Tiger Woods is a bad guy, right? He lied and cheated ... and cheated ... and cheated. At least on his wife, who is reportedly talking about filing for divorce. As far as we know, he didn't cheat in golf, but of course that shouldn't win him any trophies.
Even hardcore fans seem resigned to admit now that the decade's best athlete is a bad guy who plays great golf. End of story.
But wait. It gets a bit more difficult to demonize the man when you hear that his charitable organization, the Tiger Woods Foundation, gives away over $2 million a year for tutoring and other programs dedicated to empowering youth. Tens of thousands of children around the country have been aided by the foundation's scholarship, tutoring and character development programs.
Now that he's embroiled in scandal, though, won't all of Tiger Woods' charity get washed away into the maw of history like so many canceled endorsement deals? He announced in December that he will be taking a hiatus not only from playing golf, but also from managing his foundation. Will he lose the goodwill of the community he serves or the support of the partners who help him? The foundation staff, despite Tonic's attempts to contact them, kept mum.
Greg Johnson, Executive Director of the Sports Philanthropy Project, a nonprofit that works to make the power of sports and the sports industry benefit communities, says that philanthropy done well makes its own reputation above and beyond a foundation's founder or spokesman, though the kind of publicity Woods has garnered certainly doesn't help.
"I suggest to philanthropies that they don't use athletes as their brand name and bank their whole organization around one athlete's reality, because we're all human beings," said Johnson.
Human beings, as we know, are bad. And also good. And sometimes both. Well, usually both. Like all of us in our own ways, Tiger Woods is a bad guy but also a good guy. It just so happens that his badness and his goodness are extreme and have been hashed out on an international stage in front of millions of onlookers. The rest of us can keep our little badnesses and our little goodnesses inside our four walls, doing much less damage (one hopes) but also much less benefit.
Benefit is the key; what matters more than the (mis)behavior of the main benefactor of a foundation is the consistent, quality work the foundation is doing to help people in its community.
"I think more or less if you can show the integrity of what you do in the community over time to your partners, they will sustain that work of its own accord," Johnson said. "But I guess you've got to get beyond the glitter -- all that glitters is not gold -- and if you get beyond that and see what the real gold is, it can be perpetuated."
The Tiger Woods Foundation has plenty of gold to offer. It supports a number of scholarship programs and sponsors a National Junior Golf Team. The Tiger Woods Learning Center, a 35,000-square-foot, 14-acre education facility in Orange County, Calif., has served over 20,000 students and families with an after-school curriculum focused on career planning.
And Tiger's Action Plan, a nationwide character development program, supports kids in identifying and reaching long-term goals and engaging in community service.
Woods' charitable giving trumps that of the Dan Marino Foundation (which disburses around $1.7 million annually), Derek Jeter's Turn 2 Foundation (around $1 million), the Mia Hamm Foundation (around $200,000), the Roger Clemens Foundation (more than $150,000) and Kristi Yamaguchi's Always Dream Foundation (around $57,000), to name just a few of the many pro-athlete-funded philanthropies.
In fact, few other athletes are in Woods' league when it comes to generosity, the most notable being cyclist Lance Armstrong, whose Lance Armstrong Foundation donates more than $21 million annually to cancer research. Other athletes in big-league philanthropy are tennis great Andre Agassi, whose Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation gives over $4 million to assistance for at-risk boys and girls every year, and the late baseball player Cal Ripken, Sr., whose Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation spends around $2 million yearly to offer baseball and softball camps to disadvantaged youth.
Beyond the Glitz
Agassi's life might, in fact, offer a guide with which to understand the clash of goodness and badness we see in Woods. The retired winner of eight Grand Slams and an Olympic gold medal recently came out with an autobiography, Open, that reveals his hatred for the sport in which he excelled and his addiction to methamphetamines during parts of his career.
Johnson believes that the relative youth, newness to great wealth and intense pressure faced by these high-level athletes make it difficult for them to balance all the parts of their lives, including family demands and philanthropy. Elite athletes, he told me, "have been plying their trade and perfecting their craft as athletes as opposed to developing themselves in other ways."
Many athletes are not fully prepared for what they're getting into when they decide to start giving seriously. It's not nearly as easy as you'd think to give away money. Philanthropy, said Johnson, "is a difficult craft," a full-time job. It takes time to learn the ins and outs of prioritization and administration, and then there's the matter of becoming established and issue-focused enough to have people take you seriously.
"You need to build up a certain caché that will go beyond your glitz," said Johnson. That can be particularly difficult for athletes whose giving is more about burnishing their images than about benefiting the community.
The big marketing firms managing pros' endorsements, Johnson noted, often instruct their clients to use philanthropy as an image-booster, a prospect that can spur the creation of slapdash philanthropic ventures or make legitimate charities vulnerable to negative publicity like that garnered by Woods.
While Johnson was silent about the extent to which Woods has been using his philanthropic activities to boost his image, as well as about the extent of the damage to his charity caused by his transgressions, he did say that the golfer's giving is well placed and effective.
"I hope he'll be able to keep up his philanthropy," he said. "He does very good philanthropic work."
In short: Woods may be a bad guy, but he sure is a good one, too.