"It's amazing how it -- how my dad can speak to me from different ways, even when he's long gone."**
/After his Masters opening round 68, Tiger was asked by Christine Brennan about the new Nike ad featuring his father's voice.
Q. As you know in addition to this being a big day in golf for you, your Nike ad did start airing and there's been a lot of conversation on it; on such a private matter you don't want to speak about, why then would you have an ad come out?
TIGER WOODS: Well, I think it's very apropos. I think that's what my dad would say. It's amazing how it -- how my dad can speak to me from different ways, even when he's long gone. He's still helping me.
I think any son who has lost a father and who meant so much in their life, I think they would understand the spot.
According to this ABC story, it seems the audio from Earl Woods was taken from the Tiger DVD set produced by Disney a few years ago. Turns out Earl was paraphrasing a talk about Tida vs. his style, and the word "Tiger" was edited in.
The documentary then cuts to Earl Woods, then 72 and already showing the ravages of prostate cancer, talking about Kultida "Tida" Woods, his Thailand-born wife and Tiger's mother.
Earl's full quote in the film is: "Authoritarian. Yea, Tida is very authoritative. She is very definitive. 'Yes' and 'No.' I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what you're thinking was, I want to find out what your feelings are and did you learn anything?"
Earl then adds, "So, we were two different types but we co-existed pretty well."
Gene Wojciechowski had this to say about the ad:
The voiceover of his deceased father asking, "And did you learn anything?"
I can answer that.
No.
If he had, Woods would have never let Nike air the bizarre, self-important, manipulative commercial. Instead, the spot would have died a quick, appropriate death on a creative director's desktop.
Gene Yasuda sheds some light on the ad's creators and the reaction in the ad world.
And the first parodies are in on the ad. Huffington Post puts together a nice gallery of them, though the Jimmy Kimmel edition of the follow up ad featuring Tida wins the prize:
**Two more reviews of the ad. James Corrigan in the Independent:
So what has he learnt? To listen to advisers who assure him it is all right to use the scandal to flog his sponsors' equipment? To listen to advisers who insist there's nothing at all hypocritical in complaining about the intrusion into his family's privacy and then to parody a private discussion between himself and his dead dad? To listen to advisers who say it's not remotely distasteful to base a marketing campaign on an addict's rehabilitation and in the process borrow words from a dead dad's past and put them into his lifeless mouth?
Yep, Tiger has learnt all that. Those advisers of his do know what they are doing.
John Hopkins in The Times:
The shamelessness of Woods and his principal sponsor is almost beyond parody. The unprecedented billion-dollar fortune of Woods was constructed, at least in part, upon his image as a decent man with strong family credentials, the soft-focus photoshoots with his wife, children and late father engineered to appeal to the basic values of Middle America.
Now, with that image shattered by the tawdry reality of his private life and with many of his sponsors fleeing for cover, Woods and his advisers have sought to repair his tainted image by using precisely the same pitch, this time with Woods seeking redemption via an invented dialogue with a man in his grave. You couldn’t make it up.
