One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

I like sports, but I'm not all that thrilled with golf. I used to play golf. I thought I hated it. Turns out, I only hated the guy that I was dating at the time who wanted me to play golf with him. Once I got rid of him, started drinking and rented a cart, golf had much more of an appeal to me. But I digress. The point here is that if there is a major tournament, I might check out a little bit of coverage, just to see how it's going. This week is the British Open and boy am I glad that I did check it out. If I hadn't, I would have missed John Daly in this photo of all of the previous British Open winners. Behold!

Uh, one of these things is not like the others. As confusing as the choice to wear that jacket is, John Daly looks even more confused. Is he back on the sauce? That's not the facial expression, nor the fashion statement of a sober individual. And I would really be doing the whole photo a disservice if I didn't comment on the Farmer Forehead tan that Tiger Woods seems to be sporting there. The guy on the other side of John seems to have the same affliction. But not Lee Trevino down there in the middle at the bottom. Granted, he is unnaturally tan for a 70 year old, but at least it appears to be uniform.

So I started looking back at some of John Daly's fashion choices throughout the years. Hoo-boy! While it was good to know that it's not all that unusual for John to make some interesting choices for what to wear, it still wasn't overly comforting that he chooses these things in the first place. Let's look at some of them, shall we?

Here's John early in his career. He doesn't look horrible. Granted, donning an Indian blanket as one's shirt isn't the most advisable wardrobe selection, but it's going to look tame compared to some of his later looks. (Look at how thin he was, too. Ahh, but those days were few and far between.)

In the photo below, he's still young, yet seems to be getting prepped for that humongous gut that he'll be dragging around with him for years to come. Again, it's not horrible. It's sort of a Christmas sweater sort of look. And it might be his last time looking somewhat presentable.

Yellow will play a part in many of John's outfits. Like here with this inexplicable tartan pattern. (I think that's tartan. I skipped textiles in high school.)

Here he is in more yellow...and apparently on a break from clown college.

Top to bottom yellow, not to mention a crazy hippie-dippy-trippy flower power pattern, never advisable. Ever.

It's even less advisable in orange.

Here he is looking like a pissed off and gay Bill Parcells. Nice man-hoots, John. Nice bright orange man-hoots. Good Lord...no one wants to see that. Er, those. Whatever. It's hideous.


Twister, anyone?

Whenever John can't find his own pants, he apparently just borrows some from the lead singer of Warrant.

Look, when John Daly is playing well enough that it doesn't matter how he dresses, that's fine. But he's really going to have to be on his A-game if he wants to be able to justify the ensemble below. Ever.

Just Don't

Wow. That's almost all I have to say about this one. Just wow.

Apparently, Nike felt that it would be a good idea to roll out a new Tiger Woods commercial on the day before the Masters begins. Now, I don't proclaim to know anything about corporate advertising. But I think I do know what doesn't seem like a good idea and this commercial would be it.

Here's the gist of it (Well, actually, this isn't the gist. This is IT.): You see a black and white image of Tiger from the chest up just standing there and staring straight ahead at the camera. I don't know if the black and white imagery is to try and trick viewers into thinking that we have magically been transported back to a time before his multiple extra-marital dalliances with cocktail waitresses and porn stars were widely known or what, but it kind of bugs me.

All he does throughout the entire 30 seconds is stand there and stare. The camera slowly moves in closer to his face throughout the spot, but he's just standing there and staring. Meanwhile, we hear the voice of the dearly departed Earl Woods. Now, the only reason that I know that it's Earl Woods is because I read that it was over at The Huffington Post. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had a clue. Don't get me wrong, I follow sports. I know who Earl Woods was. But I don't know if I'm supposed to know that it's Earl's voice when I hear it. It just comes out of nowhere, so are we supposed to think that it's God? Please. That better not be it.

Anyway, this is what he says: "Tiger, I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything." Are you kidding me?

Are they just begging people to mock the heck out of that or what? He's "prone to be inquisitive"? Like what? "Which Perkins coffee shop did you pick that one up at?" That kind of inquisitive? Or the kind of inquisitive that asks, "Why are you constantly cheating on your beautiful Norwegian wife with all of these porn star skanks? I wonder which one it is.

He wants to find out what his thinking was? Really? Lemme help you out a little bit, Earl. His thinking was "I don't give a fat rat's ass about anything other than myself and my big ol' boner and therefore, I'm going to be having lots of kinky sex with that there cocktail waitress, Pops."

Do they really want to include the line "I want to find out what your feelings are"? I can't imagine that they do. But they did! See, that's where Earl and I differ. Earl wants to know about his feelings. I want to know the total number of bimbo whores he slept with.

