We wish this was embeddable, but it’s easy enough to go over to the Tiger Woods website and check out the web video of Eldrick the king answering fan questions. While the one-man, one-camera production is a little spare I actually found myself liking this a lot more than some of the over-produced, SportsCenter-type music-ated highlight type films.

What’s interesting about this video segment is that it gives you almost 15 minutes of up close and personal with Woods, who is notorious for being wooden, stiff and cliche-predictable at press conferences or on those “you just got off the course” video interviews. In this one Tiger seems as normal as any mega-millionaire can be, revealing why he likes the British Open trophy better than the others, and what’s in those little bottles that he drinks on the course. (If you listen closely at one point you can hear Tiger’s or someone’s phone buzzing in the background. Love the low production values! Good enough works!)

What’s interesting to me is how this effort is being reacted to by the professional golf press. Here’s one take from Stephanie Wei, editor of the great Wei under Par blog and a writer who covers the tour for Sports Illustrated and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

Wei’s pretty savage takedown of Tiger for skipping the formal press conference in favor of a one-sided Q&A is a pretty standard reaction I have seen this year from traditional media. It’s pretty clear that the professional press doesn’t like (and has never liked) the way Woods goes “over their heads” and talks directly to the world via his own electronic media channels. I think you can draw a pretty straight line between this issue and the way many media people savor kicking Woods when he fails on the course — the post-Masters rip jobs are but the latest example.

On one hand, I get the outrage. Media people are trying to do a job and serve their readers, and when the best and most interesting player in the sport you are covering makes your job a hassle, it’s understandable that you might be ticked off. But to rip a guy for taking media into his own hands is, I think, a bit backwards. If Tiger isn’t happy with how he gets treated by the media, he has every right to become his own broadcaster. I think it’s something we’ll see more of in the future, not less. I also think “professional” media types would do well to shelve their outrage and figure out ways to make their own reporting and analysis more attractive to their readers. Because if it comes down to fans having to choose to follow Tiger directly or via a proxy, I don’t think professional media types are going to like the answer.

Here’s the link again.

UPDATE: Here’s another take, which I think unneccessarily rips the production value. And finds fault with Tiger reading the questions off paper. Like what, he’s supposed to use a teleprompter? I don’t think fans care about this stuff as much as the “pro media” does.

UPDATE 2: Yet another “professional media” take ripping Woods, from a media person who claims that the media is supposed to be “the conduit” between player and fans. What law was passed that makes that statement true? It might have been the way things happened historically, but there’s a lot of things that have changed over time. Being the approved “conduit” is not something I think the media can or should take for granted.

UPDATE 3: Stephanie Wei, to her credit, not only watched the whole video several times (I have watched it once) but also transcribed some of the answers. She also seems to have reversed field a little bit from her original take, no longer seeing this as a “middle finger to the media” but as something geniune, done for fans. I think it’s pretty funny that media folks are ripping Tiger for the video’s supposedly poor quality. It’s not like there’s a lot of better stuff from the media I see covering golf 24/7.