While the world’s greatest golfer was caught in the rough, we were scarfing down every tidbit we could find about Tiger Woods’ car crash, his “transgressions” and the growing legion of women who claim to be part of Tiger’s harem.
All this time we thought Woods was obsessed only with his game. But according to an interview in US Weekly with reported mistress Jaimee Grubbs, he’s also all about the Benjamins. Despite being the world’s first billionaire golfer, Tiger allegedly told his rumored paramour that “his life is overwhelming [and] he needed the endorsements and busy schedule because he wasn’t as financially stable as he wanted to be.” That explains all those stories about Tiger skimping on tips. Elsewhere, US Weekly offers a breakdown of Tiger’s puzzling crash into a fire hydrant outside his Florida mansion.
Talk about bad timing! “Ten Tips Obama Can Take From Tiger” declares Golf Digestfrom its January cover, featuring Tiger posing as the president’s caddy. Known for its fawning Tiger coverage, the magazine completed its cover in mid-November, well before the scandal broke. But the irony attached to the issue and the laughs you can get by reading the Tiger article against the backdrop of the scandal might be reasons enough to pick up this issue. Though the recession has taken its toll on golfing, fans may chuckle when they read Joe Queenan’s article about the golfer and the president. Case in point: “Tiger never does anything that would make him look ridiculous.” Despite that embarrassment, Golf Digest scored a rare 5 percent jump in ads for bleak January.
Star‘s coverage of Woods is merely a summarization of the scandalous events of the last week. Its cover instead focuses on a nebulous story about the gaps forming between super-couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, centering on a violent fight that sounds more like a scene out of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” complete with Jolie throwing a chair across the room and narrowly missing her poor, defenseless mate.
People magazine’s coverage breaks no new ground on what’s turning out to be the scandal of the year. The Woods fiasco copped the requisite spot on the publication’s cover but deets about the star’s blond ambitions are few and far between. Elsewhere, Meredith Baxter’s coming-out-of-the-closet revelation appearing in People takes a backseat to Tiger. Still, the magazine does serve up info on the former “Family Ties” mom’s admission that at 62, and after three failed heterosexual marriages, she’s determined she’s a lesbian.
New York magazine scores at least one hit among multiple covers for its package of why the current decade was the pits, entitled: “The World Did Not End — But Pretty Much Everything Else Did.” Its stark version for subscriber copies was arguably the best of several designs that for the most part were the pits, like the decade. Regardless, inside stories on the “oh-oh” decade are splendid.
The New Yorker offers a dose of relief from the health-care reform headache, with an analysis saying the plan’s lack of focus is probably a good thing. The cover article by Atul Gawande, a physician and Harvard Medical School professor, argues that holding down spiraling costs isn’t the issue, and never could be controlled by legislation. He proposes modeling reforms on a solution used a century ago to tame runaway agriculture costs: trial-and-error pilot projects, ever changing, with producers in the loop. “You can have transformation without a master plan, without knowing all the answers up front,” he writes. The magazine also delves into why Somalia is the world’s most failed state, and predicts Roman Polansky will be coming to California in what is sure to be the global media circus of 2010: the proceedings surrounding his 33-year-old sex suit.
Time prefers to take a serious look at the world, using its cover to highlight President Obama’s trip to West Point to announce his plans for the troop surge in Afghanistan. The Tiger scandal was buried in the back of the issue in a wrap-up on how being a celebrity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Time also ramps up the negative — explaining how health-care reform is flopping, and why some climate-change solutions aren’t likely to work, either.
Newsweek uses the Afghan troop surge — the White House’s first head-on collision between realism and idealism — to spin its cover package on “The Post-Imperial President,” a tidy effort to describe his first year in office. On the economic front, the magazine says the next sovereign debt crisis like Dubai’s could easily erupt among Europe’s peripheral economies such as Bulgaria, Hungary and the Baltic states.