Tiger Woods, Person of the Year

December 21, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist

By FRANK RICH
AS we say farewell to a dreadful year and decade, this much we can agree upon: The person of the year is not Ben Bernanke, no matter how insistently Time magazine tries to hype him into its pantheon. The Fed chairman was just as big a schnook as every other magical thinker in Washington and on Wall Street who believed that housing prices would go up in perpetuity to support an economy leveraged past the hilt. Unlike most of the others, it was Bernanke’s job to be ahead of the curve. Yet as recently as June of last year he could be found minimizing the possibility of a substantial economic downturn. And now we’re supposed to applaud him for putting his finger in the dike after disaster struck? This is defining American leadership down.
If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. His sham beatific image, questioned by almost no one until it collapsed, is nothing if not the farcical reductio ad absurdum of the decade’s flimflams, from the cancerous (the subprime mortgage) to the inane (balloon boy).
As of Friday, the Tiger saga had appeared on 20 consecutive New York Post covers. For The Post, his calamity has become as big a story as 9/11. And the paper may well have it right. We’ve rarely questioned our assumption that 9/11, “the day that changed everything,” was the decade’s defining event. But in retrospect it may not have been. A con like Tiger’s may be more typical of our time than a one-off domestic terrorist attack, however devastating.
Indeed, if we go back to late 2001, the most revealing news story may have been unfolding not in New York but Houston — the site of the Enron scandal. That energy company convinced financial titans, the press and countless investors that it was a business deity. It did so even though very few of its worshipers knew what its business was. Enron is the template for the decade of successful ruses that followed, Tiger’s included.
What makes the golfing superstar’s tale compelling, after all, is not that he’s another celebrity in trouble or another fallen athletic “role model” in a decade lousy with them. His scandal has nothing to tell us about race, and nothing new to say about hypocrisy. The conflict between Tiger’s picture-perfect family life and his marathon womanizing is the oldest of morality tales.
What’s striking instead is the exceptional, Enron-sized gap between this golfer’s public image as a paragon of businesslike discipline and focus and the maniacally reckless life we now know he led. What’s equally striking, if not shocking, is that the American establishment and news media — all of it, not just golf writers or celebrity tabloids — fell for the Woods myth as hard as any fan and actively helped sustain and enhance it.
People wanted to believe what they wanted to believe. Tiger’s off-the-links elusiveness was no more questioned than Enron’s impenetrable balance sheets, with their “special-purpose entities” named after “Star Wars” characters. Fortune magazine named Enron as America’s “most innovative company” six years in a row. In the January issue of Golf Digest, still on the stands, some of the best and most hardheaded writers in America offer “tips Obama can take from Tiger,” who is typically characterized as so without human frailties that he “never does anything that would make him look ridiculous.”
Perhaps the most conspicuous player in the Tiger hagiography business has been a company called Accenture, one of his lustrous stable of corporate sponsors. In a hilarious Times article, Brian Stelter described the extreme efforts this outfit is now making to erase its six-year association with its prized spokesman. Alas, the many billboards with slogans like “Go On. Be a Tiger” are not so easily dismantled, and collectors’ items like “Accenture Match Play Tiger Woods Caddy Bib” are a growth commodity on eBay.
From what I can tell, Accenture is a solid company. But the Daily News columnist Mike Lupica raised a good point when I spoke with him last week: “If Tiger Woods was so important to Accenture, how come I didn’t know what Accenture did when they fired him?” According to its Web site, Accenture is “a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company,” but who cared about any fine print? It was Tiger, and Tiger was it, and no one was to worry about the details behind the mutually advantageous image-mongering. One would like to assume that Accenture’s failure to see or heed any warning signs about a man appearing in 83 percent of its advertising is an anomalous lapse. One would like to believe that business and government clients didn’t hire Accenture just because it had Tiger’s imprimatur. But in a culture where so many smart people have been taken so often, we can’t assume anything.
As cons go, Woods’s fraudulent image as an immaculate exemplar of superhuman steeliness is benign. His fall will damage his family, closest friends, Accenture and the golf industry much more than the rest of us. But the syndrome it epitomizes is not harmless. We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over. A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth.
The most lethal example, of course, were the two illusions marketed to us on the way to Iraq — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and some link to Al Qaeda. That history has since been rewritten by Bush alumni, Democratic politicians who supported the Iraq invasion and some of the news media that purveyed the White House fictions (especially the television press, which rarely owned up to its failure as print journalists have). It was exclusively “bad intelligence,” we’re now told, that pushed us into the fiasco. But contradictions to that “bad intelligence” were in plain sight during the run-up to the war — even sometimes in the press. Yet we wanted to suspend disbelief. Much of the country, regardless of party, didn’t want to question its leaders, no matter how obviously they were hyping any misleading shred of intelligence that could fit their predetermined march to war. It’s the same impulse that kept many from questioning how Mark McGwire’s and Barry Bonds’s outlandishly cartoonish physiques could possibly be steroid-free.
In the political realm, our bipartisan credulousness has also been on steroids in this decade, even by our national standards. Many Democrats didn’t want to see the snake-oil salesman in John Edwards, blatant as his “Two America” self-contradictions were if you cared merely to look at him on YouTube. Republicans incessantly fell for family values preacher politicians like David Vitter, John Ensign and Larry Craig. Fred Thompson was seen by many, in the press as well as his party, as the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Karl Rove was widely hailed as a mastermind who would assemble a permanent Republican majority. Bernie Kerik was considered a plausible secretary of homeland security. Eliot Spitzer was viewed as a crusader of uncompromising principle.
But these scam artists are pikers next to the financial hucksters. I’m not just talking about Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay, but about those titans who legally created and sold the securities that gamed and then wrecked the system. You’d think after Enron’s collapse that financial leaders and government overseers would question the contents of “exotic” investments that could not be explained in plain English. But only a few years after Enron’s very public and extensively dissected crimes, the same bankers, federal regulatory agencies and securities-rating companies were giving toxic “assets” a pass. We were only too eager to go along for the lucrative ride until it crashed like Tiger’s Escalade.
After his “indefinite break” from golf, Woods will surely be back on the links once the next celebrity scandal drowns his out. But after a decade in which two true national catastrophes, a wasteful war and a near-ruinous financial collapse, were both in part byproducts of the ease with which our leaders bamboozled us, we can’t so easily move on.
This can be seen in the increasingly urgent political plight of Barack Obama. Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it). The truth may well be neither, but after a decade of being spun silly, Americans can’t be blamed for being cynical about any leader trying to sell anything. As we say goodbye to the year of Tiger Woods, it is the country, sad to say, that is left mired in a sand trap with no obvious way out.


