"Tiger Woods treats his audience like his bimbos."
/Sally Jenkins with another hard-hitting Tiger column, this time picking apart the veracity of some of Tiger's recent statements.
The golf industry seems more than willing to collude in this hasty public rehab, whether it's real or not, given that TV ratings without him can fall by as much 55 percent, and sales revenues are off by 11.6 percent. There's an industry behind Woods struggling and writhing to survive -- and willing to do anything to preserve the empire. Woods gave brief five-minute TV interviews to ESPN and the Golf Channel on March 21, apparently in a deliberate attempt to ease back into the public eye. "There's a natural progression of things he's got to do before he tees off," as Jim Furyk put it. It's not good for business if fans decide Woods's "legendary focus" is just compulsion, his "competitive fire" is just epic selfishness, and his "quest for history" is just insatiability.
But the fact is, despite the rush toward the redemption of Woods, there remains a gap between his lip service and his actual honesty. It's a handicapping issue. When it comes to telling the truth in his public statements, the guy is shooting 80.