Tiger Woods Takes A Break: David Loftus

I haven’t been keeping count and I am not watching the stories, so I’ll take whoever’s word for it that the count is twelve and the ads have ceased. But this one’s easy: Tiger Woods’s career is forever tarnished and he will bounce back. He may not stay married and he may not end up with the same array of sponsors, but the arc of his future isn’t hard to predict.

Things will be quiet for a time, while he gets his personal life sorted out. That will take one to three years, let us say. After that, married or single, sponsored or not, he will go out on the links and start winning again. Once he’s returned to being a golf champ, corporations will want him in their ads again. Perhaps not the same ones as before, but if people want to watch him play, then sponsors will want to feature him.

Few of the rest of us will feel quite the same about him, but it’s not as if he was involved in a gambling scandal that was discovered after his athletic career was pretty much over anyway (like Pete Rose), or he was betting on and breeding pit bulls for fighting (like Michael Vick). He’ll just be human now, not perfectly superhuman. And I suppose there’s no great harm in that for anyone but him and his wife.