Tiger Woods

Ethics Hero: P.G.A. Golfer Brian Davis

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I don’t follow golf, but if this sort of thing happens very often, I may have to become a fan…in spite of Tiger Woods.

P.G.A. tour veteran Brian Davis was facing Jim Furyk in a playoff at the Verizon Heritage, and trying to finally win a P.G.A. event. His approach shot to the first hole in the playoff bounced off the green and landed in the rough. When Davis attempted to knock the ball back up to the green, his club barely swiped a weed on his backswing. The rules of tournament golf decree that touching anything lying around the ball during a player’s backswing violates  the prohibition against moving loose obstacles or impediments to a shot. The required penalty: two strokes, enough to guarantee that David would lose the play-off and his best, maybe only, chance for PGA glory, not to mention a seven figure prize.

Davis may have been the only one to notice the infraction, but golf is a game that calls for self-reporting. That’s what he did: he called the violation on himself, and made himself a loser. Continue reading →

Oprah and the Icons: the Ethics of Lying to Make a Difference

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized, rip-the-mask-off-the-icon bio is out, and now Oprah Winfrey must weather the inevitable de-construction of some of her meticulously self-created image. Oprah is pretty much untouchable now; I was a guest at her “O” Magazine Expo last Fall in Kansas City, and it was clear that her status with he legion of followers is somewhere between a guru and a goddess. There aren’t many revelations, short of proving that she is secretly Dick Cheney in an elaborate disguise, that could do much to reduce her cultural influence or undo her popularity.

Still, it used to be that heroes, celebrities and cultural icons could count on the whole truth about their personal and career embellishments to surface only late in life, or more often, long after death. Thus it has been a standard tool of rising figures in America to carefully craft an inspiring story and an appealing persona that excite and engage the public, and the truth has had little to do with it. It’s worked, too. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Unethical Ethics Teachers

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

An essay by lawyers Joel Cohen and Katherine A. Helm begins with this story:

“Noted ethics philosopher and Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell once was questioned by the Harvard Board of Governors about having an extramarital affair with a student. When faced with the hypocrisy of being an ethics professor engaged in immoral conduct, Russell argued his private affairs had nothing to do with his professional duties. “But you are a Professor of Ethics!” maintained one of the board members. “I was [also] a Professor of Geometry at Cambridge,” Russell rejoined, but “they never asked me why I was not a triangle.”‘

The authors use the anecdote to explore the issue of whether proven ethics miscreants like Eliot Spitzer, Rod Blagojevich and disbarred class action lawyer William Lerach ought to be lecturing, speaking, or otherwise being listened to in regard to their opinions and advice on ethics. After all, acting teachers are often indifferent actors, and the best baseball managers weren’t much as players. Why should ethics be any different?  Continue reading →

Isolating Corey Haim: Child Star Deceit and Disinformation in the Media

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It is clear that the news media, and especially the entertainment and pop culture media, don’t want to lose their cuddly child performers. Thus when a former kid star like Corey Haim perishes at a young age, the victim of a dysfunctional childhood turned fatal by addictions to fame and drugs, the sad story is usually told as a cautionary tale about how one young actor’s early promise and talent turned to dust and destruction because of his own weaknesses and missteps. A responsible media would use such events to examine the larger, serious, and mostly ignored problem of child abuse and exploitation in the entertainment business, and its terrible toll of casualties.The media is not responsible on this topic, however, and in the case of Haim, seemed to go out of its way to falsely represent his fate as the exception, rather than the rule. Continue reading →

“It’s Just Sex”? No, It’s Betrayal

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

There isn’t much good that can come out of the sordid infidelity Trifecta of John Edwards, Tiger Woods, and Jesse James, but maybe there will be this: Perhaps after the public has observed and measured all the pain and suffering the outrageous conduct of these three men has inflicted on innocent third parties, especially those who depended on them and trusted them, it will not be so quick to accept the facile argument, perfected during Bill Clinton’s ordeals, that adultery is “just sex.”

The latest flagrant celebrity dog, Jesse James, is an especially powerful case for leaving the Clinton Excuse with Clinton. He had a wife who clearly adored him, the late-marrying Sandra Bullock, who touchingly paid a tribute to her supposedly devoted husband in one of her several Best Actress acceptance speeches this year by saying that she knew he “had her back.” Now tattoo models and strippers are coming out of the woodwork to say they had affairs with the chopper-maker, and the revelations may end up sending his six-year old daughter back to her porn star mother, though James and Bullock had been awarded custody.

