The Tiger Woods-Panama Connection
By David Young
What do Tiger Woods and Panama have in common? If you guessed golf, you sliced on the first tee.
In a country where some 54 percent of our citizens are at, or below the poverty level, golf is not an option.
Infidelity would be a good second guess, with married men through all ranks of society more or less openly flaunting their mistresses, and boasting about how they take care of the offspring of their affairs … it’s part of the macho image.
Now that brings us a little closer. Woods is reported to have finally moved back home with his wife Elin Nordegren and has hired Ari Fleischer, a former advisor to former president George W Bush, to help plot his return to the pro golf circuit.
Panama has hired Terry Holt, another member of the Bush team to help improve our image around the world. He will be receiving a monthly stipend of “approximately” $15,000 a month. As the approximate pay packets of our elected deputies include other small benefits like a gas allowance for their SUVs and other bonuses like the right to import cars duty free, one can assume that the monthly invoice will be higher, rather than lower than $15,000.
One wonders what spin he will be able to put on the “one murder every 12 hours” statistic, in a country with a little over three million people. Maybe he can fall back on the “safest country in the region” saw.
Explaining warnings like “don’t walk around with your Blackberry in your hand” in case you are attacked, will be another challenge.
“It’s cheaper with coima” might be a good slogan to explain the driving habits of some of our public servants and transit drivers.
Holt has informed U.S. authorities, that his contract with Panama will cover services as a publicist solely, not as a strategist. So he won’t have to worry about contributing solutions to problems, only to explaining them in a user friendly way?
In proposals written by some of the world’s biggest public relations agencies “strategy” is usually a major heading. That has included paying off newspapers in Iraq to publish favorable press releases,(Those Blackwater guys who killed 17 unarmed civilians were blinded by the sun), or spreading disinformation like the Iraq army pulling the plugs on incubators in a maternity hospital in Kuwait, or flying fake victims to New York to give their stories first hand.
THE TIGER RETURNS
Meanwhile back to Tiger, According to the New York Post, he could be back in action (on the golf course that is) as soon as the Arnold Palmer Invitational, which starts on March 25 at Bay Hill in Orlando, Florida. The Post claims Palmer himself has told friends that Woods is definitely playing Bay Hill, while the tournament organisers are preparing for a larger-than-usual media crowd.
Others say Woods could be back even earlier, playing the Tavistock Cup on March 22 at Isleworth, his home course.
In the meantime, the golfer and his wife have to live down a shock schmuck Howard Stern bikini contest, in which three of Wood’s former mistresses told all in competing for prizes which included $75,000 from an agency devoted to finding partners for married men. Some former mistresses, including porn actresses Holly Sampson and Joslyn James, refused to take part.
