"The Tiger Bubble"

Sunday's New York Times Magazine features a lengthy story by Jonathan Mahler with the above title and the premise that Tiger's accident was just the needle that popped an ever-expanding bubble. 

There were a few components to the story that struck me as worthy of discussion, starting with this quote from Harrison Frazar, one of the tour's great straight-shooters.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but in the last couple of years the tour has been aware of the fact that the negotiations of TV contracts and sponsorships are coming up, and in advising us on what to do, the one thing they’ve said is that we need the superstars to play more and no scandals, no controversies,” Harrison Frazar, a veteran of the PGA Tour, told me a couple months ago. “Well, it’s unfortunate that what’s happened right now is the ultimate scandal in the history of professional golf, and it’s happened to the absolute wrong person.”

So here's my question in the context of Mahler's story: Was professional golf's only selling point to sponsors that its athletes stay out of trouble? 

And is controversy that deadly for golf?