The Public Relations strokes of Tiger Woods: On course, but still in the rough

The thinking here that, ultimately, the most important part of the business of sport is the business of winning will be put to the test in the case of golf icon Tiger Woods.

His twinned agenda -- the first being his pursuit of the Golden Bear and 18 majors and the second his attempts to repatriate a public image badly-tarnished since the night of November 27th, 2009 -- will be dominant storylines in the golf industry throughout 2010 and into 2011.

It's clear to me that he'll do much better on the field of play -- especially on Tiger-friendly golf courses such as Augusta, Pebble Beach and St. Andrews -- than he has fared off of it in recent months.

We'll never see Tiger in exactly the same way given the events and lurid revelations which were unleashed by the bizarre automobile accident at his home last fall. But winning will go a long way, as it has with other similarly-disgraced professional athletes and sports icons in the past.

Whether it's enough in itself -- for either Tiger or his various publics -- only time will tell. What's clear is that any of us expecting a complete reinvention of Tiger Woods as a media-centered, fan-friendly professional golfer are, as veteran columnist Cam Cole wrote in today's edition of The Vancouver Sun, "dreaming in technicolour".

http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/Cagey+Tiger+Woods+plays+questions/2713561/story.html

In my books, the handling of the media and PR firestorm surrounding the car accident itself and the resulting stories around his private life ranks among the worst-ever in professional sport, at least for an athlete of Woods's profile, especially given the massive resources and infrastructure he has at his disposal.

Doing nothing but a few short written statements on http://www.tigerwoods.com/ in the first three months was a mistake, especially as many of his corporate sponsors squirmed in the unwelcome attention his actions had caused.

Then doing nothing more than a highly-controlled, overly-staged media conference February 12th was another mistake, at least in that it was done in isolation from any other public communications and in that it contained now ridiculous-sounding vagueries like "not ruling out a return to golf this year" less than a month before the plan to return to Augusta was put in motion.

What we do is one thing. How we handle what we do -- especially our mistakes -- is another. The latter is often as important as the former in rebuilding public trust and connectivity. That's why the questionable approach taken by Tiger Woods, Inc. on all of this has been unfathomable to me in terms of public relations and personal brand management.

Yet by beginning to make himself available for interviews such as those delivered by Tom Rinaldi of ESPN and Kelly Tilghman of the Golf Channel Sunday evening, Tiger Woods is now at least back on the course of proper public relations. How and when he's doing it remains suspect -- in my view, he's still in the rough in terms of "getting it" -- but at least he's taking the basic steps that are part of the territory of being a professional in general and a professional athlete in particular.

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