Brandel: "Why agree to talk if you’re not going to cooperate and what prompts Tiger to be so consistently smug, when he is interviewed?"
/Brandel Chamblee dares to jump into the debate about Tiger's post-round Masters interview. Whether you think Tiger handled the Macatee interview well or not, Chamblee lays out why interviews like this will make it tough for Tiger to land the endorsement deals he seemingly covets.
Tiger, despite not winning last year and despite losing sponsors, made over $70 million and was the highest paid athlete in the world. What is he being paid for? Is it just to win? Perhaps it is and that is enough for his sponsors, but if he wins and then is rude, does the sponsor get what it is paying for? Does the sponsor get the positive association that they hope will bias a viewer to buy its product? Maybe it doesn’t matter what Tiger says after an interview or how he says it, but I suspect it does.
It does matter and the millions Tiger is paid are for what he does after he wins, when we all want to connect the dots and figure out if he is worthy of our attention. He is free to be terse and short and smug but I suspect it will hurt him eventually, because skills fade, legacies endure and after the curtain goes down, companies pay for legacies. In the meantime I think Tiger should just say no and let his golf speak for him, because at least that gives us hope.
Years ago, when enduring a long series of questions after a round, Ben Hogan said, “ I hope one day that a deaf mute wins the U.S. Open, so you guys will have to figure things out on your own.”
I’m sure Tiger feels the same way, but since he is neither deaf nor mute, he should give his sponsors what they are paying for or give the money back. After all, he is not obligated to talk after a round; he is paid to.