A recent issue of Forbes features a full-page ad for the consulting firm Accenture with Tiger Woods striding through tall grass. The tagline reads, “The road to high performance isn’t always paved.” To which the obvious rejoinder these days is “Sometimes it runs straight into a fire hydrant.” Jokes about Woods’s current woes come easy, but the story is not trivial—at least, not in terms of money. Woods has been the best-paid athlete in the world for almost a decade, and much of that income is from endorsements; ESPN once estimated that his lifetime earnings could total as much as six billion dollars. When the scandal erupted, journalists and brand-marketing experts alike insisted that it would have little impact on Woods’s advertising appeal, and his sponsors—including Nike, Gillette, and Gatorade—quickly affirmed their support for him. But, from the start, this attitude seemed like wishful thinking. The problem isn’t a question of morals, exactly; it’s that a huge gap has opened up between Woods’s advertising persona and his public image. With every new revelation, it seems that the biggest career in sports is being reshaped before our eyes.

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

The fact that a golfer’s marital troubles might affect the bottom line of a multinational is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although athletes have been endorsing products for more than a century—beginning, by most accounts, in 1905, when Honus Wagner put his name on Louisville Slugger bats—the importance of endorsements to the sports economy really dates back to the sixties, when Arnold Palmer and his agent, Mark McCormack, effectively invented the athlete as brand, with Palmer the quintessential Everyman fronting for companies like Pennzoil, Hertz, and Sears. In the eighties, Michael Jordan took the endorsement game to a new level, perfecting the iconic association of athlete and individual product with the Air Jordan line, while his off-the-court bonhomie made him an ideal spokesman for brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Hanes. Woods, in turn, has broken new ground by becoming the face of Accenture, a company whose customers are corporations rather than ordinary consumers. Like his predecessors, he has endorsed sports products and consumer goods. But he has also become a kind of ubiquitous symbol of the business world.

There is a logic to this. Unlike Palmer or Jordan, Woods never seemed warm or even especially personable. Instead, he seemed resolutely businesslike. Woods’s appeal was based, ultimately, not on his physical abilities but on his mental toughness, his extraordinary capacity for focus and discipline. He was the man who always made the key putt, who never cracked under pressure. That’s why Gatorade, introducing a new drink with his face on the label, called the drink Tiger Focus. And it’s why the most powerful Nike ad about him is the one in which his father, in a voice-over, says, “I’d say, ‘Tiger, I promise you that you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life. And he hasn’t . . . and he never will.’ ”

In other words, Woods has been presented as the embodiment of bourgeois virtues: dedication, hard work, single-mindedness. Indeed, when, in 2008, Woods won the U.S. Open while essentially playing on one leg, the Times’ David Brooks devoted a column to his extraordinary ability to block out distraction and focus on the matter at hand, dubbing him “the exemplar of mental discipline” for our time. For millions of people—many of them, to be sure, affluent middle-aged white guys—Woods embodied an approach not just to golf but to life. Myriad studies show that celebrity endorsements are most successful when there is a tight fit between the pitchman’s identity and the product he’s pitching. Woods was the rare athlete whose identity seemed to fit not just with golf clubs or sports drinks but with consulting firms.

The current scandal has disrupted, if not shattered, this image of perfect control. Scandals that aren’t out of tune with a celebrity’s image are often surprisingly easy to bounce back from: after images of Kate Moss snorting coke surfaced, her bookings fell, but, over time, they went up. Revelations that Michael Jordan had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling barely dented his appeal, since the story reinforced the image of him as a fierce competitor. But scandals that conflict with a person’s public image can wreak havoc. And it’s hard to think of a scandal that’s more discordant with an image of focus and discipline than this one. Woods’s alleged cavorting with Vegas waitresses and celebrity groupies, his woeful “sexts” and voice mails, his driving his S.U.V. into a tree: all these things make him look weak and discombobulated. Some have speculated, optimistically, that this may humanize the Tiger. But that’s exactly the problem: what was so amazing about Woods was precisely that he wasn’t like the rest of us—that he wasn’t weak or distracted.

Woods is too big a name for his sponsors to simply abandon him, even though Gatorade has discontinued its Tiger line (for other reasons, it says). But the scandal may well narrow his appeal, turning him from someone whose virtues seemed relevant to many fields of work into someone whose virtues apply mainly to golf. And while comebacks may be an American tradition, it’s not clear that you can ever get all the way back: for instance, Kobe Bryant’s endorsement income today is much smaller than his on-court performance would lead you to expect. If Woods returns in April and wins the Masters, it will make for an extraordinary story. Still, it seems unlikely that any company will be advising us to “Be a Tiger” anytime soon. ♦