December closed with a remarkable flurry of headline sports stories. It was not only one for the memory bank, but it may have been the most fitting way to end the decade known as the Naughty Aughties. What seemed like an awkward tag at the beginning of the new century has become a most appropriate signature phrase.

The first shock was the fall from grace of the poster boy for clean living and family values. Tiger Woods instantly went from the slickest brand in the American pantheon of commerce to the butt of jokes and ridicule.

IMG, the International Management Group, had persuaded nearly all major sport corporate sponsors that Woods was their man: the perfect golfer with the perfect image, the quintessential sportsman. Everybody loved Tiger, admired Tiger, wanted to be like Tiger.

We all got on board, even though we should have known better. America still wants its sports heroes cut from the Frank Merriwell at Yale mode, and Tiger Woods of Stanford looked like one of them.

Instead, Tiger is the perfect hollow man, lacking a center and lost without a compass — except for the one on his yacht that has become his shelter from the firestorm.

Typical in cases like this, the media that touted the Tiger Brand as the genuine article turned with fury and self-righteousness on its former model of perfection. Even more amusing is how quickly the corporate world cut its ties to the feline philanderer.

Accenture, one of the major corporations that identified its brand with his brand, quickly began removing all images of Woods from company advertisements. Tag Hauer, the Swiss luxury watchmaker, announced it would scale down its association with Woods. Procter and Gamble lowered their Tiger profile by withdrawing its Gillette ads featuring Woods. Then AT&T pulled the plug on its Woods connection.

Only Nike has remained completely faithful, with Phil Knight saying that this whole thing was but a minor blip. There have been no TV commercials featuring Woods on television since late November. Tiger Woods has vanished from public view and from the branded world in which we live. It is doubtful, however, that sex has disappeared from the PGA tour or other sporting venues.

Sex and sport are inextricably linked. Faux sex surrounds all our sporting events, where young women called “cheerleaders” and “dancers” decorate the landscape with wiggles, jiggles and giggles passing as a cross between glamorous role models and purveyors of sexual titillation. Then there’s the real sex, as women make themselves available to athletes, and star athletes take it as a perk of the position.

The Tennessee Hostess Scandal is an adjunct to the Tiger Woods affair. Sending young women from the University of Tennessee out to a high school football game on a recruiting trip is about as bad as it gets. The stories of attractive young women traveling hundreds of miles to see and be seen with naïve high school athletes who are targets on the football recruiting board point to issues of sexual access and the insane pressures surrounding intercollegiate athletics.

Such insanity was on display in Florida recently as Urban Meyer, head football coach and minor deity, announced his retirement from coaching, citing his health. An outpouring of grief and angst flowed throughout Gatorland. Then Meyer reversed his decision. He will now take a leave of absence until he gets control of his world. This is comparable to most of us giving up breathing until we could live without having to do it constantly.

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