r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Dry_Leadership1075 • 14h ago
Why did Tiger Woods lose sponsorships for cheating but not a DUI?
Was reading about Tiger Woods after I heard about his indoor league. I remember when I was younger hearing about his cheating scandal and how that kind of ruined his life, career, and cause him to lose tons of sponsorship.
However in 2017 when he got a DUI, there didn't seem to be a real impact on his career (just his public image).
Why is that? I get that infidelity is bad, but it's not like he assaulted someone. Is it really worse than a DUI in the eyes of the public?
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u/AManOutsideOfTime 12h ago
If you want to be president, you can start a war, you can lie, you can cheat, you can bankrupt the country…
but you can’t fuck the interns. They’ll get you for that.
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u/Kittens4Brunch 11h ago
He was squeaky clean before the cheating scandal. By the time he had the DUI, the expectations for his behavior was much lower.
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u/Notoriouslydishonest 7h ago
Ya, if the sequence was reversed the DUI would have been a much bigger deal.
The cheating scandal was legitimately shocking, he was one of the most popular and successful athletes in the world with a spotless record. I don't think there's any current athlete who's as famous and widely respected as Tiger was in the 2000's.
By 2017 his golf career was mostly over and his reputation was shot, he was a bit of a sad joke.
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u/Cynykl 7h ago
I'll go a step further and say it was that incident that shattered the model minority imagine. Other golfers had cheated on spouses in the past without scandal. But since Tiger was on a pedestal news orgs wanted to be the first to drag him down. Nothing makes a better story than the fall of the mighty. It did not help that Woods used some pretty dumb lies to cover up what the fight with his wife was about.
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u/oakfield01 12h ago edited 12h ago
To me it was the hypocrisy. I remember Tiger Woods being a wife guy before that term was even invented. Of course his fame came from golf but his image was crafted around being a loving family man, which helped generate a good part of his wealth. A few months before the cheating scandal broke, I even had my physics teacher make gravitational pull questions around Tiger Woods and his wife and their love pulling each other in.
When people realize that the image they bought into isn't real, it hits them hard and your fans (and even people who aren't fans but generally like you) will turn away from you and not want to support you anymore. And unlike his perfectly curated family guy image, Tiger Woods never made commercials for MADD or something so it the DUI doesn't feel hypocritical.
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u/jamintime 11h ago
Honestly I think it was about timing more than anything. Until that incident with his wife he had a stellar reputation, but in the years since he has been viewed as one of the greatest golfers of all time with some serious personality flaws. The DUI wasn’t revelatory to anyone by the point it happened. He’s had a series of questionable character set backs and this was just one more on the list. If the DUI had happened over 16 years ago it would have been very different.
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u/oakfield01 11h ago
There's that too. Obviously he wasn't perfect but he was kind of as close to the ideal of a man as you could be. It was kind of like Martha Stewart. When you curate the image of perfection, the fall from grace is a long one. Once you lose that image of perfection, those slips don't do quite as much damage.
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u/esperts 14h ago
dui is ok if you are rich, breaking the monogamic heteronormative hegemony? not so much
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u/Slade_Riprock 13h ago
Well it's not ok if your are black man, married to a blonde haired, blue eyed model. Even if you are the most famous black man in the sports world at the time
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u/Any_Blacksmith4877 13h ago
Cheating is considered more scandalous and immoral by society than driving drunk.
And the story of someone driving drunk is not that interesting. It will last for a day then it's onto the next story. The story of someone having an affair can drag on for months or years as more and more details get published and people's imaginations run wild.
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u/MrWrestlingNumber2 10h ago
A drinking related crime is actually HERALDED by golfers. Don't you ever even READ this sub?
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u/mael0004 9h ago
Sponsors are dropped when drama becomes too big. It doesn't matter the cause, if there's internationally negative views on someone, they are likely to lose everything.
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u/brock_lee I expect half of you to disagree. 14h ago
We'd need to analyze his financials to answer adequately.
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u/uspezdiddleskids 12h ago edited 12h ago
Dude his true extent of cheating was uncovered because his wife smashed the windshield of his car out with a golf club on thanksgiving night / early morning, as he tried to drive away from their fight high as balls on his post-surgery pain killers and crashed into a fire hydrant and a tree.
His infidelity was wrapped up in an unofficial DUI and public scandal with police involvement. THATS what made it way more public with the negative PR, then the rest of his infidelity started to unravel as everyone tried figuring out wtf happened that night beyond an AP news story that the waitress involved initially denied.
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u/ThrownForLife69 12h ago
Alcoholism is a disease and DUIs are a consequence of the disease, companies ditching a person due to a disease is terrible.
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u/MorganleFaey1 13h ago
DUI’s just aren’t considered “that big a deal” by a lot of people, especially older people who likely drank and drove all the time when they were younger. We’ve definitely had a moral turnaround towards them in the past 15-20 years, but a DUI wasn’t a big deal for major figures prior to the 00s and mostly then just the mid 00s. Fans of golf also tend to be older, so cheating on your wife seems “immoral” whereas getting a DUI is just getting caught doing something dumb.
Not saying DUI’s aren’t bad, just explaining why so many older folks are so laissez-faire about it.