There is little doubt that Mr Tiger Woods has set himself up for an almighty fall. By playing the all American, clean living family man, his philandering ways were certain to trip him up big-time sooner or later. That day has now come. His squeaky-clean image is in tatters. Some sponsors are deserting him. His carefully constructed family image is in ruins. And to add salt to the wound, the moral high-grounders are on his back. It’s an all together different type of birdie that the world is now interested in. Acres of newsprint have been devoted to the fall of the Tiger. Nearly all, to some degree, castigate the man for either his lapsed morality or his outrageous hypocrisy.

Very few it seems are willing to see the man as a mere puppet, albeit a grotesquely over paid and willing one, of some very amoral multi-national corporations.

Why have our so serious investigative journalists not turned their attentions to the morality of Nike, Gatorade, Gillette, or the financial services giant, Accenture and the equally gigantic communications corporation, AT&T. Let our crusading journalists investigate the tax regimes of each of these all-American corporate giants. Let us have some exposure on Nike’s third world employment strategies. Let us have some light thrown on the ethical basis of their respective investment portfolios. And whilst we are at it, what of the personal moral standings of their directors and shareholders?

By buying into the carefully constructed soap opera that is Tiger Woods, and then castigating the real man who it transpires, is a million miles away from that corporate image, we conveniently take our eyes off the real villains, the corporations who buy up all the world’s great athletes and turn them into puppets dancing to the tunes of their marketing departments. Brand Beckham, Brand Bolt, Brand Henry. And when the brand image falters, as it inevitably does, our crusading journalists are full of scorn for the puppet, become preoccupied with the puppet, but have nothing much to say about the puppeteer.

Professional sport is no more or no less a reflection of our grubby world than any other aspect of the rapidly unravelling capitalist monolith. The entire financial system is corrupt and rotten to the core. We know that now. Enron was the beginning and it’s been down hill ever since. Parliament is corrupt and rotten to the core. After the criminality of the Iraq war, not to mention the criminality of bogus expense claims, who now dare deny that truth. The media, so quick to preach the moral standard, is corrupt and rotten to the core. Owned by a handful of billionaires, Murdoch and co treat our flimsy democracies as mere play things.

Professional sport, we are now learning, is no different. There is only one logic and one morality to our much lauded capitalist system; maximisation of profit by the sale of commodities. In turn, every thing and every body becomes a commodity, to be bought and sold for profit. Even sporting institutions as once noble and glorious as Manchester United and Liverpool Football Club could not resist. ‘Usain Bolt, the fastest man who has ever trod this Earth, could not resist. Roger Federer, probably the greatest tennis player of all time, and by all accounts, a decent enough sort of bloke, could not resist. Even the oldest human institution of all, the sexual attraction between men and women, is reduced to nothing but a commodity under our cherished epoch of capital.

In historical terms, capitalism’s time may well be drawing near, but not before it has dragged the entire world, sport included, to the very economic and environmental precipice. Tiger Woods, caught with his trousers down, is nothing but a pawn in that game.