Did he learn anything? I don't know. I don't think that he did. Are we supposed to think that he did? Maybe he learned that it's not a good idea to let your wife find text messages from one of your waitress mistresses on Thanksgiving. Maybe he learned to not try and drive his Escalade (unless he can avoid hitting various shrubbery and a fire hydrant) when his wife is chasing after him with a golf club at 2am. Maybe he learned those things. But I'm thinking that the only thing that he might have really learned is that it sucks to get caught.

I don't get the logic behind this commercial. I know that Nike is one of the only two sponsors that he has left (the other one being Electronic Arts, makers of various video games which are seemingly immune from most controversy), but I didn't think that they'd be using him in a commercial again so soon. Then again, I don't know why they'd stick with him at all. Granted, their slogan is "Just Do It", but I don't know that they want a spokesman who really goes with the literal (and the carnal) translation of it.

I guess that they couldn't do a commercial which would have incorporated all of his philandering ways into it, like instead of having gophers pop up across a golf course in all of the holes, have his bimbos pop up. Yeah, I think something like that is probably considered to be "in poor taste". Probably. Whatever. I think that channeling the voice of the dead father is a bit much. The commercial is below. Did you learn anything?

Tiger's String Theory

I don't pretend to be a PR person. I barely pretend to be a good person. All of that being said, I have no idea what Tiger Woods thinks that he's up to. All I know is that Sunday afternoon I heard that he had given two separate interviews to ESPN and The Golf Channel (yep, there's a golf channel) and that they would be airing "in their entirety" Sunday evening. Two interviews? In their entirety?! I immediately cleared my schedule, as I figured that this was must see TV. OK, granted, my schedule was already pretty clear, but I've always wanted to say that. (I also exaggerated with the "must see TV", as it was really "I'll watch it if the re-run of The Simpsons isn't one of the really early ones where all of the characters seem to have just a touch of Cro-Magnon in them.) In reality, even if my schedule was packed, I would have only had to block off ten minutes, as each interview was only five freaking minutes.

Really Tiger? Five minutes each? Who in the world gives an interview that is only five minutes. Way to hype this up, ESPN. "In their entirety". Please. When something is only five minutes long, it's a little hard to not show it in its entirety! They didn't even sit down! He just stood there, uncomfortably close to each interviewer. He was wearing a ball cap with one of his TW logos on it, as he is the only person who will endorse himself these days. First up, the Kelly Tilghman interview.

Kelly Tilghman has apparently been with the Golf Channel since its inception. She's a very attractive woman who might know something about golf. (It's hard to know whether or not they base their hiring practices of very attractive women who will be on TV on whether or not they have an in depth knowledge of the sport itself as opposed to how good they look holding a phallic shaped microphone.) She started off with a fairly reasonable inquiry. She asked, "Tiger, you’ve been a master of control your entire life, how did things get so out of control?" That's when Tiger started off his part of the interview with a fairly ridiculous response. "Going against your core values, losing sight of it. I quit meditating, I quit being a Buddhist, and my life changed upside down." Oh, spare me.

You quit being a Buddhist?! I don't remember Tiger Woods being all Buddhist-y before. And I'm going to disagree that he went against his "core values". It would seem to me that his core values included sleeping with any woman with a sizable rack and carrying some sort of drink tray. Yeah, that's what happened. He quit being a Buddhist and suddenly found himself screwing every cocktail waitress around like he was some sort of jackrabbit on crack. (I mean, you know,if the whole inter special thing was even possible in this analogy, then it would be just like that.)

Question Two from Ms. Tilghman: "Were there moments you thought you should stop, but didn’t?" And ridiculous answer Number Two from Tiger Woods: "Yeah, I tried to stop and I couldn’t stop. It was just, it was horrific." Yeah, it sounds horrible. All of that crazed sex that you were having all the time, whenever you wanted it, with whoever you wanted it. You poor, poor, tortured soul. And without your Buddha to keep you company (as far as we know). Good Lord. Horrific? That's hilarious. He has apparently confused the time when he was screwing anything that wasn't nailed down (and presumedly had an appropriate orifice) and the time when he was finally busted. The getting busted part? That might qualify as "horrific". The rest of it? All of the not stopping? Not so much.

Let's see...oh! Here's one that really exemplifies how Tiger has NO intention of giving any sort of answer with any sort of substance. Question: "For a man who’s so disciplined physically and psychologically, why couldn’t you say no?" Tiger's answer: "I don’t know, now I know. It’s part of what I learned in treatment, being there for 45 days you learn a lot. You strip away the denial, the rationalization and you come to the truth and the truth is very painful at times and to stare at yourself and look at the person you’ve become, you become disgusted." Uh-huh.

Wow, he actually used the word "strip". I guess maybe because he's awfully familiar with things that strip. You might notice that he didn't offer up what he had been in treatment for. No, no. That would be too much. He still thinks awfully highly of himself (and he's one of the few that still do) and he's not about to totally admit that he so screwed up. And down, too, probably. The whole transcript of that interview is available over at something called National Post.

