NYDN: The Nike Ad Shows Woods Has No Shame [View All]

[Captain Hilts]

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more_sports/2010/04/09/2010-04-09_tiger_ego_lives_on.html

Tiger Woods has been shamed now in a way few athletes, and few public figures, ever have. But when you see this new Nike commercial, the one with the voice of his dead father, you wonder if he has any. Shame. At least we know he's playing the right clubs and wearing the right clothes. Because clearly he and Nike deserve each other. The golfer who brought whole new dimensions to "Just do it" and the machine behind him.

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It is the repackaging of Woods, as the spoiled golf champion who lost his way, that is so hard to stomach, no matter how far under par he is. We are now supposed to buy the notion that the married man who is alleged to have sent all those text messages to his girlfriends - "I want to treat you rough, throw you around, spank and slap you ... hold you down while I choke you" - is just somebody who took a wrong turn, even though to take that many wrong turns you would eventually drive right off the planet.

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Earl Woods, who sure had marital problems of his own, who seemed to think he was raising a Messiah and not just a golf champion, is supposed to be Tiger's good angel now. Or maybe Nike's idea of the voice of God.
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Only at Nike would this be perceived as a kind of wisdom beyond the reach of mortal minds. It almost makes you wonder what other wisdom from Woods the father - from the show-business parents version of Bartlett's Book of Familiar Quotations - ended up on the cutting-room floor. Or maybe they're going to roll out another commercial like this in time for the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach.