Are you, with Sun-Timesman Rick Morrissey, ready to recall at this crucial moment in sports history what Tiger Woods and “countless other athletes and coaches” have said when faced with bad publicity about philandering, such as “Please respect my privacy as I go through this very personal situation”?

If you are, consider what Lisa Schiffren says at American Thinker.  She begins in tentative agreement with Morrissey’s implied leave-it-be advice:

As a rule, the revelation that a married athlete (or actor, or rock star, or politician) has conducted extramarital affairs with [a] bevy of “party girls” may titillate, but rarely has the power to shock. In those realms, these things happen. Entitled men. Willing women. Deceived wives. What’s new?

She promptly tells us what’s new.  Aside from our “normal prurience at work,”

we are interested [mostly] because Tiger Woods, who may legitimately be the best golfer ever, had been turned into an all-purpose icon: a man of personal rectitude, a lovely smile, apparent openness; a family man, with a lovely wife and two adorable babies. And of course, he was our first living embodiment of the collective hope for racial reconciliation. Who knew that the early reports of his betrayed wife Elin swinging at him with a golf club constituted literal icon-smashing?

Icon-smashing: the 8th– and 9th-century violent opposition to statues of Jesus, Mary, and the saints.  Tiger, a figurative icon, apparently got hit with a golf club by a woman scorned.  (Hat tip to William Congreve.)

Schiffren’s point, however, is that we the people have been terribly deceived in the Tiger Woods matter, and what we see now is a terrible undeceiving.  Floodgates have been opened, the toilet has been flushed, we are being shown how badly we have been fooled, and this makes it important that we know the awful truth.

We are staring [at this story] because we’ve been had. Betrayed. We see now that the image was all a fraud. The talent was real. But the things that made the public like Tiger personally — the low-key demeanor, manners, and sweet smile of countless sports-page photos, magazine covers, political analogies, and most important, product endorsements, was an act.

So?

The larger lesson here is about how much artifice — sustained, deliberate deception — goes into the construction of a public persona when there is profit to be made or power to be had.

It’s good that we be reminded that there’s a media machine out there waiting to fool us for profit or power. 

Most of us, to be sure, did not venerate Tiger, at least not as one venerates a statue-as-reminder of saint’s virtue, etc.  Some may even have gotten sick of seeing his mug everywhere.  But he became a billionaire largely on the strength of all that exposure, and now the truth is out.

“One of the greatest athletes of our time is disintegrating in front of us,” says Morrissey — though “disintegrating” is a bit much; there apparently wasn’t much there in the first place. 

What he means is that the image is collapsing, evaporating — an image that meant billions for Tiger, not to mention an enormous fund of heroic sports-writer material.  Down the drain, gone forever.  It’s enough to make a columnist weep.