As IF Times

link To be a great, McIlroy must stay true to himself – USATODAY.com.

 At the just concluded 2011  US Open , 22 year old Rory McIlroy’s prodigious talent  burst  him onto the world stage in dramatic fashion.  Readers can refer to other sports sites for details of his on course exploits, but my discussion is the more compelling story of the kid himself. 

Just 22 years of age and he already has been placed at the top of the sporting world as much for his character as for his athletic accomplishment.  He is much of what most celebrity athletes these days are not.  He is not brusque, arrogant or distant.  He does not wear strange clothing, have tattoos or earrings.  He does not  hide behind aviator sunglasses and surround himself with surly bodyguards.  He speaks humbly of his accomplishments, does so in complete sentences and is a filial son.  Unlike many top name athletes today, his ego has yet to overwhelm him.

It’s almost too good to be true.  He is like a Stepford wife.  With an impossibly beautiful swing bordering on golf pornography and a disarmingly modest demeanor, it’s hard not to be drawn to this kid.   In the golfing world at least, guys like Nicklaus and Palmer have always tended to their good guy image and may in large part explain their revered positions in golf.  This is in contrast to Ben Hogan and recently Tiger Woods, both of whom were more prickly personalities but were tolerated because of their talents.  A guy like Rory comes along and once again, people can pull for a hero without reservation.  He has the same quality as did a young Phil Mickelson.  Granted, he’s still young and much may happen, but the talent has been there since an early age and the grounding influence of his parents will keep him as a like-able person for years to come.  It appears that a strong value system was instilled from the outset.  Undoubtedly, his family and friends back in his hometown of Holywood, Ireland wouldn’t have rioted even if Rory had lost.

How many 22 year old kids go off to Haiti on their own volition without commercial intent to assess the conditions of the earthquake victims? How many young kids can take the crushing collapse that he experienced during this year’s Masters and brush it off with equanimity and without bitterness or recrimination?  The kid has a maturity well beyond his years and this gushing fan hopes that he will be the new standard of celebrity athletes in the future.  The world can use some genuinely nice guys.

link EXCLUSIVE: Porn Star Shopping Alleged Tiger Woods Sex Tape To XXX Company Vivid — Top Level Talks Today | Radar Online.

This story underscores people’s natural inclination towards capitalism and entrepreneurship.  Our poor gal, Devon James, not seemingly endowed with anything other than an inability to say no, decides to try her hand at business.  Technically, she had always been self employed, but the tryst with Tiger presented an opportunity to make revenue in bunches rather than the way she would normally do it: piece by piece as it were.

She now claims that there is a video tape of Tiger and herself in, how shall we say,  flagrante delicto.  After performing an intricate series of calculations involving present value, interest rates, exchange fluctuations and moon phases, she concludes that the value of this tape is worth at least $350,000.  Nobody should snicker at this because the calculations for all collectible art are made in more or less the same way.  Apparently, porn distributor Vivid Entertainment would be interested at this price level. Or perhaps even Tiger himself for posterity.  He can file it under PRO-AMS, where in this case, he would be the amateur.

The factor of potential embarrassment to Tiger may be one of the factors in determining the $350,000 price tag for the cinematic treasure and  that’s a fair bit of change, certainly more than any movie Michael Moore will make again.  This of course begs the question, why would Tiger be embarrassed?  This whole episode has already cost him his marriage plus a few hundred million dollars plus perhaps a place in history. So what would embarrass him? That he had carnal relations with a woman?  Hardly embarrassing.  The world didn’t think he dated these women to talk swing changes.  Would he be embarrassed about perhaps physical shortcomings?  Unlikely.  Tiger is not known to leave his putts short.  I think perhaps the only thing that could be seen as possibly embarrassing is if he insisted the gals put on Phil Mickelson masks.  In that case, $350,000 may be cheap.

But you can’t blame a gal for trying.  With her loose lips and resultant declining client list, another major may be hard to get in her lifetime.  Tsk tsk to poor Tiger.  He shouldn’t have been playing out of bounds.