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March 5, 2008 |
Superiority is complex - Trio's dominance could annoy fans in the long term
CARLOS MONARREZ
Maybe it's all Tom Brady's fault.
The pretty-boy quarterback and his New England Patriots set the sports world on fire with thoughts of a perfect NFL season. The Pats seemed to promise 19-0 all season before all that unraveled in the last few minutes of Super Bowl XLII.
If Brady and the Patriots accomplished one thing, it's that they got sports fans thinking about domination and perfection as a realistic pursuit.
If Brady and the Patriots accomplished one thing, it's that they got sports fans thinking about domination and perfection as a realistic pursuit.
Enter Tiger Woods. And Lorena Ochoa. And maybe even Scott Hoch. They're poised as the dominant figures of their respective golf tours.
Tiger has won five straight tournaments worldwide. Ochoa has won six of her past 10 events, and she made a joke of her peers with an 11-shot victory in her LPGA season debut at Singapore. Even Hoch is going for his third straight win this week on the Champions Tour.
Is this what you want to see? Dominance without equal?
Greg Wilson, who specializes in marketing and crisis counseling as a senior vice president with Levick Strategic Communications in Washington, said dominance sometimes comes at a price.
"You can look at it as a crisis of success: Be careful what you wish for," Wilson said Tuesday in a phone interview. "If we're talking about Tiger Woods, there's no question in my mind that he's raised the profile of golf, but he has as many people who love him as hate him. At some point, there's going to be a backlash against the PGA for that.
"But at the end of the day, it's kind of the Howard Stern effect, as many people tune in each week to see if Tiger Woods is going to win, and a number of people tune in to see if he's going to lose."
Anecdotally speaking, I haven't come across too many Tiger haters. Judging from correspondence I receive, I'd say the numbers are 4-to-1 in favor of making Tiger's birthday a national holiday.
But even if you love Tiger, there's still the notion of having too much of a good thing.
"There's always a little bit of a deficit when somebody takes the game to the next level," Wilson said. "Tiger's currently doing that right now. The New England Patriots did that in the NFL this season.
"Everybody was jumping on the New England Patriot bandwagon for a while. If you look at it, it's kind of like a math curve. They were increasing in popularity because they're winning, but all of a sudden, those son of a guns are winning too much and people started jumping off the bandwagon."
There was plenty more that fueled the backlash against the Patriots. Since golfers don't represent cities or regions, Woods, Ochoa and Hoch aren't as likely to experience the same enmity as they assert their dominance and pursue perfection. After all, who doesn't like a good role model?
"I think we all like the concept of superheroes," Wilson said. "I grew up watching Superman cartoons and everything else, and I was always fascinated with the idea that there was somebody with a red cape that could do things that nobody else could do."
Say, for instance, beat the Patriots?
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