Moving onto the other five minutes of his time that he managed to spare yesterday, we have him speaking with a one Tom Rinaldi of ESPN. (The transcript of those 300 seconds is available over at The Huffington Post.) Tom (I call him Tom) said to him: "Eleven months ago, here at Isleworth, I asked you, 'How well does the world know you?' What's your answer to that now?" His response sounded remarkably similar to what he said to Ms. Tilghman when he said, "A lot better now. I was living a life of a lie. I really was. And I was doing a lot of things, like I said, that hurt a lot of people. And stripping away denial and rationalization you start coming to the truth of who you really are and that can be very ugly." The stripping. The denying. The rationalizing. All very good key words to throw into an interview answer...if you don't repeat them five minutes later!

My favorite part of ESPN interview was actually when he was asked "What's the difference between the man who left Augusta national a year ago and the one who is about to return?" Tiger answer with "A lot has transpired in my life. A lot of ugly things have happened." I don't recall any of this happening to him. I really don't recall these events transpiring. I recall him almost getting beaten senseless by his extremely angry wife (allegedly) on Thanksgiving after she found out about a multitude of strippers that he had been fornicating with, but I don't know if I'd call that "events transpiring". No, I'd simply call that "getting caught".

Rinaldi, er, Tom also asked him, "I ask this question respectfully, but of course at a distance from your family life. When you look at it now, why did you get married?" That seems to be a perfectly reasonable question. But the answer that Tiger gave sounded almost like he was surprised that someone would ask such a question. What?! You want to know why I married my wife? Just because it's been revealed that I've been sleeping with Perkin's waitresses in my Escalade outside of their mobile home?! Is that why you're asking that? Uh, yes. Yes, it is. But his answer? "Why? Because I loved her. I loved Elin with everything I have. And that's something that makes me feel even worse, that I did this to someone I loved that much." Please note the use of the term "loved" as in the past tense. As if we needed to read anything into anything as it was, but whatever.

Seriously, how was he supposed to answer that question? "Uh, I thought it would look good." "Uh, well, I thought she wouldn't find out." Or what I find to be the most plausible: "Dude, she's a Norwegian model who has a twin sister! Do the math!"

Look, I'll give him that he was less robotic than he was during the odd, odd press conference in which he rambled on for 12 minutes (and scolded the media at one point for following his children). It was still pretty robotic and it's still pretty evident that he hasn't internalized anything. (I base that on the repetitive answers and that I don't believe anything that comes out of the serial fornicator's mouth and neither should anyone else.) I couldn't quite figure out what he was up to until the very end of the Kelly Tilghman interview when she says to him, "I noticed you’re wearing a bracelet, can we see it?...What does it mean?" A bracelet? Where? What...that? Behold!

That's a string. Is a string a bracelet? Because that's a string? Guess what it's for? That's right! All of the Buddhism! He told her, "It’s Buddhist, it’s for protection and strength and I certainly need that." Protection from what? Cocktail waitresses? Is that string from one of their thongs? Does is work at fending off porn stars as well? Like those magic bracelets that Wonder Woman wears? Is it like that? Oooh!! Do you have magic lasso, too?!

She continued with the string inquisition by asking, "When did you start wearing it?" ("The second I got it off of that hooker." Oh, I kid! That's not what he said!) "Before I went into treatment." Ohhh. BEFORE the treatment. Of course. Because you sat down and thought long and hard about what you'd done and you decided that a string around your wrist would be in order. Gotcha. Anything else? Why, yes. Yes, there was something else. Apparently, Ms. Tilghman was fascinated by this string. "Will you be wearing it during the Masters?" What do you think he said? Come on! Guess! That's right he said, "Absolutely." And she took it a step further (and thankfully it was the last step) and asked, "For the rest of your life?" And what do you think he said to that? Come on! Guess! That's right. Again with the, "Absolutely." I get it.

So the string is a decoy. It gives people something to focus on. That will be his way of not having to talk about how he's doing in the future. If you see the magic string, you know he's protected from cocktail waitresses. Seriously, what else could it be for (because it certainly isn't for protection from anything)? We (the public 'we') are just so stupid that we're going to believe that if we see the string, that he's a faithful, Buddha loving, family guy once again. Oh, OK! We believe you! Sure! Did Ari Fleischer come up with that one? It's new. Let's see if it works.

Not 'works' in the sense that he'll be protected from hookers or anything, but 'works' in the sense that people will assume that he's not effing anything that moves like some wild beast, but only if he has the magic string on his wrist. Look, just because someone has a string on their wrist, it doesn't mean they're faithful...to anyone. Not to their wife. Not to their mistresses. Not to their hos. No one. String or not.