BEDA 11: Tiger & Don

Okay, so my Blogging Every Day in April effort is not quite EDA enough . . . but I'm not upset. And while I am in between Game of Thrones and Mad Men, I thought I would drop a quick hit blog post about something.

Credit: www.sterlingsatellite.com

Here at WWYG?! I am no stranger to weird theories. I've been spinning them for years--damn the consequence. So, I was all in a few years ago when my oldest brother worked on convincing me about a theory he had heard (for one summary of the idea, see this Bill Simmon's mailbag link and the note from Josh Peterson in Omaha) linking interesting parallels between the real-life fall of noted golfer Tiger Woods and the fictional fall of noted ad-man and serial-philanderer Don Draper. If you search the two men, you can probably find some good summaries of the two men's parallel fall from "grace" a while back--Tiger's public fallout with his wife, the holiday mishap and driveway accident, the eventual reveal of sex addiction and whatever. Along with that was Don's break up with Betty, the singledom, all culminating with eating pancakes and whiskey while his daughter watches.

So, at the start of this season of Mad Men, we were noting the upswing in Tiger's golf rankings, his favorite status at this week's Masters golf tournament, and the return of Mad Men from a loooong hiatus. Would Don's life follow a similar upward trend this season?

Well, after seeing the two-hour premiere of Mad Men last weekend and seeing Tiger's travails at Augusta this weekend, I'm here to suggest that the parallels are still there--and they aren't good.

Don can't see the suicide metaphors right in front of his face during his missed ad pitch to the hotel chain. He's got so much of the Hawaiian surf pounding in his ears he  can't understand what is going wrong with his life. But he knows that his fake life of Dick Whitman is slowly unraveling for all the world to discover.

And Tiger? He also found trouble this weekend, also amongst water, as he made his own falsification with his errant ball drop and the incorrect scorecard. Sure, the golfing powers-that-be let his continue his Saturday and Sunday efforts, but nothing came of them. And nobody at Sterling Cooper Draper Price is going to be firing Don/Dick anytime soon either (unless they can lure Peggy Olsen back into the fold to take Don's place?). So Don, like Tiger, will continue to go through some of the motions. But how much longer can they hold themselves together before it all crashes down on them with finality?