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December 17, 2009
Accenture, as if Tiger Woods Were Never There


By BRIAN STELTER
How do you Tiger-proof an entire corporation? At Accenture, you start by telling employees to tear down all the posters that say, now somewhat awkwardly, that “we know what it takes to be a Tiger.”
For six years, Tiger Woods was the advertising face for Accenture, the big consulting firm. But now that Mr. Woods has confessed to infidelities amid an assault of media coverage, Accenture wants him to disappear.
On Sunday, hours after Accenture ended its sponsorship deal, the golfer’s face was replaced by an anonymous skier on the company’s home page. His name was scrubbed almost completely from the rest of the Web site. The company’s advertising campaign is about “high performance,” and Mr. Woods “just wasn’t a metaphor for high performance anymore,” a spokesman for Accenture, Fred Hawrysh, said.
By Monday afternoon, Accenture staffers had swept through the company’s New York office and removed any visible Tiger posters. The next day, marketing and communications employees around the world were asked to turn in any remaining Tiger-emblazoned posters and other materials. Accenture marketing employees did not respond to requests for comment about the Tiger purge on Wednesday.
Accenture said it did not tell all of its 177,000 worldwide employees to toss their Tiger T-shirts, caps and tchotchkes away. But when asked about branded merchandise, Mr. Hawrysh said, “Our intention is to ensure we are no longer using it internally or externally.”
But it takes time to erase the golfer’s identity completely. Accenture spent $50 million on advertising in the United States last year, and Mr. Woods appeared in 83 percent of the company’s ads — far more than for any of his other major sponsors — according to TNS Media Intelligence.
The remaining billboards and ads, now outdated, inspire smirks and jokes. In ads at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, Tiger is seen crouching on the green, studying a golf ball’s trajectory and endorsing outsourcing. In Atlanta, he is posed as The Thinker, adorned with a Nike hat, promoting management consulting. At Dulles International outside Washington, he is peering into the distance, dark clouds on the horizon. That ad, forebodingly, says it is “tougher than ever to be a Tiger.”
“The Accenture ads with Tiger finally make sense,” Quentin George, the chief digital officer for Interpublic Mediabrands, an advertising holding company, remarked on Twitter Wednesday.
Mr. Woods provided a big boost to Accenture when he became the company’s worldwide public face in 2003. At the time, the Accenture name was less than three years old, and was still regularly called by its old name, Andersen Consulting. The campaign’s initial theme was “Go on. Be a Tiger.”
Mr. Woods “was a powerful device for our advertising, there’s no doubt about it,” Mr. Hawrysh said.
But as allegations of Mr. Woods’s extramarital affairs spread in recent weeks, the titan of golf was transformed into a distraction. In the early days of the media frenzy, Mr. Woods still greeted visitors to Accenture’s Web site next to the words, “It’s What You Do Next That Counts.” Then on Sunday, the company proclaimed that Mr. Woods was “no longer the right representative” for its advertising and began scrubbing his name and face away.
On Tuesday, that meant telling staff members in an e-mail message to review their sales pitches and slide shows to ensure that they “no longer include Tiger Woods.” In New York, employees were asked to bring posters and other physical assets to the company’s front desk for disposal. The company would not comment on exactly how they would be disposed of.
They may be trying to avoid having the materials recast as collectors’ items. Already, some Accenture magazine ads and memorabilia, including an Accenture Match Play Tiger Woods Caddy Bib, are on eBay (Asking price for the bib: $175.)
Mr. Woods’s private life remains a daily topic on TV talk shows and Web sites, but some of his sponsors, including Nike, have stayed by his side. Nike’s chairman, Phil Knight, told The Sports Business Journal last week that when Mr. Woods’s career “is over, you’ll look back on these indiscretions as a minor blip.”
Accenture, however, is already preparing a new ad campaign. Jon Swallen, a senior vice president for research for TNS Media Intelligence, said it seemed notable that the consulting firm chose not to hide under a no-comment cloak or hire a new celebrity spokesman; instead, it separated from Mr. Woods publicly and swiftly.
“It struck me that they were taking him to the woodshed,” Mr. Swallen said.

