By now, most of the prurient fascination with the moral and financial collapse of Tiger Woods has faded back into the white noise of daily life, but the debris left behind is a reminder of the jawing difference between “private” and “personal.”
For someone who has drawn their fortune from public adulation and has erected a brand image on a false pretense, Tiger cannot now plead for privacy. Frankly, he owes something to the hundreds of people whose livelihood was pegged to his brand, to the charities that were supported by the PGA events in which he competed, to the inner city kids who looked up to him as a role model (and, please, no argument that sports figures are not role models; sport stars don’t get to make that choice when they understand their stature in the hopes and dreams of some youth), and to the companies who rented his brand attributes under the misled assumption that he actually lived up to his words. (A UC Davis study pegs total shareholder losses at $5-12B).
Any true leader understands you cannot have it both ways. Yes, there are things in everyone’s life that are just private and ought to be sacrosanct from the madding crowd and tabloids, but there is something cathartic and even restorative when a fallen leader is willing to speak honestly (or at least vulnerably) to the people who trusted them. We are an amazingly forgiving breed of beast, but when someone refuses to acknowledge their failings, they are less human to the rest of us. They are truly on their own. And that, is the worse privacy of all.
