As my wife less charitably noted, the event seemed overly prepared, handled, and rehearsed. Looking up at the camera at just the right time appeared more the product of professional coaching than a genuine connection with his audience. The gratuitous and elaborate references to his various charities and foundations was overkill. But in the end, did any of this take away from what I believe Tiger is truly feeling? No, not really.

To be kind, perhaps we are just so used to seeing Tiger in a golf shirt, golf hat, relaxed and unscripted, that it’s difficult for us to adapt to a different context.

If Tiger owed us an apology, and perhaps he did, then we at least owe Tiger the right to deliver that apology in whatever manner he is comfortable. That is Tiger’s right as much as it is our right to have our own individual reactions to what Tiger had to say. For my part as a fan and as a semi-competitive and avid golfer, Tiger needn’t apologize further. At least not to me.

Some of the negative commentary following Tiger’s statement focuses on the fact we are no further ahead in knowing when Tiger may return to competitive golf. What irks me is this criticism comes from the very same people, who if Tiger had used the occasion to also announce his return to Augusta in a mere 7 weeks, would have dismissed Tiger’s apology as disingenuous and merely as a pretence for announcing his return to golf. Tiger was damned either way.

I must admit that in the final few minutes before Tiger spoke, perhaps once I caught a glimpse of the somber room full of somber looking people, I suddenly became very concerned that Tiger might announce he would not play in this year’s Masters or perhaps not at all this year, or ever again. How selfish of me? Here is a guy that’s obviously going through hell, even if it’s mostly self-inflicted, and what I seemed to care most about was whether or not Tiger was going to entertain me by putting a small round ball in a slightly larger round hole.

For those of you who think that’s all I, and I suspect others, were worried about, you can stop reading now.

Tiger’s words, even if borrowed, ring very true; “it’s not what we achieve, it’s what we overcome that matters.’ Perhaps then our zeal for wanting to see Tiger back sooner rather than later says more about our desire for early signs that Tiger is successfully overcoming his daemons than it is about watching the world’s number 1 golfer play golf.

Tiger may not defeat his daemons and his marriage may yet fail. But not everyone has, or should have, the morbid mentality of a  TMZ or the National Enquirer. There is a vast difference between showing an appropriate amount of interest in Tiger’s unfortunate circumstances versus wanting, hoping, and in some cases having at least an indirect hand in causing someone fall just to sell more eyeballs.

There appears to be no limit to what Tiger can be criticize for, including Ernie Els and others who think the timing of Tiger’s statement during the Accenture match play championship is “selfish.”  I truly did not see what benefit accrued to Tiger by speaking on Friday as opposed to say Monday, nor do I see how Accenture was so maligned. In fact, I agree with Brandel Chamblee’s assessment that Accenture has only benefited as more viewers than otherwise might have tuned in when Tiger is in the news in one form or another.

More ironic, if not selfish in their own right, is that Accenture is the firm who shortly after the Tiger saga broke, I thought initially showed the greatest amount of compassion and insight into the complexities of the matter with their clever “it’s what you do next that counts” advertisement. Too bad Accenture was too selfish to stick around long enough to find out. Or, was Accenture also guilty of some level of disingenuousness?

For weeks, if not months, I have openly speculated that Tiger would play in the 2010 Masters. Now I am not so sure. But my gut still thinks/hopes there is no way Tiger’s role in this year’s Master’s is going to be limited to that of clutching a TV remote.

No way!

Now we all owe Mr. Giambrone the respect and privacy he deserves.

Like Tiger, Mr. Giambrone has some soul searching to do but not until the full impact of this ordeal has hit him. It hasn’t yet. That will come when the camera lights go out, media attention and the blogosphere refocuses elsewhere, and he finds himself thinking private thoughts in the wee hours of the morning.

That process may or may not involve Ms. McQuarrie in tow. I suspect it wont. But that too, like Tiger and Elin, is a private decision none of us has the right to invade or judge.

Mr. Giambrone, while I have never met the man, is obviously an intelligent and ambitious young public figure. Mr. Giambrone is not the first, nor the last, individual whose actions can be explained by the role of the hidden brain.

Say what you wish, but the TTC is a world class organization that is not without its positive markings from Mr. Giambrone’s contributions and influence. With time, he will reincarnate.

Time now to put yet another divergent, and unfortunate, story to rest.

It’s one thing to be brazenly optimistic. It’s quite another to be completely utterly politically naive. As soon as Mr. Giambrone comes to fully appreciate the gravity of his public predicament, he will be forced to do the only thing which public opinion will otherwise take care of in very short and brutal order.

Don’t get me wrong, the Toronto electorate is on a different curve when it comes to “house on the prairie” values. No other city in Canada has a adult classifieds listing longer than the used car section. The city is likely filled with a disproportionate share of everyday folk who think it’s okay to have one partner for getting elected and another for getting erected. No argument here.

But when otherwise every day people come out from under whatever particular fantasy turns their crank, they still have to be fine upstanding citizens who hold honest jobs, raise families, pay taxes, and when called upon to do so, elect best suitable candidates to public office. Toronto may be as avant-garde as they come, but folks still vote and fantasize with different parts of the brain.

It doesn’t take more than a scant read of the comments section the Star to assess how public opinion is reacting to the Giambrone story. Some of the very same people who may share an equivalent fantasy, or reality, will condemn sanctimoniously when given the opportunity. What better pretence than the safety and security offered by an anonymous comments section?

