Tiger in trouble

The trajectory of the Tiger Woods story is both tragic and ghoulishly fascinating: no doubt his lawyers will be trying to gag as many players in the cast as possible to limit the PR tsunami-type damage. Only odd details are filtering to the UK, but some trends can be spotted already:

• The reported family yacht trip has presumably been put on ice indefinitely;

• In times of trouble, people hunker down with cartoon comfort-blankets (presumably Disney/Pixar rather than Fritz the Cat);

• Whatever Tiger does to handle the catastrophe from now on, there'll be people already pitching the revised biopic to Hollywood, plays to Broadway and even Woods the Opera to impressarios, executives and commissioners of all shapes and sizes. The first of these shows will hit the cultural fan before the end of 2010;

• The Tiger Woods Story (1998) will never be reshown on television in its current form;

• Before going back to the golfing day job, as he surely will, Tiger will make at least one self-effacing appearance on Saturday Night Live and one (and only one) come-clean confessional (without the gory detail) on a talkshow format: perm one of an Oprah special, a David Letterman late-show chat (as our Dave has had his own public marital problems), or an interview with Sir David Frost;

• Fox News will flay Tiger with salacious gossip-mongering (the latest being an educated guess that Mr Woods will start his rehabilitation at a sex-addiction clinic). The channel will also soon try to link the Woods' marriage implosion with speculation about Barack and Michelle Obama's marriage.

• Sponsors of the golfer will make a big play of whether or not they continue to endorse the Woods' brand. Once Tiger starts playing golf again in earnest, the sponsors will get huge publicity from re-hiring him for ad endorsements, appearances and the like.

All of the above is both predictable and depressing: celebrities having to dance to the publicity cycle's beat when things go horribly wrong.

News media hates hypocrisy, and when blood is in the water the game of keeping a reputation is up while the destroying of a name sells units (e.g. newspapers; cable channel subscriptions; website memberships). The hunt is only called off when a tipping point is reached when more units can be sold by covering the star's recuperation, and that moment for Tiger Woods will come (even with the unfortunate likelihood of marital separation at best being played out in public).

Maybe at fame schools everywhere budding role models will have to be trained even more in the art of living a decent life in private if the desired public image is one of wholesome family bliss. And the art of living a private life out of the public eye for even the most global of A-list celebrities will have to be re-examined and the curriculum updated.