A Tiger’s Tale: Road to Redemption

It’s old news now, but Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, the squeakiest of the squeaky clean sports stars, has been outed as a serial philanderer. The Twittersphere and the tabloids have done a pretty good job of documenting Tiger’s indiscretions, the details of which need not be revisited here.

The question I’m more interested in is a little harder to answer - What damage has Tiger Woods, the man done to the Tiger Woods, the brand?

First thing’s first - Tiger will return to golf. He will better than ever. He will break Jack Nicklaus’s record for the most Major wins. This much is certain.

But far murkier is how Tiger’s tale will evolve from this point. Will his wife leave him? Is he a toxic asset that sponsors must drop? How will golf fare in his absence?

Accenture has already pulled the plug, Procter & Gamble have “benched” him by limiting his presence in Gillette ads. Tag Heuer has announced they will continue supporting Tiger after initially signalling they would sever ties with the troubled superstar.

But Tiger’s most important booster is the swoosh factory – and Nike is sticking with their man. Founder Phil Knight recently observed, “When his career is over, you'll look back on these indiscretions as a minor blip.”

Tiger - The Brand
With some sponsors leaving and others holding firm, no one has a crystal ball telling us whether Tiger’s stock is buy, hold or sell. While most think his brand image will slowly rise from rock bottom, few believe it will ever climb back to the stratospheric heights it once lived.

One thing is certain, Woods’s actions have made his brand infinitely more vulnerable than the virtuous juggernaut it seemed only a couple of months ago. Perhaps his self-described “transgressions,” made us realize is human after all. As it might be expected, the immediate damage to his market value was significant. University of California, Davis economists Christopher Knittel and Victor Stango have estimated the financial fallout of Tiger's scandals to have cost his sponsors between US$5-12 billion in wealth.

While it's hardly comforting right now, his sponsors can be optimistic that the outing of his inner lothario have added a whole new dimension to Tiger's brand. In the final telling of Tiger's story, the silver lining of this moment is that practically all revered heroes in history face daunting challenges at some point, but most come out intact. Let’s face it, stories aren’t very interesting when it’s all smooth sailing.

Legendary mythologist Joseph Campbell believes that such adversity is a recurring theme in every great story in history. In his famous book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell formulated the idea of “ The Hero’s Journey” or “Monomyth” - a narrative framework that transcends time, place and culture. George Lucas famously used the monomyth as a template for writing the Star Wars saga.

A quick glance at the cycle quickly reveals how it relates to Tiger’s travails. Some of the stages, appropriately named, “the road of trials” and the “woman as temptress” have landed Tiger firmly in “the abyss”. But as Campbell writes, “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

The reason for the abyss stage is simple - while not all protagonists in mythological tales are human, the audiences who read them are. In order to relate to the hero, we must be able to empathise with their experiences. It’s pretty hard to empathise with a flawless robot. To err is human after all.

From Tiger’s perspective, his short hiatus from the game has already put him on the road to redemption - at least with the fans and sponsors - no one knows how atonement will go for on the home front. But time is a powerful healer, and before long Tiger will have mended fences and be back swinging clubs and spruiking products like never before. The only thing Americans love more than a fall from grace is a comeback of Lazarus proportions – just ask Robert Downey Jnr.

Like Michael Jordan before him, Tiger Woods is one of those rare figures that transcends his sport, his race and his nationality. His marketability is based on the certainty of outcome – he will win, and he’ll look good doing it. So sure, the facade of the bulletproof boyscout has been shattered. But for Tiger, perhaps his own “hero’s journey” may not be a such a myth after all.


To read about another recent tale of redemption, see Gunther Sonnenfeld's great post on Michael Vick.