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Tiger Woods reflects on a poor shot - Source: Reuters -
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The news today that Tiger Woods may have fathered a love child with one of his mistresses has sighed life into a tale that many people had hoped, and some prayed, not to hear any more of.
But the UK tabloid The Sun is suggesting that his mistress Theresa Rogers may have been carrying Woods' baby rather than that of the Serbian basketballer she was seeing at the time. Putting aside that the Serbian shooter remains unnamed, here we go again.
In any journalistic undertaking, there's the story, and there are the other associated stories, some of them directly related, others not so much, though no less interesting for it. Typically the process of reporting is one - especially in television - of condensation. Much of the criticism directed at television news comes because this winnowing is equated with a kind of flensing of what might be - in print, or radio - retained as elements of the narrative.
Television news is often deemed to be less intelligent than that filtering through other media, though it's rarely praised for being more visceral, which it clearly is. In fact the gripping, elemental charge a viewer receives watching a piece of video, say of a woman clinging to a branch in a flash-flood (as CNN is recounting in the background while I write this), is seen by some as inhibiting of a viewer's ability to judge a story accurately.
All of this is a rather elaborate and long-winded (but not as much as it could have been) way of saying a picture is worth a thousand words. So the images of Tiger's mistresses said as much about him as the images, smeared with the TMZ logo, of his smashed-up SUV.
A story itself may undergo several cycles. This used to be referred to as a story 'having legs', or being able to run and run.
Ditto with Tiger. The Thanksgiving Day crash became a tale of domestic ill-harmony, then of adultery, then of pathology. Though -as we learned - Tiger made little attempt to conceal his proclivities from the general public (allowing himself to be photographed with some of the women while out), he'd hidden them from his wife. So the story became about public and private morality, and whether that was revealing of an individual's character. Then it was about a perceived desire for an apology, or at least for a sincere one.
As I found out by attending the US Masters, golfing fans didn't really care about what he'd done in bed, they only wanted him to play golf successfully. "What did his sex life have to do with his putting?" they asked. For a while they were right. Tiger's game fell apart after the Masters.
Yet it felt like the end of something. My cameraman and I took rooms in the hospital district of Augusta; at night while my cameraman and I tried to sleep, the cancer patient next door coughed arias. During the day she sat staring at us, smoking, and drinking black coffee. At the time, I was reading Left Behind, a book about the Rapture that has sold 65 million copies worldwide.
The Rapture is - some believe - a Biblical prophecy in which the faithful are taken up to be with God, leaving unbelievers to reap the whirlwind. It's the end of the world, as written by evangelicals. This is what I mean when I'm talking about the story outside, and around the story.
What does Tiger Woods have to do with the last days? Endings of careers, of particular modes (the global financial crisis), even of fashions say something about the nature of the times, and about the times that may come. I wrote about this for the blog Killing the Buddha; how Tiger's public sufferings were imbued with religious significance, and what that might mean when viewed through the lens of the Rapture, and the news. You can read it here .
Despite the complexity some ask for, we can watch news for the same reasons we watch sports; to find out what the event was like, and who won. Who are the good guys, and who should we disapprove of? Life is rarely so self-evident, but it can be.
When it's not, the obligation is to show the shades of grey. That's difficult. But in the interests of honesty, I'll make a prediction: I doubt this new love child actually is Tiger's, but that Serbian basketballer shouldn't go spending his child support on an Escalade just yet.
Read more of Tim Wilson's articles.
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