Tiger and the taxpayer
Just as Tigermania was taking hold in Melbourne last November, a Sydney-based British reporter was dispatched to the city by the American tabloid, the National Enquirer, and told to look out for an attractive women wearing knee-length boots and a distinctive belt. She was reportedly "stalking" the world's number one golfer.
Sure enough, the reporter spotted a woman meeting that description checking into Tiger's hotel, the Crown Towers, and digital photographs were taken to record the moment. For the National Enquirer, the snapshots were a smoking gun, since the woman was not a "stalker" at all but one of Tiger's alleged mistresses - the first to be "outed" in the scandal which pummelled his reputation, threatened his career and jeopardised his marriage.
The irony is that during his stay in Melbourne, his first trip to Australia in over a decade, Tiger had presented himself as a model professional. Lured to Victoria with the sweetener of about $A1.5m ($1.35m: £900,000) in taxpayer's money, he happily promoted Melbourne's sandbelt golf courses. Then he went on to win the Australian Masters' tournament, proudly donning the winner's yellow jacket at its end. It proved to be his last tournament before his self-enforced break from the game.
Now Victorians are being asked to consider whether taxpayer's money should be spent on hosting Tiger again.
It is an election year in the state, and the question has been raised by Peter Ryan, the leader of the Victoria Nationals and the deputy opposition leader. It follows news that the Labor state government is considering offering Tiger public money to come back.
"I think that there is a reticence in community about doing that and I think the premier should hasten slowly," Peter Ryan told the last week. "I mean like it or not, people who fulfill a role such as that which Tiger Woods does are role models. They mightn't choose to be so but they are. I think it can very fairly be said that when he was in Australia last year, he conducted himself in the public eye accordingly."
"I think there was universal acclaim for the way in which he presented himself. We now know of course, that other things were occurring in different areas of the man's life and I think therefore that people have a sense of being let down."
On economic grounds alone, financing Tiger's return seems like a no-brainer. The golfer turned out to be a one-man stimulus package during his last trip, and the state government calculated that he had injected more than $A34 million into the Victoria economy. But this is being posed now as a moral question.
The Labor state government has accused Mr Ryan of being a moral policeman. Others have noted that his comments tap into a puritanical streak which has long been evident in Australia in general and Victoria in particular - a censorious impulse which Australians called wowserism.
Certainly, the debate over whether Tiger's off-course behaviour should disqualify him from receiving taxpayer's money take us into curious territory, and raises all sorts of questions about moral equivalence.
Should the same rule be applied to other visiting sports stars? And to what extent? The upcoming Australian grand prix takes place in Melbourne at the end of March, at huge expense to the taxpayers of Victoria. Should the visiting drivers be scrutinised for wrong-doing, and the funding be conditional?
Should it be applied to foreign dignitaries, whose visits often come with a huge security bill?
And what of home-grown sports stars, who often receive public subsidies indirectly?
Or is this simply an instance of wowserism gone mad?
Tiger has recently been dropped by Gatorade, AT&T and Accenture. Should the taxpayers of Victoria follow suit?
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