On Tiger's response to Dan Jenkins: What was the point?
Was Tiger Woods just trying to convince himself that he's not all of the things Dan Jenkins pointed out in his recent parody interview?
By
Kyle Porter
•
3 min read
I'm going to let you in on a little secret inside the golf world: There are zero people who, before Tuesday's digital melee, didn't already have a set-in-stone opinion of Tiger Woods.
My grandmother has an opinion on Tiger Woods. Yours probably does as well. We all do. He's the most opinion-inducing athlete in professional sports, and it's probably not even close.
He knows this, or I presume he does ,because if he doesn't then he's even more tone-deaf than his handlers would lead all of us to believe, and as such I have to wonder what the point of posting a response to Dan Jenkins was in the first place.
Was it for web traffic? Woods did only make $108,000 in 2014, so maybe he's trying to recoup some of that money elsewhere.
Was it for his haters? Surely a 400-word essay from the most recognizable athlete on the planet would soothe the naysayers and dispatch of two decades worth of whatever it is people hold against Woods.
Was it for the idolizers? You mean the ones whose disposable income could not be any further disposed of no matter how many times Tiger says "fans’ encouragement is what really matters to me?"
Woods is a calculated individual. Those draws he's hitting in February at Torrey Pines are for Augusta. That explosiveness he's working on the day after Thanksgiving is for Chambers Bay. Those hours on the range in mid-December are for Whistling Straits.
Nothing he does in his life doesn't have an intended purpose and yet it's difficult to figure out what the purpose of typing up something you knew would go over about as well as a putt-putt tournament invitation to Bubba Watson.
The folks who dislike Tiger were driven further into that corner. "An outrage," they cried at his response, citing the first amendment as ammuniton for Jenkins.
Tiger's legions of lovers demanded he be given an opportunity to defend himself from, um, a fake interview.
And yet as I read Woods' piece and the over-the-top verbiage he used, I realized that Woods wasn't writing towards anyone that follows him or his career.
"Good-natured satire is one thing, but no fair-minded writer would put someone in the position of having to publicly deny that he mistreats his friends, takes pleasure in firing people, and stiffs on tips—and a lot of other slurs, too," wrote Woods.
Here's a fake Tiger line from the Jenkins piece: "I like to fire people. It gives me something to do when I'm not shaping my shots."
Nobody thought that was a real quote. I mean, literally nobody thought that was something Tiger actually said.
Here's the headline on the piece in case you missed it:
So you tell me who Tiger is trying to convince that this was all a fabrication and that none of it is true -- a public following he apparently thinks is moronic and can't read or...himself.
It's not as if Jenkins pulled his points out of thin air -- there are plenty of backroom tales of everything noted in the piece.
Satire at its best is intended to make caricatures out of humans in a way that shines a spotlight on truth. I'm not saying Jenkins did this perfectly, but he certainly landed a punch or two.
Jonathan Swift, he of tremendous satirical fame, once wrote that "satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own."
Mission accomplished.
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