Accenture put all of its marketing eggs into Tiger Wood's basket, and now the most sainted figure in the world of professional sports has destroyed, perhaps forever, the idea of sainted figures in professional sports.
I have to think back to recall if any of the sports heroes of mine actually ever finally screwed the pooch. For some reason I think they all did, except for those who are dead. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Muhammad Ali? (Hmm, muslims) Steve Garvey? Thurman Munson? Gene Washington? Sugar Ray Leonard?
None of it is greatness. There is too much that we expect from sports as a consequence of too many of us having too much disposable income. So we shouldn't be so surprised that we have disposable heroes. What is golf, baseball, boxing? They are bourgeois entertainments, and it stands to reason that simply because millions of people pay a bit of attention and money that their creations should be lasting. Yankee stadium isn't the house that Ruth built, it is the house that the fans of Ruth built. Fan is short for fanatic. Why should we be surprised that the realization of fanatic dreams are ultimately dysfunctional?
So the world of golf finds itself shorn of its glamor and questioning its future. In the end it was all about Tiger Woods, not the game. The game? A splendid waste of time and space, if not energy. An exercise in frustration with few rivals in any organized activity. A tedious ritual of tournaments and jackets that could only be made exciting by someone possessed of a perfect combination of skill, intrigue and personality. Golf was born for the thing that Tiger Woods became and he wore it out. The story of golf one month ago was "How long is it going to take for us to declare Tiger Woods the greatest in history?" A whole quarter of its audience cared little more than to be a part of that history in the making. By watching.
And now they don't watch.
That only goes to prove that the power of celebrity is a significant part of American life. We might hope that 25% is as much as it goes but it might be more. The number of significant figures any average Joe might know in any field of public endeavor almost never exceeds a busload. And thus the entire consciousness of average Americans are almost never more than a car bomb away from total destruction. If you managed to got Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh in one plunging elevator of doom, half of America would have nothing to talk about.
It is that precariousness of our society that weakens it so. So much is so leveraged on singular winning expressions. I listened yesterday to a financial analyst talk about the tender offer for XTO's acquisition, and then he spoke of how it might happen again with "the Anadarkos, Devons and Chesapeakes of the world". It immediately became evident that he had exhausted that entire tier of the energy business. There aren't "Anadarkos, Devons and Chesapeakes of the world", that essentially is the world. We may as well be talking about the Carters, Clintons, Bushes and Obamas of the world. The fortunes of the many are determined by the powers of the few, or of the one. This is unnatural. There is nothing too big to fail - anyone with two eyes can see that. Even a one-eyed man can see that which is the point of having two.
There are several implications of this I should belabor for the moment. One is that this is an insight of Taleb. Two is that it augurs for open sourcing. Three that more people need to up their knowledge and skills so that the old recipe doesn't die with the old man. Four is that robustness is a component of military thinking in which you overspend in consideration of the worst case scenario which is catastrophic failure.
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