Monday Qualifier

Tiger Woods finally emerged from behind the iron curtain, or rather "the velvety blue curtain seemingly purchased off Craigslist from Conan O'Brien," as Jason Gay wrote Saturday in the Wall Street Journal. It was never going to be an easy sell for Woods.

The day the earth stood still, Feb. 19, 2010, did so for 13 minutes, 30 seconds, or about as long as it takes to play a par 4, though we'll leave it to others to decide whether Woods made birdie or bogey with his speech. Virtually everyone had an opinion, it seems, save for the Dalai Lama, who claimed ignorance of the world's second most famous Buddhist.

Only headlines are necessary to diagram the spectrum of opinion on Woods' public confessional, sincere and insincere playing to a draw, as dueling Washington Post headlines demonstrate (one in print, the other on a blog post):

• "Tiger Woods's controlled apology leaves little room for sincerity"

• "Tiger Woods apology accepted"

Has an event related to golf, however peripherally, ever been witnessed by more people, even on those Augusta Sundays with Woods in contention? Bloomberg reported this on Friday: "New York Stock Exchange volume fell to about 1 million shares, the lowest level of the day at the time, in the minute Woods began a televised speech from Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, headquarters of the U.S. PGA Tour. Trading shot to about 6 million when the speech ended, the highest for any period except just after exchanges opened, data compiled by Bloomberg show."

Woods spoke about philandering and philanthropy, but not Phil Mickelson. Golf was a footnote in his mea culpa. On three occasions, he invoked a word that was befitting the week in golf: Sorry.

It was sorry on several levels, foremost among them the visible and verbal reminders that the game's transcendent star had betrayed his family and stained his legacy.

The timing of the Woods event, from the Wednesday announcement through Friday's post-speech analysis, evoked criticism for detracting from the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship outside Tucson, Ariz. Worse, there were those who wondered whether it was a vendetta, payback for Accenture having severed its endorsement relationship with Woods.

PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem was collaterally criticized for having agreed to host the event at PGA Tour headquarters.

There was the kerfuffle with the Golf Writers Association of America. It voted to boycott the event when Woods' camp would permit no more than six members to attend and forbade them to ask questions.

Finally, there was the fact that a tournament carrying the imprimatur of World Golf Championship went ahead without its two most prominent champions -- Woods, who was getting his life in order; and Mickelson, who was keeping his in order with a family vacation.

The Match Play delivered a respectable winner, at least, the dapper Ian Poulter, who on Sunday was fashionably attired in pink. A few days earlier, Poulter posted this Olympics observation on Twitter: "do you think the figure skaters are wearing my outfits.... ha ha ha look at them bobby dazzlers."

A bobby dazzler, according to urbandictionary.com is "a quaint colloquial term from northern England pertaining to someone very special indeed, either through good looks or by simply wearing something fancy."

Golf, unattractive and cloaked in controversy last week, was no bobby dazzler.

ACCENTURE UPSTAGED?

Some of the most pointed criticism of the timing of the Woods event came from players, who were left uninformed of the reason why Friday was D-Day for Woods. Finchem on Sunday accepted blame.

"In hindsight, we should have pushed the thing along in a way to get the players briefed before they went into their Wednesday matches, so they're not coming out of a match and getting hit with all these Tiger questions," Finchem said. "We just screwed up on that."

The Woods camp had attempted to quell criticism by noting that Friday morning was the only available time for Tiger to make his statement. Indeed, he announced he was returning to a rehabilitation facility the following day.

Still, it overwhelmed the sport for three days, leaving scant room in the news for an important tournament. It also left unanswered whether the sponsor and its event were slighted, whatever the merits of Woods' timing.

We posed the question to a couple of those with some expertise in the area -- Bob Williams, CEO of Burns Entertainment and Sports Marketing; and Kym Hougham, executive director of the Quail Hollow Championship (and before that the John Deere Classic).

"I think it's helped Accenture," Williams said. "The reasoning that the Tiger Woods camp offered is legitimate in terms of his going back into therapy. It wasn't some thoughtless act that some in the sports arena accused him of, nor was it a direct pot shot at Accenture for dropping him as an endorser.

"The therapy continues and it continues on Monday. I think people in that arena would tell you it's the person's responsibility to be there, and it doesn't matter whether he's a celebrity. He needs to be there. I think that it's a net benefit for Accenture, just from the mentions it gets, on front pages, on national cable business channel outlets.

"The Tiger effect netted them additional exposure, and most exposure is good exposure."

Hougham seconded the notion. "I think it probably helped Accenture. I saw it mentioned on CNN, and I'm sure it wasn't just CNN.

"Things happen all the time. When our tournament was going on, Tiger's father died, Daly's book came out one year. It would be nice if we all had everybody's attention all the time, but we don't."

An opposing view came from Chubby Chandler, managing director of International Sports Management, as quoted in the Guardian: "The timing of it was outrageous. This morning (Friday) people were still asking other players about Tiger Woods at a time when they are trying to win a golf tournament. I didn't see or hear anything that suggested to me that this couldn't have been done on Monday."

THE 14TH AT PEBBLE: AN ADDENDUM

The Monterey Herald reminded us that the trio of 9s made at the 14th hole in the final round of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am were neither the first 9s nor even the most memorable. In 1967, Arnold Palmer was trailing Jack Nicklaus by a stroke when his 3-wood second hit a tree and went OB. He reloaded and hit another off the tree and OB. That night, a storm knocked the tree down. The lesson: Don't mess with the King.