Abstract
Stephen Fay examines why it took a car crash for the press to explore the rumours about Tiger Woods’s marital problems, which had been circulating among golfing correspondents for some time before the crash. Citing sports journalists’ similar reticence in the past to focus on incidents in the lives of Ian Botham, Don Revie and Bob Stokoe, Fay concludes that “many sports reporters have felt a greater loyalty to the people they wrote about than to the people they wrote for”. However, he also argues that radical changes in the culture of journalism, in particular its increasingly adversarial nature, allied with the widespread media obsession with the private lives of celebrities, have increasingly made such reticence a thing of the past.
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