Sports & Games
Trevor Takes the Title; Tiger Takes the Headline
Proving the Media’s Unprecedented Obsession with Woods
At the start of the final round of the Masters on Sunday, April 13, 2008, Trevor Immelman led the field. But you’d never have known it by the media coverage Sunday morning.
“Woods Refuses to Fade Away” was the New York Times’ headline of its Masters coverage. “Masters’ Leaders All Wary of a Woods Charge,” said the Chicago Tribune. ESPN.com’s front page warned, “He’s Still Out There”—the accompanying photograph indicating that Tiger, not Trevor, was the golfer of focus.
Even when Immelman’s third-round lead made it to the headline, as in the Los Angeles Times, Tiger was only a semicolon away: “Immelman Leads Masters; Woods in Fifth.”
The Washington Post seemed to stand alone in giving the leader his own moment in the sun, the sports page heralding, “Immelman Hangs In There.” But the lurking adversary intimated in the headline nearly took center-stage in the article: “Woods” and “Immelman” both appeared 13 times in the write-up (including the “Immelman” in the headline). The tie breaker? Zero independent references to “Trevor,” but one instance of a “Tiger.” TW 14, TI 13. Tiger wins.
Keep in mind that Tiger was not in second place at this point. At six strokes back and in fifth, he was still hanging around, but he was hardly breathing down Immelman’s neck. In the 74 years of the Masters, only five times has the green jacket ended up on the back of someone who was down by six or more strokes after 54 holes, so a comeback was not a likely scenario.
In short, what became clearly visible this weekend is that the media have inflated Woods to the point where the spotlight this phenom brought to the sport of golf now shines only on him. The result is an unprecedented shift in Masters coverage, as an analysis of 49 years of the New York Times demonstrates. The focus is no longer on golf’s premier competition but on golf’s premier star.
From 1960 until 2004, on the morning of the final round of the tournament, the Times’ lead Masters headline included the name of the current leader in all but three cases. In two of those three instances the headline contained no golfer’s name, once because so many golfers were near the top (“Turn of the Screw: Masters Gets Tighter,” 1995) and once because the real story was the playing conditions (“Stormy Weather Slows Masters Golfers,” 1992). Only one time in those 45 years did another golfer completely displace the leader’s name in the headline: in 1986, when Nick Price’s record-breaking round put him in second place behind Greg Norman (“Price’s 63 Humbles Masters Course”).
Compare those numbers with the past four years, in which the headline on the morning of the final round included the leader’s name exactly zero times. In 2006, the weather again stole the show (“Lots of Rain, Little Golf, Many Holes Left to Play”). The other three years, however, it was Woods who made the headline in place of the leader. Tiger was four shots behind Chris DiMarco in 2005 when the Times declared, “Sky Clears as Woods Roars Into View.” Last year, Stuart Appleby’s leading performance was overlooked in favor of Tiger’s march to within one shot (“As Scores Climb Ever Higher at Augusta, So Does Woods”). And of course this year Trevor Immelman took a back seat to the man in fifth place, as readers learned “Woods Refuses to Fade Away.”
Add to that the times when Tiger shared the headline despite being multiple spots behind the leader. In 2000, Woods was six strokes back, tied for sixth place, but made the large print anyway: “A Howling Wind and a Prowling Woods Can’t Stop Singh.” His fifth place standing in 2003 was good enough to make him the subject of the headline, relegating the leader to object-of-a-preposition status: “Woods Makes Cut, Then Makes a Charge; A 66 Puts Him Four Back of Maggert in the Masters.” Phil Mickelson received his own headline in 2004 (“Mickelson Stands Closer Than Ever To First Major”), but the story essentially shared top billing on the page with an article about Tiger, who was nine strokes back and in 19th place (“Woods Close to Another Letdown”).
The point is, the media are just as obsessed with Tiger’s potential as they are with his performance. So even when he’s being outplayed, Tiger at least shares the spotlight—and often takes it over entirely. Some will argue that his talent and his past performances warrant this kind of attention, and that the Times and other outlets are only acknowledging his uncanny ability to remain always in the hunt. This may be true, but even if it is, it represents a marked change of course for the paper’s Masters coverage, which never gave Jack Nicklaus such treatment.
