Tiger caught by the tales

His actions may have taken a three-iron to his fiercely guarded spotless image, but as long as Tiger Woods keeps winning, too many people have a stake in his success for the damage to last, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

THE FORMER Elin Nordegren can hardly have been pleased by those photographs of her husband with Rachel Urchitel in the National Enquirertwo days earlier, but that wasn't what set her on the warpath. Even in the face of evidence to the contrary, Urchitel was still denying everything, but it has been reported that in search of independent confirmation, Elin picked up Tiger Woods's mobile phone. Exactly what she found remains unknown, but within hours a panic-stricken Woods was leaving a voicemail on Jaimee Grubbs's answering machine, asking her to remove her name from her voicemail message.

By midnight, according to the reports, the row was in full swing, and by 2am, Woods was trying to flee the premises.

We don’t want to spoil anyone’s illusions, but it should probably be noted that Woods was neither the first nor the last man for whom the life of a professional golfer provided unlimited opportunities for extramarital sex. Woods was engaging in a tradition nearly as old as the tour itself. What has set him apart from his forebears and the Generation X golfers who have followed him is that, technologically speaking, Woods came of age at precisely the wrong time.

The golfers who were chasing women when he joined the professional ranks in 1996 – some of them just a few years his senior – did so without the benefit of mobile phones and laptops. Many of them would, to this day, be befuddled by a text message.

And while those who came along after Woods grew up in the age of multi-tasking and iPhones, they were also savvy enough to recognise the need for discretion, aware that even erased e-mails and text messages can leave a footprint, and that if push ever came to shove, somebody might subpoena your hard drive.

The “Tiger” nickname was given to him by his father when he was but a club-swinging toddler. However, in his college days at Stanford, Eldrick Tont Woods was known to his golfing team-mates as Urkel, after the socially awkward character who represented the quintessential nerd on the TV sitcom, Family Matters.

The teenage Woods was far from a ladies’ man. He was reputedly the least athletically gifted member of the basketball squad the golf team fielded in a Stanford intra-mural league. His team-mate, Notah Begay, also told me Woods was the worst dancer on the Cardinal golf team – not an inconsiderable feat, when one recalls that it also included Casey Martin, who even then suffered from a painful hereditary foot condition that eventually led him to unsuccessfully petition for a waiver that would have allowed him to use a motorised cart on the PGA Tour. And when it came to interaction with the opposite sex, Tiger made his namesake, Steve Urkel, look like Casanova.

Tiger’s tenure in Palo Alto lasted but two years. Having abandoned the carefree life of a college student for the world of professional golf, how long did it take the nerd to transform himself into Tiger Woods, horndog? Not long at all, apparently, according to my friend and former colleague, Charlie Pierce.

In the spring of 1997, shortly before Woods won the first of his 14 majors at the Masters, Pierce negotiated the labyrinth of red tape his handlers had built around him, and was, for a short time, granted almost unlimited access for an Esquire profile.

Six months into his professional career, Woods was like a child in a sweetshop. His zeal in pursuit of young (and some not-so-young) ladies sometimes seemed as obsessively driven as his pursuit of golf perfection.

Even back in 1997, Pierce recalled this week, it “was one of the worst-kept secrets on the PGA Tour. Everybody knew. Everybody had a story. Occasionally somebody saw it, but nobody wanted to talk about it, except in bar-room whispers late at night. Tiger’s people at the International Management Group (IMG) visibly got the vapours if you even implied anything about it.”

Pierce’s Esquire piece did not detail this emergent aspect of Woods’s personality, but it did repeat a couple of off-colour stories he told in the back seat of a limousine. As they ran counter to the image IMG was carefully developing, Pierce was widely excoriated and his became the first name on IMG’s informal JEOT (Journalistic Enemies of Tiger) dossier.

Befitting that status, Pierce has now found himself in sudden demand as the go-to guy. “From that moment on,” Pierce recalled in a blog posted on Esquire’s site a few days ago, “the marketing cocoon around [Woods] became almost impenetrable. The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeless brand easily peddled to sheikhs and shakers.”

