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.Concluding his complimen-tary remarks about Tiger s record-setting performance at the Masters,Zoeller added, The little boy s playing great out there.Just tell him notto serve fried chicken at the [Champions] dinner next year, but thenadded, Or collard greens or whatever it is they serve. 52 As a result of IMPACT 151the comments, Zoeller took a terrible beating in the press, culminatingin K-Mart, his corporate sponsor, dropping him as their spokesman.He was unable to talk to Tiger directly to apologize and fi nally pub-licly asked Tiger to call him to discuss the incident.Several playersrepresented by Nike called and implored Tiger to make some kind ofcomment to defuse the situation.It was not until three days after thesecond apology that Tiger fi nally made a public statement acceptingZoeller s apology.The incident did little to endear Tiger to a number ofhis fellow tour professionals.Another misunderstanding further strained Tiger s relationshipwith his golfi ng colleagues.Several weeks after the Masters, Tiger wasscheduled to play in the Byron Nelson Classic in Dallas.Billy Andradewas an outgoing golfer who had befriended Tiger when he fi rst cameon the tour.Andrade and Brad Faxon run a charity golf tournament inDelaware every year, and as a fundraiser they ask fellow pros to signgolf balls to be auctioned.They wanted to assemble a dozen balls eachsigned by a Masters Champion, so they asked Tiger to provide themwith a signed ball.Tiger refused.Jack Nicklaus had signed and ArnoldPalmer had signed.Nick Faldo and Tom Watson had signed.Whentwo young boys read about the story, they donated a ball Tiger hadsigned when he was an amateur.The actor Joe Pesci bid $50,000 for thedozen balls and gave the Tiger-autographed ball back to the two boys;the publicity about the incident resulted in a record auction for charity.Eventually Tiger donated a signed lithograph, but once again he hadexhibited poor judgment, not atypical of a 20-year-old.53 But Tiger wasnot a typical 20-year-old.His youth also led to another problem when, according to an As-sociated Press report, Tiger was able to get into the Lucky Lady RiverBoat Casino in Iowa, using fake I.D.When the bouncer was informedthat this was Tiger Woods, he was quoted as saying, I don t care if it sthe Lion King. 54An article in the March 1997 issue of Gentleman s Quarterly pro-vided another lesson in Tiger s education in dealing with the media.Writer Charlie Pierce accompanied Tiger on a photo shoot that wouldappear in the magazine.Under the assumption that he was speakingoff-the-record, Tiger let his guard down and told several slightly off-color jokes with racial and gay-bashing themes.The reaction to the 152 TIGER WOODSGQ story varied.Some felt it humanized Tiger, while others felt it wasjust reward for limiting his interviews to a select few reporters whotended to sanitize their subject for public consumption.55Despite the occasional bad press, Tiger s public image did not suffer.As he matured and began to take on more responsibility for his actions,he relied less on handlers.The result was generally better press.Butfamous athletes always maintain a love/ hate relationship with the re-porters who cover them.The reporters need access to the athletes, andso they are necessarily reluctant to criticize these people who can makeor break their careers.A reporter who writes negative stories about anathlete generally loses access to that athlete, and conversely, generallythe negative stories come from reporters who have been denied accessto that athlete.That has been the case with Tiger.Despite his unprecedented accomplishments on the golf course,when Sports Illustrated made Tiger the Sportsman of the Year in 1996,Mike Lupica (Daily News) said, Tiger Woods was one of the best sportsstories of the whole year.His first month on the PGA Tour was one ofthe most exciting things to ever happen to the PGA Tour.But he wasnot the Sportsman of the Year.Unless you can win Sportsman of theYear on spec these days. 56 In the cover story, Earl could not restrainhimself from expressing his understandably inflated predictions for hisson.He claimed that Tiger would eventually have a greater impact onsociety than Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and Buddha.His reasoning wasthat because of modern means of communication, Tiger would havea larger forum.While his reasoning was sound, it was not the sort ofthing that one should actually say out loud.The reaction of the presspretty much refl ected the access the respective reporters had to theWoods camp: the closer you were to the team, the less likely you wereto pan Earl s comments.But such comments only put more pressure on Tiger in his dealingswith the press.It was only natural that the press expected him, as aminority, to weigh in on issues beyond the world of golf.The most un-comfortable situation occurred during the 2003 Masters tournament
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