Tiger has won the Masters four times in his career, those wins coming over a nine-year span (1997, 2001, 2002, and 2005). Nicklaus won six times, including an amazing run of three green jackets in four years (1963, 1965, 1966). Conceivably, then, the media should have given even more deference to Nicklaus, who still maintains Masters superiority over Tiger. But in the three years following his 1966 win, Nicklaus doesn’t even get a mention in the headline going into the final round. It’s not until his performance picks up and he is a co-leader after 54 holes that the Golden Bear makes the headline again, in 1971.
So what’s the result of this hyping of Tiger Woods? A change in the way the public perceives golf and golfers. By its very nature, golf is a sport whose players are less removed from the normal fan than are athletes of other sports. There is no helmet, protective gear, or uniform to set them apart; they have no obviously bulging muscles; instead of sprinting, jumping, or pushing they simply saunter most of the time; and often enough the leader board has names on it that you haven’t seen before. Compared to other athletes, golfers are just normal guys. (Rich, white normal guys, but still just normal guys.)
For better or worse, Tiger has changed our perspective. By trumpeting his name even when his performance fails to meet his hype, the media have crafted an image of Woods that defies the historical notion of the golfer as an everyman whose merits should be counted based on his play that particular day. The question is no longer, “Who is playing the best game of golf?” but rather “What kind of golf game is Tiger playing?”
Discussion
3 comments for “Trevor Takes the Title; Tiger Takes the Headline”
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Mr. Calme-
Very interesting piece. I remember when Tiger first came on the scene, and they used to show that famous Mike Douglas clip ad nauseam. It always felt like, as long as there was a Tiger Woods, there was a mediated Tiger Woods, the perception of him as the only golfer that matters, bar none, endorsed by print and tv journalists alike. Still, I think you’d have to admit a little company called ‘Nike’ and their role in all this. As Wikipedia points out, “Shortly after his 21st birthday in 1996, Woods began signing numerous endorsement deals with companies including General Motors, Titleist, General Mills, American Express, Accenture and Nike. In 2000, Woods signed a 5-year, $105 million contract extension with Nike. It was the largest endorsing deal ever signed by an athlete at that time.” With sponsors like that, don’t you expect some prioritizing in the media coverage? I mean, what global brand endorsed Nicklaus in his day?
In response to Mr. Tense’s comment-
My intention in the article was to examine the extent to which the media have inflated Tiger’s image and to demonstrate that this level of attention is a clear cut with tradition. I did not intend to examine the factors that have caused this change in coverage. In fact, on that topic, I agree with you: endorsement money and business interests are the main cause of this expansion of Tiger’s spotlight. However, I think these interests are influencing the media not directly but rather through the opinion and taste of the general public, as readership of course dictates advertising dollars. What is really interesting is that readers are eating up this coverage of Tiger. The average American might be able to see him/herself more clearly in the pre-Tiger everyman golfer, but the same American is much more attracted to the Tiger type. We don’t want a sport that mirrors our own reality, in which talent is tempered by luck and work ethic, resulting in a daily churn of winners and losers. We want a hero, someone who is pure potential. If he wins, we gape at the superhuman presence in our midst; if he loses, we relish the fall from glory. Either way, our eyes remain glued to the coverage–and the accompanying ads.
Mr. Calme,
An intriguing article. Allow me to contribute a few thoughts in light of your analysis:
1. It seems that perhaps the causal relationship between newspaper headlines and our perception of golf/golfers runs the other direction. I would argue that newspapers are not changing our perception, but that the prevailing perception of golf has changed the way newspapers cover the sport.
2. My point above may be related to a change in that very relationship between golfer and fan you discuss–a change Woods has largely inaugurated. While he is indeed not wearing a helmet, Woods has become an athlete in a way few golfers before him have. He does in fact have bulging muscles. He occasionally runs, jumps, or pumps his fist. He swings with a power and precision that set him at a distance from both fan and fellow competitor. He may even be said to wear a particular uniform, at least on Sundays. And of course, one of the first stirs he caused at The Masters was not his win, but the fact that he was not cut from the “rich, white” fabric of which you speak.
All these factors contribute to an athlete who is indeed different from almost any golfer of the past or present. While he may not have surpassed Nicklaus in a variety of statistical measures, Tiger Woods has redefined the sport of golf in a number of important ways. In the process, he is redefining the headlines as well.