PRO GOLFERS HAVE nothing on other professional athletes when it comes to the pursuit Dan Jenkins described as “chasing wool” (pursuing women), and when the old Cuban-born baseballer, Luis Tiant, famously joked that “there’s no such thing as an ugly white woman”, the witticism played to the worst fear of the racist element.

There are those, no doubt, who have openly rooted for Woods to fail at every turn, and their sentiments can only have been exacerbated five years ago when he married a Scandinavian beauty who could not have been whiter. At the same time, it should probably be noted here that one could comb pretty much the world’s entire female population without coming up with a racial match for Eldrick Woods: quarter African-American, quarter Thai, quarter Chinese, one-eighth Cherokee, one-eighth Caucasian (Dutch). In some southern states, Woods would have been violating anti-miscegenation laws no matter who he’d married.

The union with Nordegren was facilitated by Jesper Parnevik, who was employing her as a nanny when Woods asked him to be a conduit in asking her out. Recent events have apparently led the Swedish golfer to reassess the wisdom of that introduction.

“We probably thought he was a better guy than he is,” said Parnevik when the Golf Channel interviewed him this week. “I would probably need to apologise to her – and to hope she uses a driver next time instead of a three-iron.”

The late-night battle at Windermere resulted in the police being summoned to the gated community in the early hours of November 27th, after Woods managed to hit both a water hazard (a fire hydrant) and a fixed obstacle (a tree). Nordegren’s aim was slightly better: she shattered the glass on the back window, supposedly to facilitate her by-then unconscious husband’s escape, although even the Windermere cops must have been able to figure out what had actually happened.

What Woods really needed right then was one of IMG’s spin doctors, because the couple’s version appeared so preposterous that it just begged for the journalistic inquiries that followed, to say nothing of the intervention of the Florida Highway Patrol, which felt constrained to take action when the local cops seemed overly intimidated.

Woods might have remained the victim in the eyes of the public, but instead of one unseemly story in the National Inquirer, the result has been a veritable flood of mistress tales – at last count, there were at least three.

Grubbs has already made her texts and voicemail available to a TV programme. Uchitel declined to confirm a sexual relationship with Woods, who allegedly paid for her ticket to Australia when she joined him there a few weeks ago, but it might be noted that though she lives and works in New York, she showed up in Hollywood this week, accompanied by her lawyer.

This whole mess is going to result in a lot of billable hours before it’s through, in fact. Even the next-door neighbours whose tree attacked Woods’s Escalade are now communicating through their attorney.

Even as he posted his quasi-confessional on his website this week, Woods could not resist throwing a barb at “the media” for having invaded his privacy and, truth be told, there have been fairly serious internal differences of opinion about the way the sporting press has handled the story.

Once again, Pierce seemed to put it in perspective as he recounted IMG’s strategy for keeping the fourth estate in line: “The golfing press became aware that stories about Tiger’s temper, say, or about his ties to unsavoury corporate grifters, would mean the end of access to the only golfer in the world who matters. There is a quick way to tell now which journalists have made this devil’s bargain and which ones haven’t – the ones insisting that ‘the accident’ is somehow ‘not a story’ are the sopranos in the chorus.”

THE METAMORPHOSIS of a stumbling kid who didn’t know how to ask a girl for a date into a man who believes himself to be God’s gift to women is easy to understand. Earning close to a $100 million (€66 million) in purses, as Wood has in 13 years on the Tour, will do that for you – and his on-course earnings pale by comparison with his commercial endorsements from sponsors such as Nike, Buick and EA Sports.

How will Woods’s commercial enterprises be affected by the current scandal? They won’t be – at least not unless the pressure exacts a toll on Tiger’s golf game. As long as he keeps winning, sponsors are going to stay where they are, because they know that their competitors would be happy to leap into the breach.

Kobe Bryant’s sponsors dropped him like a hot rock following his arrest on rape charges several years ago, but after that case wound up without a conviction and the Lakers won an NBA title last year, Bryant is a hero again. If things get hot enough over the winter, and if IMG decides it’s a good idea, you might even see Woods check himself into some rehab facility to be treated for sex addiction, but we can pretty much promise you this much: whether it’s the Masters in April or a subsequent tournament, the moment Woods wins his next major, what seems a nightmare now will become a forgotten memory.