Why the Adulation of Tiger Woods?

I watched Tiger over the weekend at The Masters and am fascinated by his amazing comeback, while at the same time being a bit befuddled by all the attention paid to him by the media. The answer to why this attention is simple: we the public are interested in Tiger. I had never even heard of the eventual winner (and supposed #1-ranked player in the world) before this weekend. There simply is nobody else who I and many others want to watch other then Tiger, hence the media gives us what we want.

The real question here is why we Americans idolize our sports heroes so much. Golfer Ben Hogan had a ticker-tape parade for him in 1953 after, like Tiger, coming back to play golf following a near-fatal car accident, in which his car had a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus which was trying to pass another vehicle on the two-lane highway (and many thanks to President Eisenhower for his vision in creating the interstate highway system).

I see no Nobel Prize winners on the ticker-tape parade list, nor anyone who has distinguished himself/herself in the arts, literature, or the sciences. Nor are any of these fields represented on our coins and currency.

Compare this to Australia, which on its currency has a poet (Banjo Paterson), a businesswoman (Mary Reibey), a social reformer (Edith Cowan), a minister (John Flynn), a writer (Mary Gilmore), an opera singer (Nellie Melba), and two Aborigines (Gwoya Tjungurrayi and David Unaipon). The contrast between the values of that culture and ours could not be more stark.

The people on the seven denominations of U.S. currency still in circulation are all from the world of politics. And even more striking, four of the seven are known for their war "exploits"--Washington, Jackson, Grant, and Lincoln. As a people we venerate our war heroes and our sports heroes, rather than those people making actual positive contributions to society.