What @tigerwoods Could Learn from @adammyerson.
December 21, 2009
As I type this, Tiger Woods’ 14,111 twitter followers have enjoyed only five tweets from the golf superstar. The last of which was five months ago: a short missive announcing Tiger’s very polished, very professional new website which today holds a pared down letter quoted in press around the globe.
“After much soul searching, I have decided to take an indefinite break from professional golf. I need to focus my attention on being a better husband, father, and person.”
Everything about Tiger suggests this might be the first time he’s ever needed to search his soul. Prior to the press firestorm detailing much of Tiger’s philandering, his soul had been held in escrow by a higher power in exchange for golf supremacy, dirty flings with disenfranchised women, and an endless stream of Escalades. His soul is now laid bare for the world to see.
Conversely, Adam Myerson’s 578 followers have never known anything but the 37 year old professional cyclist’s soul…or his heart, dreams, whims and smallest inclinations. The much tattooed Myerson has 2487 tweets, the most recent of which links the text, “This shower is not going to be awesome.” with an illustrating photo of Myerson’s road rash on his hip, a towel keeping the photo PG-13.
Myerson has no fears of public backlash. He posts a wide array of comments, calls out what he feels are transgressions of his colleagues, and highlights the highs and lows of life as a professional cyclist, coach and race organizer. Myerson draws a living from two disciplines of cycling, road and cyclocross. He has a successful coaching business and promotes cycling events. He is successful in a working class type of professional cycling way, a punk-rock George Hincapie. His entire image and personae is self-regulated, promoted and managed. In this way, he's built a following that is laudible, suitable and truly authentic. Would he be more profitable with a squeaky clean image? With less transparency? With a tight PR machine? It isn't likely, and it certainly wouldn't allow Myerson control over his image the way he maintains currently.
How much athletes allow the public to know about them can determine their sponsored worth and while its easy to point to Tiger’s awful indiscretions as purely the work of another entitled near-billionaire, his entitlement isn’t the entire cause for the athlete’s endless microscope treatment by the media. It was his dishonesty with his message, his image, his lack of transparency throughout his career. his decided un-Myerson-ness. Tiger was an endorsement and money-making machine because of his squeaky clean reputation and seeming inability to lose control over the variables around his game. Had he been caught with a vial of growth hormone, cheated on his taxes or used a Schick instead of Gilette razor, he might have been skewered with similar (albeit less moralizing) voracity. It isn’t that we’re mad at Tiger for cheating alone, it’s the fact that he was playing us for dupes, letting us bask in the shadow of his endless, seeming perfection. Should he have come out and said that he was a narcissistic satyriasist? Maybe not. But had he employed a bit more Myerson in his life, the shock wouldn’t be so great, so all consuming so destructive to his future and current earnings. At the time of writing this Accenture had pulled a 50 million dollar ad campaign. Poof. Gone.
Tiger shouldn't have been a philandering jerk, but before that, he shouldn't have tried walked an unwalkable line.
Facades crack: It isn't the perfect message that resonates with the world, but the honest one.
-AG