On Thursday, after serving five months in self-imposed exile following an infantile yet lurid sex scandal, Tiger Woods returned to the world of professional golf by teeing off at the US Masters. Possibly overshadowing this meta-event was the new Nike ad that debuted in conjunction with the Masters.
Self-consciously arty, the ad is shot in a somber black and white that offers such little visual contrast as to appear almost sepia. Woods, looking weary and mortal, stares blankly into the camera. There’s a Warholian emptiness to Woods, as if he’s receptacle that’s just waiting to be filled up with the myriad projections of his audience. As we watch Woods, who does nothing more than blink a few times, a disembodied voice emerges.
The voice belongs to Earl Woods, Tiger’s dead father.
There’s an evidently paternal quality to the voice. Open, patient and lacking any edge of judgment, the voice, as if coming from inside of Tiger himself, asks the simple questions that any golf fan watching might want answered.
What were you thinking?
What are you feeling?
Did you learn anything?
But Tiger just stares back. Little more than a ghost, Woods betrays not a hint of expression or feeling in his face, and the audience is implicitly entreated to stay the course and continue to follow the career of Tiger Woods, hoping to discover the answers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLxOs3tMqhM
It’s a fascinating and complex ad, but for the most part the responses have been visceral, negative in the extreme. People are repelled and confused. That Woods would allow his father’s voice to be posthumously edited and rearranged in order to help rehabilitate his own career is a stunning act of self-interest.
I don’t think that I know anybody who would do such a thing.
Tiger Woods is clearly a smart man, but on his own, without a mentor to focus his laser-like concentration, Woods seems little more than a boy flapping wildly in the wind of his impulses. How a man like Woods, with all that he has at his disposal, could go on a serial sex binge like he did without realizing he’s was going to be caught and thrown in the stocks by the public is beyond imagination.
It’s deluded.
From the time that Woods was a boy, his father micromanaged his life, consciously creating a sporting messiah, of whom he himself said, “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.”
Earl Woods wasn’t trying to help shape his son into an evolved adult, he was in the business of creating a myth. There was no man, only the projection of a man. And as we listen to him speak from beyond the grave, it becomes easy to understand why his son would think it was OK to use his voice in this manner, for surely the questions he was being asked were not meant to be understood in a moral framework, but as a part of a business strategy. In the Woods cosmos, there’s no meaningful interior, just an impenetrable exterior. There’s just no there, there, and what the Nike ad shows us is the narcissistic melancholy of the sociopath, dressed up to appear as something much more elusive and meaningful.