If Tiger Woods can bottle some of that humility, his public relations drive will go further

He wasn't even in the game of effective crisis management in December and January...he was out of bounds on proper media relations with his unilateral video statement February 12th...in the rough with his two controlled, five-minute interviews with Tom Rinaldi of ESPN and Kelly Tilghman of the Golf Channel on March 21st.

Finally, in his third shot at it in the first three months of 2010, Tiger Woods finally made it onto the fairway of professional public relations today with his 35-minute media conference at Augusta -- his first truly interactive PR event since the bizarre car accident of November 27th, 2009 and the resulting flood of allegations and eventual admissions of infidelity throughout December.

Off the tee, Woods did the right thing by apologizing to his fellow PGA Tour players for causing them to have to deal with the fallout from his sex scandal -- while he was either silent or disrespectfully fueling even more questions by scheduling his media statements in the middle of Tour events. He was sorry for being such a distraction and for inconveniencing them as he has over the past five months.

While he is still having difficulty getting his head around some of the areas of questioning -- which will not go away anytime soon -- he still gave enough new information to make the media conference more than just a necessary evil for him; five stitches and a sore neck, a torn achilles and blood platelet therapy from Toronto's own Dr. Anthony Galea to help him heal faster.

Yet more than anything, what Tiger did right today was finally show some humility.

If Tiger Woods the athlete can find a way to bottle that humility and humanity, his public relations drive will go a lot further. It might never fully repatriate the impossibly clean image he had before the car crash and sex scandal, but it would do enough to largely restore Tiger Woods, Inc. as a billion-dollar empire and an athlete corporation valued at more than $600 million US.

To get there, he needs to strike a balance between the two very different Tigers on display today at Augusta, four days before he strikes his first ball back on Tour in the opening round of the Masters on Thursday.

The first was the Tiger who was tight, stern and sometimes short in the face of questions on the scandal. The second was a Tiger who smiled and comfortably handled the golf questions, even gushing at the prospect of playing again and winning on the PGA Tour.

The second Tiger is someone the golf media and the world haven't seen a lot of since his early years on the tour. It's a Tiger who would bring a lot of people -- fans, media and sponsors -- back into his tent over time. It might even earn him some new fans among those of us who have found it difficult to connect with the robotic Tiger, largely because he rarely worked to engage us at any level other than as a golf superstar.

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