Adis Neger and the New Thing About Their War on Freedom of Expression in Ethiopia.

December 14, 2009

I don't write these days. I find all kinds of excuses not to do it. I am productively engaged in contributing my two penny's worth during meetings with a bunch of dedicated Ethiopians in the Washington, D.C. area. I gain an ounce of satisfaction when I get a chance to grab the microphone in the Civility or Geza Tegaru Pal talk rooms and give a passionate semi-sermon about the state of affairs in Ethiopia, or vent out my frustrations about a bunch of losers that show up in Alula Aba Nega room, an abode for TPLF defectors.

I do browse the net, Aiga Forum, EthiopiaFirst, Reporter, Ethiomedia, Abugida, Nazreth.com and a couple more, in that order. This, on top of trying to do a job that pays the bills.

You would think this should fill a gentleman's day and leave very little time for scribbling a few more words to articulate one point of view or another. But, once in a while, I come across articles that completely distort the real situation in Ethiopia or Ethiopian politics and force me to pick up my pen. I am used to the deceptions, legal meanderings and verbal diarrhea by the likes of Al Mariam. I have long desisted from responding to his lies. But, a new crop of press freedom fighters are showing up on the radar, starting with the likes of Abiy Teklemariam Megenta of the now defunct newspaper, Adis Neger.

Let me share a recent brief e-mail encounter I had with this gentleman, following his article on Bertukan Mideksa. Here is a man who closed down his newspaper business; because the circulation was hurting bad and run away to what he thinks are greener pastures, with an excuse of an alleged political harassment.

Dear Abiye,

I enjoyed reading your piece, enjoyed it painfully! What a waste of talent. What a sad commentary on the state of opposition papers in Ethiopia. You did not have the nerve to follow the path of your Heroine. You would rather go hiding, of all places in the UK, to spill your conspiracy theory and your doom and gloom for our emerging democracy.

Good luck in your new life that is fading away very fast.

Washera

Dear Washera,

Thank you for the comments. If people couldn't understand the darker pages of Hegel, nobody can say it is for the lack of freedom.

Very best,

Abiye Teklemariam Megenta
Research Scholar
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford

Dear Abiye,
Thank you for responding. May be a little bit of research and re-education at Oxford U will do you a little bit of good. May be you will improve your acuity and develop a more refined view of how to advance a burgeoning democracy in Ethiopia. I will follow your writings and progress at Oxford.
If you happen to pass by Washington, D.C., do look me up. I will be glad to buy you dinner and help you out with your thesis.
Good luck
Washera
That is the spirit. At least you admit that even a fastly fading life has a chance to get new perspectives. Sadly, you can't help me because my work is highly empirical. There isn't enough soil here to nourish the roots of brothers.

Respectfully,
Abiye

And here is another one, word for word with grammatical errors and all , from some old timer whose hate fangs mix logic, religion and politics. He was responding to my couple of paragraphs on Tiger Woods.

