Tiger’s Tail Just Keeps on Growing

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Pole dancing NFL wives? Salacious pictures of your team’s star third baseman? Believe it. Yes, the ripple effect of the Tiger story just keeps rolling on.

Today we add two more items to the list of what  Tiger  has wrought. Both should have pro athletes dreading what comes next. The rest of us will just roll our eyes.

The first: a start-up company called “Off the Market,” whose goal is to strengthen the relationship between pro athletes and their wives and girlfriends. Among the early ideas: teaching the wives of athletes how to pole dance and giving their husbands adult toys to use while they’re on the road. No, we’re not making this up.

The company is the idea of Tia Robbins, the wife of New York Giants defensive tackle Fred Robbins, Jerika Johnstone, wife of former NFL player Lance Johnstone, and Jasmine Silva, girlfriend of St. Louis Rams safety James Butler, reports Darren Rovell of CNBC. Robbins says she and her partners came up with the idea before the Woods scandal broke, but thinks the non-stop Tiger stories will be a wake up call for athletes and their wives.

“We want to help athletes sustain a positive and sexy relationship with their mates,” says Robbins. And if that means teaching wives how to pole dance to keep their husbands out of strip clubs, then so be it. She’ll even find you someone to install a pole in your home. “We’d like to offer a private lesson for strip pole dancing one day or even offer to have a strip pole built in a home.”

Robbins says she is drawing on her own experience.

“My husband told me that since he had that ring on his finger, women have been flocking to him more,” Robbins said. “We have to be open with each other and we think we can help with these unique relationships.”

With all due respect to Robbins, her two partners, and all the other wives of professional athletes, I’m just not sure what sort of tips they can share  that will prevent the sort of behavior that has been going on since, well, since forever.

But here’s something that may slow down a few athletes: gossip king TMZ is planning an all-sports spinoff early next year, reports the New York Times. According to comScore, an online research firm, traffic for the week ending Dec. 6—prime time for Tiger coverage—increased by almost two million unique visitors. That’s enough to change your business plan.

Will it change the habits of athletes on the road?

We are soon to find out.

And athletes aren’t the only group affected by TMZ’s decision. Sports writers who regularly cover beats have long been aware of what married athletes do when their wives are back home minding the kids. Every writer makes up his or her mind about how to deal with this information, and the vast majority pretty much ignores it for a variety of reasons. Athletes are not elected officials, they are entertainers, the thinking goes, and what they do on the road has rarely, if ever, been part of the mainstream coverage.

But can the writers stay on the sidelines if TMZ is making headlines? Will news organizations like the New York Times run a TMZ story, then pick up the chase? Will ESPN, which has partnerships with virtually every professional sport, alter its coverage?

Here’s what former ESPN ombudswoman Lee Anne Schreiber told the New York Times today.

“If another outlet caters to the celebrity approach, ESPN cedes that territory and loses eyeballs,” she said. “But if they directly compete, they risk altering their own mission as a sports media entity. They risk alienating fans that resent that kind of approach to sports coverage and, perhaps, more importantly, they risk alienating athletes and the kind of access that they currently enjoy.”

In other words, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. TMZ pays for many of its scoops. Money talks, as we’ve seen in TMZ’s coverage of movies starlet and rock stars. There are already a few sites, most prominently Deadspin, who tread in this field. Though none have the resources of TMZ, a unit of Time Warner, chances are we could be witnesses to an internet-style tabloid war.

“Does this mean that every single person on the planet with a raunchy photo of athletes drinking or sliming over women will now run over to TMZ first because they’ll offer some payment for these types of photos? Yikes,” Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio wrote today. “That would suck. But remember—we pay, too. Probably on a less frequent basis than they do, but should the right thing come along that I feel Deadspin could benefit from, I’ll gladly pay for it. It’s only happened once before, but if I have to start being more aggressive about using this burlap sack of scuzz money I have sitting on my desk, then so be it.”

When I reached Daulerio and asked him to elaborate, he told me:

“I doubt I’d pay for 95% of the things they do. My ideal get would be something that’s very, very unique—like Dock Ellis’ no-hitter on acid or something. But, as I said, we do pay for things. I don’t like to and I don’t like making it a part of our daily editorial mission, but I think it was worth putting out there just so we could let people know that [paying for news] is an option with us as well.

“I mean, TMZ is a threat to everyone—sports or not. We’ve seen twice now how they can just control a story and beat it into submission, i.e. Michael Jackson and Tiger. I think everyone has to adjust to them. People can turn their noses up at them for how they do things, but you have to admit that they’ve been remarkable at making online news a viable and profitable marketplace.”

The guess here: despite the best efforts of Robbins and her friends, we’ll see more salacious stories coming out of the sports world in the year to come.

Thank you, Tiger Woods.