The Globe’s usually politically seasoned Adam Radwanski must have a personal stake in this issue, for it seems according to todays post he’s “just fine” with it because “it’s difficult enough to attract good people to run for office.” Excuse me? Canada’s biggest city is so void of public office talent that Giambrone’s behaviour is something to overlook because there is no one else?

Some may argue this space appears to apply a double standard when it comes to Tiger Woods versus Adam Giambrone. Not entirely the same situation. When Mr. Giambrone can shoot 64 from the back tees he’ll have my vote to play in the Masters, and if Tiger emerges to run for Mayor of Toronto he won’t.

The people, and it’s still too early to tell if this means a few thousand people or the masses, are discovering a tool in the form of social media that may effectively prove as reason for individuals to once again care.

Widely understood and generally accepted are that decreases in voter turnout result from growing political cynicism. People increasingly don’t believe their ballot vote makes a difference and don’t see the difference between politicians and parties. Further is the belief that once in power parties and politicians are basically all the same. The more recent and correct assessment would be that governments are about one thing only, politics. Everything revolves around power; the getting of it, keeping it and pouncing on any and all opportunity to affect who has or doesn’t have it.

While Canadians are perceived as not particularly effective, organized, or boisterous in their opposition to juvenile political behaviour, this does not mean Canadians haven’t all along been paying attention and recognizing what federal politics has become. Until now, voter apathy among Canadians of all political persuasion was based on exasperation, a belief there was no hope, no voice and no method for effecting real change.

Today and in the days ahead, depending on how the prorogation issue plays out, will determine whether or not digital democracy has hit a tipping point. My instincts tell me it very well may have.

This isn’t to say Mr. Harper’s justification for proroguing parliament wasn’t – in his mind – justified or well intentioned. Mr. Harper surely sees the prorogation tactic as no worse than the more under-the-radar tactics Liberals play in the Senate or that all parties play at Committee. Mr. Harper’s bigger problem, as Bruce Anderson has very correctly written about in his piece How to make prorogation stick, has to do with perceived arrogance and the sudden realization that voters have, just as suddenly, come to understand they possess a relatively new tool, literally at their finger-tips, which they can play with to much affect.

Mr. Harper is by no means the first politician to show some level of arrogance, much less contempt for his own arrogance. Pierre Trudeau was, at times, every bit as arrogant if not more so. PET’s quip “watch me” is but one example. However, Mr. Trudeau and all prime ministers before and after him until Stephen Harper did not live in a world whereby public opinion and the widespread instant communication of public opinion could be instantly measured, instantly controlled, and further instantly re-communicated.

Mr. Harper’s war-room counter-attack may be factually correct that parliament has been prorogued 100+ times in the past and perhaps even for equivalent partisan gain. But never before under the watchful eye of something like Facebook. It’s not so much that Mr. Harper has twice in the past year used prorogation for partisan gain nor are Canadians much more aware or truly more informed. At best, Canadian’s merely have an instinct, albeit shaped by the media and the media’s use of polling results to affect yet more polling results.

Instead, the current blip in Mr. Harper’s radar has to do with a digital vehicle over which Mr. Harper has less control, and through which Canadians can teach all politicians, not just Mr. Harper, a lesson.

I suggest that many who are today joining Canadians against proroguing parliament are doing so not because they are truly very upset the government isn’t sitting, but rather almost entirely because they’ve been given access to a new and very powerful toy that teaches politicians a lesson.

Many, I suspect, are joining the Facebook effort because of the power and thrill they derive from knowing what the numbers, if they continue to grow, may accomplish. Mr. McGuinty learned the same lesson when, in a matter of hours, Facebook caused an about-face in planned legislation affecting younger drivers’ licensing privileges. This isn’t to say Mr. McGuinty’s planned licensing policy wasn’t the right one for society in the long term, only that it could be summarily defeated.

While this digital democratic power, in healthy doses, is a good thing, Canadians are well-advised to be careful of what they wish for, for as the saying goes, they may get it.

Keep in mind, the jury is still out on whether or not it’s a good thing to be governed by a government that reacts to every blip in short term and by public opinion that is largely manufactured and manipulated, as opposed to true statesmen and visionaries who govern for the long term. Arguably the GST when it was introduced by Mr. Mulroney’s majority governments is largely credited for erasing Canada’s deficit. Had Mr. Mulroney at the time been minority governed by among other social factors, Facebook, or rather by what can, overnight, be created on Facebook, I very much doubt Canada’s fiscal improvement would have been so swift.

True, there is something to be said in support of greater representation in our current political system and climate, but there is also something to be said of equal and perhaps greater importance for being given a fair chance to make your mark and to be judged by it. This is not to be confused with the very real dangers associated with yielding, from one instant to the next, to the pressures of socio-partisan micro-management.

On another occasion I will argue that polling can be used, and is used by some not simply to measure public opinion, but to effectively reshape it. At the time, Jeffery Simpson’s piece, Prorogation will not loosen the PM’s grip was likely accurate. But a mere two days later more accurate were Bruce Anderson’s arguments about arrogance. And today we have the arguments set forth in this post that public sentiment, properly manipulated across a social media such as Facebook, can play havoc with conventional and tactical political wisdom.

It’s a good thing, yes. But tread carefully would be my cautionary advice.