Tiger Woods Fails Parody, Streisands 'Offending' Content As A Result

Failures

from the bogey dept

The last time we wrote about Tiger Woods, it was way back in the day when he was best known for putting golf balls in small holes instead of [Ed.: Tim, did you really think we were going to allow this to stay in the post?]. Even back then, however, Woods demonstrated his lack of knowledge concerning the Streisand effect, trying to stifle a story and spotlighting it instead. It seems the lesson has yet to be learned. This go around, Woods has decided to respond to a barely note-worthy piece of obvious satire in Golf Digest by issuing a formal rebuttal to it in The Players’ Tribune because… well, I don’t know why really. The satire itself is both clearly marked and decidedly vanilla.

If you hadn’t seen it—and nobody had, because it wasn’t yet online—Woods is apoplectic about a fake Q&A by sportswriting legend Dan Jenkins. It is labeled as “fake” on the cover, and in the headline, and in the table of contents, so no one, not even America’s dads, could possibly have believed that it was actually Tiger Woods declaring that he fired caddy swing coach Butch Harmon because “Butchie was making me tip too many people.”

There’s no exaggeration here when it comes to how clearly this piece is noting its own satire. The damned title of the piece is: My (Fake) Interview With Tiger*: *Or how it plays out in my mind. The fake Q&A includes such scathing satire as:

Q:TV still loves you.

Tiger: The print press still loves you. The average fans still love you. Of course the average fans still love the Kardashians, too, but I feel sure America will find a cure for this someday. I just do what Steiny says.

Yawn. Anyway, the guy that used to be good at golf decided to issue his own formal and very real rebuttal to the fake Tiger that Dan Jenkins created in his head, leading to the very first ever war of words between a real and fictional version of the same professional sports star.

Did you read Dan Jenkins’ interview with me in the latest Golf Digest? I hope not. Because it wasn’t me. It was some jerk he created to pretend he was talking to me. That’s right, Jenkins faked an interview, which fails as parody, and is really more like a grudge-fueled piece of character assassination. Journalistically and ethically, can you sink any lower?

I like to think I have a good sense of humor, and that I’m more than willing to laugh at myself.

Mmm, no on both counts, I think. In the meantime, Woods’ going to battle over this has, you guessed it, put a big old spotlight on the now published article. It’s, frankly, all the free advertising the author could ever want. And for what? For satire that’s barely funny and would have otherwise gone completely unnoticed? That’s called landing in the rough, Tiger.

Filed Under: dan jenkins, fake interview, golf digest, parody, streisand effect, tiger woods