncalled-for, that it's his private life and amidst all the gossipmongering at the water cooler, we are drawing curtains on the career of one of the most successful golfers that the world has ever seen. But, there is a catch to all this, he must have at some point had to make choice about being in the glare of the public or not.And he definitely did not choose the latter. Public figures do not only represent themselves alone but a million other people from all walks of life. They become role-models, demi-gods that can do no wrong, we conjure-up an idealistic image of them so that we can aspire to be where they are someday. We are awe-struck, we want to walk like them, talk like them because we think it is that that got them there.
I just hope that power personalities like him think twice before they "transgress"(sic), it is
not them alone that they are letting down but a hordes of others too.
Cheers!
