catching tiger by the tale

Tiger Woods emerged in a press conference after many months of silence and mystery following the exposure of his substantial marital infidelity and the subsequent controversy and fall from grace.

At the conference he admitted to his errors. He apologized to his family. And he acknowledged the breach of integrity and moral character that was a huge disappointment to his fans, colleagues, sponsors and families around the world who had bestowed role model status upon him.

The question is: was it sincere or strategic?

During his presentation, he did not seem as emotional as one might expect from the truly contrite. But then again, one of the reasons he is as successful as he is as a top performer is his lack of affect. Nothing seems to faze him.

Tiger Woods is also a huge national brand and getting caught doing what he was doing was and will continue to be very expensive. Regardless, I do admire the courage it takes anyone to own up to what they've done, regardless of what we all might speculate about their motives for doing so.

I suspect Tiger's core driver is towards excellence and his infidelities are clearly by his own standards sub-excellent. Perhaps such infidelity is the darkside of all excellence. Like yin and yang they live together. Would we really appreciate excellence as much if we did not have an example to compare it with?

Whether Tiger's attempt to make amends is believable or not perhaps says more about us than him: maybe it says something interesting about our own weaknesses, fears, self-doubts, addictions and general biases towards optimism and pessimism.

Personally I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. No one will ever fully know why he did what he did and in the end he stood up and accepted the consequences like a man. Better than many world leaders and business executives.