Cherished private life now sits on top of Google's search list

IT WAS a chap on Huffington Post, the American news website, who asked on Tuesday, “If Tiger Woods held a tell-all press conference at the same time as Obama’s Afghanistan speech, who’d get more coverage?”

The head-to-head didn’t, fortunately enough, materialise, although some of the statistics floating about would suggest if it had, the President might have been talking to himself, regardless of the gravity of his announcement in New York.

An absurd notion? Well, take a look at the figures produced, for example, by the New York Times’ website yesterday: “Tiger Woods” topped the list of “words and phrases most frequently searched”, four places ahead of “Obama”, with “Afghanistan” a distant 14th in the list.

On the CBS and CNN websites the news on Afghanistan didn’t even make it in to the top five most viewed stories, Woods occupying two slots in each.

By now “Tiger Woods”, with various addendums, was by far the most searched term on Google, “tiger woods car wife” bringing up 28,700,000 hits.

Once Woods issued his statement yesterday, in which he said “I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart”, the Google search engine was fired up again. What was the most searched word in the United States after the statement? “Transgressions”. In fifth placed was “trangressions definition”. Who knows, perhaps some thought he meant “I regret those missed putts with all of my heart”?

Needless to say, much of the curiosity is fired by the potent mix of celebrity and, well, transgressions, Tiger simply usurping, say, Britney Spears, for a bit. But some of us attempt to convince ourselves that our interest is of the purely lofty kind.

Glued to every development in the story, for example, is Sports Illustrated writer Joe Posnanski. “This is going to sound very, very wrong . . . because, well, it is very, very wrong,” he said. “But I’m sorry. I’ll admit this straight out: I am fascinated by this Tiger Woods accident story.”

Accepting Woods and his family deserve privacy in their lives, Posnanski confessed he was still engrossed by the story. “I cannot help myself. I’m dying to know.” What he is dying to know, though, is not the details of Woods’ private life, rather how he “and his people are going to handle all this”.

The golfer and his advisers have, after all, been largely in control of his story since he first emerged, making the madness of the past few days a foreign country to them all.

Woods has craved privacy almost as much as majors, so one suspects he would rather have missed a two-inch putt to win the Masters than make that statement yesterday. That he felt compelled to do so, to speak publicly about his personal business, presumably on the advice of his handlers and sponsors, says something of the insanity of the world he inhabits. Not that he’s a victim of that world; he, after all, played along yesterday, rather than concluding he was sufficiently opulent to tell his image consultants where to stick their carefully-crafted statement.

The US media, though, has an all-consuming interest in the man who, for them, is “box office” gold, on and off the golf course, as it has proved. In 2007 the networks’ ratings were 58 per cent higher in tournaments when Woods was involved, the Golf Channel’s figures dropping up to 33 per cent when he was off duty.

“What he does transcends his sport and brings in casual viewers; when he’s absent, it’s much harder to get those casual viewers in,” said Page Thompson, the president of the Golf Channel, last year.

This week’s Britney Spears has, then, transcended his sport in a manner which, you’d imagine, would be the stuff of his worst nightmares, his much cherished private life now sitting on top of Google’s search list. Winning back his privacy after this might prove as tricky as “winning” in Afghanistan.