by US Staff (Tue Dec 01, 2009)
The Tiger Woods debacle in Florida this past weekend, the one in
which he crashed his car into a tree in the middle of the night and was rushed
to hospital, unconscious with facial lacerations, got me thinking. How much
of an invasion of a celebrity's privacy are we, the public, entitled to?
The kneejerk responses of ‘none' and ‘total' do not sit well with me
because these are complex and layered situations.
In Tiger Woods' case, he is one of the most famous people in the world. That in and of itself, in my opinion, does not
entitle us to anything. But, if you combine that with the fact that dozens of
companies hire him and hold him up as a standard to which we should all aspire
in relation to the clothes, cars and food (among many other products) we buy, well,
then I say it entitles us to at least an explanation. And I want my explanation
from Tiger Woods and not some mouthpiece. I want Tiger Woods to tell me whether
he had a fight with his wife and whether or not domestic violence was involved.
I want Tiger Woods to tell me how he crashed his car at 2:30 in the morning,
sober apparently, and why his wife busted the windows with one of his golf
clubs. I want Tiger Woods to tell me if he was being unfaithful to his wife and
his children.
And, the reason I want him to tell me these things is because I have
listened to him tell me why Buick is the car I should own, and why Nike makes the
sports apparel my family should wear and why General Mills makes the cereals I
should eat.
Tiger Woods owes me that much.
