This Is News?

I get my golf news headlines through a collection of RSS feeds in Google Reader and today, there were two dozen stories repeating the announcement that Tiger’s holding a news conference at Augusta on April 5.

Tiger hasn’t announced or done anything newsworthy. Augusta National has simply released a calendar scheduling him for a 2 pm news conference on the Monday before the Masters. He’s the only one scheduled for that day.

So what we have is an announcement of a press event in which Tiger might—just might—say something newsworthy. The jury’s still out on that one, though. Tiger’s first post-disaster press conference, and his five minute television interviews this past weekend were notable mostly for being so tightly staged and scripted.

No news there. Might be later. But not now.

Actually, if there is any news, it’s that Tiger’s PR team has done it again. Whether they intended to or not, on the eve of Arnold Palmer’s tournament, Team Tiger has seized the golf stage for their own show. I realize that the announcement actually was made by the Green Jackets of Augusta National, but somebody at IMG had to have had the sense to see that this was bad timing—especially given the brouhaha over the timing of his previous two media events.

Of the 54 items in my Google Reader news feeds, 27 were related to Tiger’s press conference. Seventeen were on Palmer’s tournament—and four of those were on Palmer’s reaction to Tiger’s troubles,  and the lack of Tiger at Bay Hill. That’s not to mention the fact that every Golf Blogger on the planet (myself included) has something to say about the announcement.

I think his comeback is going to continue to be handled very poorly.

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