Avery Fisher Hall to be renamed David Geffen Hall ~ naming Tiger Wood's restaurant !!!

Avery Fisher Hall is a concert hall in New York City's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts complex on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The 2,738 seat auditorium opened in 1962, and is the home of the New York Philharmonic. Lincoln Center will rename Avery Fisher Hall as  David Geffen Hall in gratitude !

Eldrick Tont "Tiger" Woods, is arguably the  most successful golfer of all time. He has been one of the highest-paid athletes in the world for several years. 

His ranking nosedived for non-sporting reasons and after winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational  In 2013, he ascended to the No.1 ranking once again, holding the top spot until May 2014. Reports suggest that the chances of Tiger Woods competing at next month’s Masters dropped significantly,  when he revealed he would not be appearing at next week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational - an event he has won eight times. Woods, 39, announced in early February that, after missing the cut in Phoneix and then withdrawing after just 11 holes at Torrey Pines with a back complaint, he would only return to competition when he could “compete at the highest level”.

What is in a name … ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’  - the names of things do not matter, only what things are  !! ~ but perceptions do matter.  For some, the  Office goers, the Office and the designation over there means a lot – mostly people are identified by what they are tagged – the official designation – a visiting card gains more weight with each promotion.  Even if one does not consciously ponder on these things, the credibility gets highlighted by the designation. There is also a theory that ‘having a name that's easy to pronounce could propel one  up the career ladder !’  It is no little perception but a theory based on the research, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, which has  found that it's not just in the office that people with easy-to-say names do well, it also discovered that it helped in the political world.

There is news of Pro golfer Tiger Woods adding “restaurateur” to his resume. The Jupiter Island resident plans to open his first restaurant – “The Woods Jupiter: Sports and Dining Club” – at Harbourside Place, the $150 million entertainment complex opening this fall at the northwest corner of Indiantown Road and U.S. 1 in Jupiter.  An opening date has not been set, but it’s likely The Woods Jupiter will open its doors in a few months. Design plans are still being finalized for The Woods Jupiter, but the 5,900-square-foot restaurant will have a “prime location” in the new development, next to the amphitheater and marina.

Amidst, there has been news that Tiger Woods can't name his restaurant Tiger Woods 'because Nike owns his naming rights'.  A report in MailOnline stated that the restaurant  hit a speed bump, with project developer Nicholas Mastroianni revealing it cannot be named 'Tiger Woods' because Nike owns the rights to the golfer's full name. In an interview with Golf.com, he said he was told that 'Nike has the rights to the name Tiger Woods', adding that even gaining permission to use Woods' name in a press release was 'over the top'.

However, Woods' manager Mark Steinberg contradicted the claims, saying Nike does not own the rights to his client's name. He said: 'I can't imagine how this could have been communicated this way. It is wholly inaccurate and categorically false', golfchannel.com reported. 'Tiger owns his own name and always had.' A Nike spokesperson too supported this, denying the corporation owned the rights to the name Tiger Woods.

In commercial parlance, ‘naming rights’  are a financial transaction and form of advertising whereby a corporation or other entity purchases the right to name a facility or event, typically for a defined period of time. Lincoln Center is to be renamed after  David Geffen Hall in gratitude for the movie mogul's $100 million gift.  David Lawrence Geffen,  is an American business magnate, producer, film studio executive, and philanthropist.  The proposed renaming has  become the new focus of a philanthropic debate that has gone on for decades. The critics miss the point that the Centre’s leaders were in fact shopping around the naming rights for the concert hall and had negotiated a big ‘million payoff’ ;  Geffen was the highest bidder, that's all.

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

18^th Mar 2015.