Tiger Woods is a sporting, cultural and economic phenomenon. He is unquestionably the greatest golfer of the age. His sudden and unbelievable success, multiracial roots and ice-cool demeanour under fire sent both his and the sport’s economic prospects into the stratosphere—and offered an irresistible parallel with Barack Obama. (Though wedded to basketball, the president is a keen golfer too.) In 2009, Forbes estimated Woods’s personal wealth at $600m (£398m) and his brand as a sportsman at $82m: the most valuable in the world. But that was before the scandal. In Milan airport earlier this year, I passed a large advert for the consulting firm Accenture. It was a photo of Woods standing in the rough with the line: “What happens next is up to you.” From behind me, a voice said: “What happens next is that you crash the car.” When Woods ran his SUV into a fire hydrant, the expensively produced and closely crafted synergy of a sporting persona and multinational corporation was destroyed in an instant. Since the very public unravelling of his personal life began, Accenture and AT&T have ended their multimillion-dollar deals with him. PepsiCo’s Gatorade followed suit, and no advert featuring Woods has appeared on primetime US television since late November. Woods still has at least six other major endorsement contracts left, but their long-term value is unclear. Two Californian academics reported the stockmarket value of companies endorsing him fell by 2.3 per cent in the 13 days after his car crash. Accounting for all other variables, they argue that Woods’s extramarital affairs have cost shareholders around $12bn. This figure is probably an exaggeration. But what is more certain is the precipitous decline in the value of the Woods brand itself. The idea of the athlete as brand was pioneered in the 1960s by the IMG sports agency, which handled golfers Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. In the last 40 years, the same formula that elides a sporting talent with a commercial product has been refined. During the 1980s, in the hands of Nike and Michael Jordan, it was taken to a new level. Woods has been managed in a similar mode, but has offered a cultural product even more sellable than Jordan: driven, individualistic, focused, imperturbable, a business-class icon, the sportsman as corporate leader. Before Accenture signed Woods, had any company that sells its services to other businesses, rather than consumers, invested so heavily in a sporting hero? Woods took a sabbatical from golf (soon to be over) to sort out his personal life. In late February, he made a formal apology to an audience including his mother, business associates and remaining sponsors. Widely televised and available online, it was excruciating to watch. Yet it is an illuminating document of our age. At first glance, the apology was mechanical, uncomfortable and over-rehearsed; it looked like a video that a stiff corporate executive would make on his first media training day. The words sounded scripted by many hands, rather than being Woods’s own. The global broadcast of an apology to one’s family—a moment of the most private intimacy—which was conducted as an exercise in corporate PR and brand management left me unpleasantly suspended between voyeurism and contempt. But if you have ever, by chance or design, hit a golf ball sweetly and enjoyed the kinetic high of transferring your body’s motion into the graceful arc of a drive, then you will know that golf is maddeningly, intensely addictive. Woods has been hooked since he was a kid. Perhaps this is the path to sympathy and empathy. For all the artifice, I saw Woods anew: confused, adrift, vulnerable. I saw a man who has lived a life so devoted to the unswerving pursuit of individual excellence and victory that the emotional and psychic worlds of love, care and nurture are utterly alien to him. In a world in which great fortunes can, in the click of a single digital camera, in a morning of furious financial trading, be made and wiped out, the sudden collapse of the Woods brand has a much wider resonance. I am reminded of the words of Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto, where he described capitalism’s great powers of change and revelation: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” The real conditions not just of Woods’s life, but of many successful and powerful people, are those in which obsessive instrumentalism, perfectionism and pathological self-mastery are required to get to the top. But these are often bought at the price of neglecting one’s emotional needs and corroding the capacity for intimacy. Worse, for the rest of us, these people are so intoxicated with their own power, so high on their self importance, that they no longer believe that the rules apply to them or that the emotional, moral and economic consequences of their actions warrant any attention. Tiger Woods, at least, is in therapy and has taken his first faltering steps towards self-knowledge. Finance capital, it appears, has just gone back to bingeing.
