The Abridged Tiger Woods Apology Speech, After a Quick Spray with the Truth Ray
TIGER WOODS: “Hello to you all. I am here to publicly apologize for cheating on my wife Elin with other women. (Why am I apologizing to the public? I didn’t cheat on them. Oh, right, kids look up to me as a role model. Kids are watching golf now? Jeez, can’t they look up to someone besides a golfer as a role model? Basketball players, baseball players, football players okay, never mind.)
“While my publicist and marketing people actually wrote these words, I can assure you they come straight from my heart. (And a billion dollars a year in endorsements.)
“In a sane world, I could just be respected as a great golfer and my private life would be my own business, but you self-righteous hypocrites in the media and you sex-starved moralists in the celebrity-obsessed public need some cheesy scandal to drool over, and right now it’s me. (Why don’t you all get a life?) You know, you don’t make rock stars and movie idols apologize like this at least I haven’t seen Mick Jagger or Warren Beatty pestered endlessly for cheating on their wives, but then I guess you can’t play golf and then pose with a car or disposable razor unless you have a spotless personal life. Hey, why don’t you ask the CEOs of the corporations that pay me for endorsements to publicly apologize for their marital infidelities? Oh, right, they aren’t celebrities. Besides, many of you in the media pull a paycheck from one of those corporations. What amazing courage.
“Okay, sorry, I was told by my handlers not to go off script. So, here, I’m just apologizing all over myself for being a kid and young man who never had much of a life outside golf, with a Domineering Stage Father who forced me to practice all the time so that I could fulfill all of his unrealized dreams, and once I was out from under his influence I went nuts and took advantage of my fame and got laid as often as I could. Every honest man listening to me, if they had grown up the way I did, would have done the same thing. Most of you men would do the same thing even without having a Domineering Stage Father, if you had the chance, especially you sportswriters.
“You know who really owes the public an apology: The media vultures covering this story by obsessing on every minute detail of my personal life. Maybe you should try spending the same amount of time on explaining things to the public that really affects their lives like health care reform, and the growing power of corporations over our lives, and the reality of war, and who’s lying about what in Washington. Oh, but that’s too controversial; instead you pick the safe route go after the golfer. You know, it’s not going to put a penny in the public’s pocket, or make their lives one bit better if I apologize, but here it is, for what it’s worth:
“I apologize completely for anything in my private life that might have ever offended anyone. But I know this mea culpa won’t be the end — my bones haven’t been picked entirely clean yet.
“Just to sum up, my adulterous dalliances outside of my marriage, and any apologies I make for them, as I’ve said, really arent and shouldn’t be important except to those close to me. The only important thing about this story is how much valuable airtime and empty words of fake outrage the mainstream media are willing to waste to pursue the sordid details of my private life. Let me reiterate: For that, I don’t owe you an apology they do.”
2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
Well Tiger (and all those other celeb’s including Warren Beatty) you were willing to bask in the limelight for all those years, and collect the royalties and job offers that went along with it, now you can stand under the somewhat harsher glare because you are a self-centered juvenile who couldn’t keep you pants zipped. (by the way I feel this way about politicians, sports stars, actors and actresses, etc.)
True, Ana, but look at how Tiger Woods is being treated compared to Warren Beatty or, and here’s a better example, Newt Gingrich. Beatty wasn’t hounded out of show business because he cheated on his wives, and Gingrich had an affair while his wife was sick with cancer, yet the media didn’t pester him with questions about it, nor demand a public apology.
My point is that there should be a consistent media standard for celebrities who get caught committing adultery. (Obviously, there isn’t.) And I’d also like to see prominent media people who get caught cheating measured with the same gauge they’re using on Tiger Woods, but I won’t hold my breath on that score.
But it is true that Tiger played the ‘squeaky-clean good boy’ card a little too often, so he was setting himself up for a fall.