Generation Recreation

The Olympic Dream Sure Beats Tiger Woods’ Nightmare

By Michael Pearlman, 2-21-10

I’ve been a complete Winter Olympics junkie for the past week. Despite NBC’s best efforts to make watching the televised broadcasts a fruitless experience thanks to tape delays, I’ve found myself glued to the television each night, inspired and awed by the skills of these dedicated athletes. While I can’t say that ice dancing and curling interest me, I’ll eagerly watch any skiing, snowboarding or speed skating event, whether or not an American is in competition for a medal.

There’s something incredibly real that’s reflected in the efforts of elite competitors in winter sports, no matter how obscure, who have commanded the attention of their home country. It’s a spotlight that shines on most of them only once every four years. As a former ski racer who’s covered the sport as a journalist, I’m particularly partial to the skiing and snowboarding events. An understanding of the difficulty and minuscule margin of error for mogul skiers or downhillers make the tears of joy that accompanied Lindsay Vonn’s win and the exuberance of Andrew Weinbrecht’’s bronze medal celebration more palpable. Even the satisfaction that crossed Bode Miller’s face during the medal ceremony after he earned a silver in Super-G is an expression of emotion I can identify with.

Then on Friday morning a certain golfer came out of hiding to offer an apology of sorts. Tiger Woods’ robotic and stilted 13-minute statement was ostensibly the beginning of his formal image rehabilitation process, but as far as humanizing efforts go, the leaden performance didn’t do him any favors. Endlessly deconstructed by every media outlet in the free world, Tiger’s contrived press conference and emotionless reading of a statement clearly crafted by his handlers was devoid of every trace of the humanity Olympic competitors have been serving up nightly.

Of course, if there wasn’t so much money attached to the Tiger Woods brand, no one would care that another pro athlete was sleeping with porn stars, taking ecstasy and having as much sex as possible. As he said himself, Tiger “knew what he was doing was wrong, but convinced himself that normal rules did not apply.” He was taking advantage of the spoils of being a celebrity athlete, got caught and now is dealing with a vicious reality check.

Tiger grew up in front of the cameras, he’s never been away from the glare of the media as an adult. I’m not sure how many times he got to cut loose while at Stanford or to hook up with gorgeous women he barely knew back then. Instead, he became a worldwide household name surrounded by an aura of off-the-golf-course perfection that was as fake as the breasts sported by many of his conquests. Tiger’s perfect marriage was a sham and the reliable brand image he represented was existing alongside secretly arranged hook-ups in the VIP areas of Las Vegas clubs. The timing of the contrast between Tiger’s dour speech and the exuberance of Olympic athletes couldn’t be more vivid. Tiger’s been so commodified, so inured to fame and the media, that an apology evokes little sympathy from a public never permitted to really know the man. Who can sympathize with that?

By contrast, most Olympians do not grow up in front of the media. They’ve been allowed to develop their own character and personalities, which are too rarely found in the big-money sports that Americans are most devoted to. One of my early ski heroes was Bill Johnson, the out-of-nowhere rebel who was the first U.S man to win the Olympic downhill in 1984. There have been Olympians like the white-trash Tonya Harding and Ross Rebagliati, the snowboarder who nearly lost his medal for testing positive for marijuana, earning him a spot on Letterman. There’s the unlikely heroes such as the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team, or the Swiss ski jumper who resembles Harry Potter who’s incredibly famous in his home country. These athletes may have found different levels of Olympic success, sure, but they’re all very real and very human.

When the games end in a few weeks, most Olympians will fade into anonymity. Some will be able to parlay their success into speaking engagements, endorsements and a career of coaching and continued immersion in their specialized discipline. Others will drift away from their sport and never see similar success in their future endeavors. Some may lack the ability to adjust to life outside the constraints of single-minded focus to competition. After a crash suffered while attempting a comeback in 2001, Bill Johnson suffered permanent brain damage and lives in a trailer in Oregon, surviving on disability.

The Olympic games celebrate the joy of “amateur” sport, of pushing individual limits and celebrating the achievement of victory or merely the opportunity to compete against the best in the world. Some will never have that chance again. Even if Tiger’s image never gets rehabilitated, he’s guaranteed an opportunity to return to competition. Tiger Woods doesn’t have to worry about turning into Bill Johnson, but who’s story is more compelling? To me, it’s not the rich golfer with the image problem.

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