Tiger Wood 's recent failure was not a surprise to me as such incidents are the problem of American society. This is not the problem of one person. We have seen it on politicians, business people, Hollywood stars and famous athletes. I don't understand why you took it as an extraordinary event. Mind you, I am not supporting in fidelity. I don't care for Golf, but that doesn't mean what Tiger did is good. Five years ago, Bryant did it, I got mad 'cause he was my ideal and my son liked him. But, I forgave him and Bryant is a different person now.

My main point is not actually Tiger. Did u follow the Geneva meeting and what the US government said this week? If you did, where is your pen? Why do u spend time with a golfer where no one cares in Ethiopia? If you stand for the right and freedom of Ethiopians, then the world has spoken that those two things are not respected in Ethiopia. You need to open your mouth whenever you see evil. Otherwise, you are just a trumpet of Meles Zenawi....Actually, u are!
Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in
Christ God forgave you Ephesians 4:32

The freedom of all is, the freedom to worship the Son of God

Eprem Madebo

Dear Ephrem,

I think I have heard about you, heard you and even read some stuff that you have written about that loser politician wannabe, Berhanu Nega. Yes, I just googled your name and proved my point.

I feel so sorry for you guys. You are coming to the end of your life and you may die complaining, without doing anything tangible for your country. In fact, I would like to do you a fever. Instead of trying to waste my time on e-mail, I would like to challenge you to a television or radio debate, not about Tiger Woods, but about the merits of Meles Zenawi and Ethiopian politics.

Forget your biblical quotes and come out to defend your allegations.

Can't wait to hear from you.

Washera
ps: While you are at it, remind the big fish that his days are numbered.

What a sad commentary about the modern day Ethiopian opposition camp politicians. A newspaper editor who blames his newspaper's bankruptcy on political persecution and a religious guy who quotes words from the Bible that he himself does not keep.

I invite all of these guys to come out from their dungeons and organize debates and dialogues among opposition groups, rather than confusing their own flock with allegations and innuendos.

Washera

TIGER WOODS DISAPPOINTS

12/10/09

Al Sharp ton Blasts Tiger Woods for Lack of Mistress Diversity

The Rev. Al Sharp ton held a press conference today to blast Tiger Woods for the lack of diversity among his mistresses. Sharp ton claims that the lack of African-American women among Woods’ harem will have a negative affect on the black community, specifically young black girls.

“Why is it that a man who calls himself black can’t bring himself to cheat on his wife with a black woman?” said Sharp ton, speaking to a group of supporters in Harlem. “What does it say to young black girls everywhere when you pass them over? Shame on you, Tiger Woods. What would your daddy say?”

Sharp ton, who has long championed taking black women as mistresses, said that today’s black athletes need to stop neglecting black women when it comes to extramarital affairs, and should follow the examples of positive black role models such as Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr., both of whom cheated on their wives with black women. Sharp ton also stressed that cheating with African-American women would help the black community financially by giving black girls the chance to sell their stories to tabloids and gossip magazines.

Added Sharp ton, “I’m not asking you to not cheat on your wives, I’m just asking you to give back to your own community.”

I don't give a hoot for such remarks from Harlem or Harem. But on a serous note, I will have you know that I am very very mad with Tiger and I have expressed my feelings on the Golf Channel website. Millions of young people throughout the world looked up to this guy as a role model. Not you and me or our children, but millions that looked up to him as a hard working, successful, good man that they wanted to emulate. When they said, "I am Tiger", they were referring to his ethics, good manners and later a good family man. He let them down! All of them and all of us. He betrayed the honorable game of golf.

Our society needs role models and when you are in such a high position to make a difference, you are supposed to take your responsibility very very seriously. I was not enjoying his game as much as I used to, because he made it look very mechanical and muscular. He did not seem to smile and enjoy it. Golf is a game of feel and touch and he lacked that. I expected him to read more about the history of golf and become its ambassador. I wanted him to read about politics and be aware of what is going on around him and in the world. He only knew what to do to that white object to win millions. Even his mastery of the English language had a lot to be desired.

He also failed me in one other area. I believe that one way to narrow the Black-White divide in this world is through inter-racial marriages. He failed miserably on that count too.

So, here is what I suggest he do. He should go to Ethiopia, build a golf course and train young children to be golf champions. While he is at it, he should repent for his extra-marital affairs and make it up to his wife and children. I will give him ten years to do it successfully. After that, I may forgive him.

In the mean time, I am packing all my Tiger paraphernalia, and there is a lot of it, and put them in boxes and store them in the basement. I will have nothing to do with him or with his books and autographed pictures. I don't want to see him on TV selling products and I don't want to see him play golf on TV.

We all pay a price if we are caught cheating. The big ones pay bigger prices. There are many better role models in the world. Tiger is not one of them and his era is over.

So there!

Washera