Destroy a family, devastate the woman who loves you, uproot your child. But hey, it’s only sex. Continue reading →

Nancy Pelosi and Forced Virtue

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I’m sure my friend and colleague Bob Stone will forgive my picking on a casual phrase he used in a comment on the previous post, for it is the inspiration for this one, and it involves the important issue of forced virtue.

Bob alluded to Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally doing “the right thing” when, as reported in the morning media, she told House Ways and Means Committee Chair Charles Rangel that he had to resign his post because of multiple ethics violations. Pelosi, we now know, had avoided this for as long as possible, first ignoring Rangel’s actions, then making the dodge that the Ethics Committee first had to make its ruling (Rangel’s egregious violations have never been in doubt), then suggesting that the violations were not significant (knowing that among them was a failure to pay taxes on $75,000 of income as well as acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars of unreported—that is, hidden—income, all on the part of the reigning chair of the committee that oversees tax legislation) because the country wasn’t “jeopardized” by them. But now the press is calling for Rangel’s head, the Republicans are making accusations that seem, for once, reasonable, and other Democratic House members have joined the chorus demanding that Charlie must go. And this is all occurring as Pelosi is trying to martial her House majority as she attempts to ram the latest health care reform package past the nation’s gag reflex.

In short, Pelosi isn’t really doing the right thing. She’s doing the only thing. Continue reading →

Tiger Woods’ Mother in the Ethics Rough

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“You know what? I’m so proud to be his mother. Period. This thing, it teaches him, just like golf. When he changes a swing… he wants to get better… He will start getting better… it’s just like that. Golf is just like life, when you make a mistake, you learn from your mistake and move on stronger. That’s the way he is. As a human being everyone has faults, makes mistakes and sins. We all do. But, we move on when we make a mistake and learn from it. I am upset the way media treated him like he’s a criminal…he didn’t kill anybody, he didn’t do anything illegal… They’ve being carrying on from thanksgiving until now, that’s not right! People don’t understand that Tiger has a very good heart and soul. Sometimes I think there is a complete double standard… He tried to improve himself. The tabloids and newspapers just killed him, held him back.. To me it looked like a double standard…When you make a mistake you learn from it and move on, that’s the way life is, that’s a human being. We’re not God, and he never claimed he was God. If anyone tells me to condemn him, I say look at yourself first.. .. I would … look in their eyes and tell them you’re not God!  This thing is a family matter… It’s not easy to be him. … (People) go to work 8 to 5 and go home to have a life with the family. Tiger can’t do that.”

—————Katilda Woods, Tiger’s mother, in remarks to the press following Woods’ statement and apology today, his first public appearance since a series of revelations about his multiple affairs.

Where to begin? I’m glad Mrs. Woods is proud of her son. That’s what mothers are for, in times like these. If only she had stopped there, before she plunged deep into the ethics rough. For example, I think Tiger’s been swinging enough, don’t you?

But Mrs. Woods decided to promote three of my least favorite rationalizations for terrible conduct, and then added one I had neglected.  Now that she mentions it, however, I hate that one too. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: England World Cup Team Coach Fabio Capello

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Just when I find myself staring disconsolately at the vast expanse of snow, thinking about how futile it is to try to sweep back the ethical apathy and self-serving tolerance for bad conduct that is burying our values as a blizzard buries a garden, along comes Fabio Capello, from the unlikely world of soccer, to give me hope.

Capello gets it. Mere days from his team’s embarking on the annual World Cup quest, he sacked his star Defender, John Terry, as team captain. Continue reading →

Disbar John Edwards

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The last shoe dropped in the sordid John Edwards tale, with his admission that he was indeed the father of his mistress’s infant daughter, as many suspected. This comes months after he emphatically and repeatedly denied this fact to the media, in the course of admitting that he indeed did have an affair with the child’s mother, Rielle Hunter, after months of denying that. His efforts at covering up all of this ultimately incorporated his terminally ill wife, his friend and supporter Fred Baron, who paid his mistress to make herself scarce, and his aide Andrew Young, who was induced to publicly claim that he, not Edwards, was the father of baby Quinn. All of the deception initiated by Edwards took place while he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, on a platform of moral obligation and justice. Continue reading →

Was Brit Hume Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking about Brit Hume’s controversial remarks on Fox News about Tiger Woods for two weeks now, trying to identify what was wrong with them. Not whether I agreed with them, or whether I would have said something similar myself, but what was wrong with them: did his comments suggesting a Christian path for the troubled golfer constitute a breach of professional ethics, or ethics generally? Continue reading →