Public figures in tight spots should realise only truth will set them free

I LIKE to think I’m not old enough to play golf but my youngest brother has been fascinated and obsessed with it from an early age, so that excuse won’t wash.

Personally, I find it baffling and when the topic comes up at my parents’ home – seemingly hourly – I head for the nearest metaphorical bunker. Let’s be clear, an eagle is a bird; so is an albatross. A chip is something you eat with steak and a bogey is something unmentionable. But a Tiger? Well, that’s a phenomenon.

Yes, even I have found it hard not to flick to the sports pages to read the latest twists and turns in the sorry tale of the world’s most highly paid sportsman (even if I would ordinarily switch channels if he hove into view).

For Americans, the fact that he is simultaneously colourless and of colour makes him adorable.

If you’re an Audi kind of person – brilliantly efficient but soulless – you’ve probably always loved Tiger. If, like me, you’re more of an Alfa Romeo kinda guy, you’re probably more naturally drawn to flawed geniuses – the Zinedine Zidanes of this world. Somehow, in the last month or so, however, Tiger has begun to grow on me: he isn’t a machine after all. Well, not the sort of machine we thought he was anyway.

So on this one, I’m on the side of JP MacManus. I’m sure all the recent revelations are not especially pleasant for his Swedish wife, Elin Nordegren, but seducing “cocktail waitresses” with names like Chesty and Lusty is hardly a crime against humanity. Plenty of people in public life here in Ireland have done far worse things.

Now Gerry Adams has been accused of many things but no one has ever suggested in print that he is anything but a devoted husband. I certainly have no evidence to the contrary but he too has been in a spot of bother recently.

In fact, he could be in more serious trouble because it is only the Tiger Woods brand which is damaged: he can still play golf even if his mind isn’t on the game right this second.

Gerry Adams and Gerry Adams the brand, on the other hand, are one and the same thing. Without public acceptance, he is nothing. It’s been so long I doubt the Duke of York would even employ him as a barman anymore. It’s interesting, however, to note the difference in the public reactions to revelations about the two men.

The general consensus is that Tiger Woods has been very badly advised. Why has he indulged in such incredibly reckless behaviour when it was obvious to anyone that the news would leak out at some stage with potentially catastrophic consequences for his image and, thereby, for his earning potential, many ask?

Did he seriously think he was untouchable? Did he enjoy taking risks? Or, more likely, did he just enjoy a bit on the side like many married men, oblivious to the fact that he is, rightly or wrongly, public property?

Whichever it was – and all of these factors were probably in play to a degree – he appears to have made a succession of terrible moves from the moment he crashed his Cadillac and culminating in his decision to take leave from professional golf.

It would certainly appear the case that by disappearing from public view, Woods has left the field open for others to mould the narrative in ways that are detrimental to him. By opting out, by refusing to take control of the story, he has turned a drama into a full-blown crisis.

He had the option of coming out a couple of days after his hospital visit and looking into the cameras and telling the world (and his wife) what he was eventually forced to acknowledge: that because he is in fact a normal, red-blooded man, albeit an irresponsible one, he was having domestic issues.

An apology to his fans and his sponsors – not to mention to his family – and he might have been allowed a bit of time to deal with his personal problems.

Instead, things went into a downward spiral to the extent that he felt forced to walk off the putting green, the one place where he could be guaranteed to generate favourable headlines.

Rather than ‘Tiger’s cocktail waitress tally now 24’, they would have read ‘Tiger back on the course’ and ‘Tiger still on form’.

Instantly, the image in everyone’s heads would have been Tiger waving his golfing iron for a change. That’s a best case scenario for him.

Time will tell if he can rebuild his image. Kate Moss managed after pictures of her snorting coke emerged, but scandals which conflict with a person’s public image can wreak havoc.

Maybe Woods’s image has been humanised but some of his sponsors – particularly those outside the sporting world – won’t be back, that’s for sure. They liked the boring robot that refused to do what most celebrities do and whine on about Third World injustice, racial discrimination and other fashionable social issues. A management consultancy firm like Accenture is unlikely to be interested in plastering images of the real sex-texting Tiger on their billboards ever again.

That’s not very fair, but that’s the way it is. We don’t expect those in moral leadership to be able to sink a hole-in-one, but we do expect Tiger Woods to conduct himself like a man of the cloth. That’s the image he portrayed and that’s how he made his money.

As Woods’s website put it: “Personal sins should not require press releases and… public confessions.”

But they do – as Gerry Adams, a much more media-savvy personality than Tiger Woods, knows only too well. But the Oprah-style, let-it-all-hang-out, bare-your-soul treatment will only really work if you tell the truth, beyond contradiction. This is where the Sinn Féin president might fall down. His story – initially well received – is beginning to have a Swiss cheese quality to it: it’s got holes in it and it stinks.

An attempt at humanity is starting to look a little less of a PR masterstroke because Adams could have ended his sexually abused niece Áine’s quest for justice years ago if he had spoken out. Instead, it seems he kept quiet about his brother Liam’s ways for the sake of his own political career. It was only her brave decision to spill the beans that forced the issue.

More than that, he claims he was “estranged” from Liam but the evidence to the contrary is mounting up: pictures of them together canvassing and at family occasions.

Worse, what appeared to be an attempt to come clean about his paedophile father – who was nonetheless buried with full IRA honours – now looks like a cynical bid for undeserved sympathy.

But what has it come to when many of the very same people who lap up stories about Tiger Woods’s infidelities – with fully consenting adult women – denounce any attempt to draw out the truth about child rape within the island’s leading Provo family?

Isn’t it time we moved on from “whatever you say, say nothing”? It isn’t working for Tiger Woods and it simply isn’t good enough for the hundreds, nay thousands, of victims of an unspeakable crime.