In an April 15 letter to the editor, a writer bemoaned the Gazette’s featuring a long story on Tiger Woods’s struggles with painkillers in a recent edition rather than covering the WNBA draft [“More WNBA, less Woods“]. The letter states, “I would bet there are more people who read this paper who are more interested in the future of the WNBA than a drunk male golfer.” I agree with the writer that women’s professional sports deserve more coverage, but I defend the Gazette’s decision to run the Tiger piece. The morning the article appeared, my 13-year-old soccer-playing son, sitting at the breakfast table, made his usual beeline to the sports section, where we found the Tiger article and started reading it together. As a parent, I found Tiger’s story of multiple surgeries leading to opioid addiction and bad decisions to be a valuable life lesson about the dark side of professional sports that I could pass along to my own young athlete. I would caution against too quickly dismissing the value of a “drunk male golfer’s” story to boys and young men seeking better outcomes in life.
Rachel Markowitz
Northampton