This Tiger Woods ad cracks me up. It embodies one of the biggest fallacies in sport, acknowledges Tiger’s own scandalous and debaucherous history that people did not approve of, and then flicks it off, takes a steaming pile of shit on top of them, and says “yeah, fuck you.”
As much as Nike wants you to believe it, winning does not take care of everything. Just because Tiger Woods is good at hitting a small white ball great distances with a metal stick, and getting it to roll into a tiny hole with minimal swings does not take care of the fact that he’s a sex-addicted narcissist who ruined lives and his own marriage to indulge his sloth. The same applies to Kobe Bryant, and that just because he scored 81 points and won another NBA championship does not rectify having raped a woman in Colorado. The same applies to Ray Lewis, and that winning two Super Bowls does not absolve him of having stabbing a guy to death.
No, winning does not take care of all these things. All it does is give the blatantly corrupt media machine something nice to say about an athlete to hide the fact that beneath their unsubstantial and unimportant sport-related achievements, they’re still worthless as human beings.
I know Nike’s a business that’s all about making money, but at what point does even their employees and creative teams stop and reflect on the fact that they’re acknowledging this critical fallacy? To a degree the impression that I get is that Nike is okay with people being criminals, as long as they go out and to something victorious and extraordinary in sports to make up for it.
Hm. One part of me is contemplating that perhaps I should stop purchasing any Nike products for my own athletic endeavors, but at the same time it’s hard to imagine that any other athletic company isn’t covering up for their own stable of crooks and criminals as well; maybe not as blatantly as Nike but I can’t imagine that they’re alone in this practice.
Kinda sucks.
