The Golf Digest Cover With Tiger Woods

The Golf Digest cover this month features Tiger Woods and President Obama.

What it must have the magazine's editors cackling with Glee This months cover of Golf Digest features Tiger Woods along with President Obama. It's true that the editors Are not cackling in public but obviously sales will soar. It's also not a planned move since the crash at Thanksgiving: magazine production schedules are much longer than that. As the Golf Digest editor explains:

H.L. Mencken said that a celebrity is a person known to many people he is glad he does not know. After listening to the entertainment-media shows and monitoring those Web sites this week, I suspect Tiger Woods is feeling precisely that way about the people who think they know him. In contrast, your letters to Golf World and Golf Digest is the subject of the event surrounding Tiger are remarkably thoughtful, Perceptive, often Forgiving, and in some cases moving. And certainly some are, well, corrective. A few letters concern Golf Digest's January cover, of course, Tiger and depicting President Barack Obama. Several talk shows and Web sites have mentioned the cover and in some cases chided Golf Digest about it.

Among them, ABC News, Slate and the Huffington Post. First - and this seems obvious to us but may not be to them and you - the cover was not created after the Thanksgiving week accident. It was completed and closed well in advance of that, during the first week of November, and it went to Press on November 14 Second, the cover was not a photo shoot with Woods and Obama. It was a photo illustration, based on a shoot done with body doubles in Los Angeles by photographer Martin Ellis. The fact that is looks like it might have been a photo is Testament to the work of our Design Director Ken DeLago, Director of Photography Christian Iooss and Fashion Director Marty Hackel, who was on site for the shoot.

That really is how long it takes the magazine industry to get things together. Which is why there are very few news magazines left: for by the time they hit the newstands it's not really news any more.

However, much, much more fun would be a little competition in the comments here. What actually are the ten tips that Obama can take from Tiger? Do not go too far into crudity or vileness ( "being mixed race will not help when your wife finds out" might be as far as we want to go) but let us know what you think those things might be ten