Tiger bows to inevitable and confesses

GOLF:FIVE DAYS after he set light to a media firestorm with a car crash outside his home in Florida in the middle of the night, Tiger Woods finally bowed to the inevitable yesterday and made what he had tried so long to avoid – a public confession about his "transgressions".

In a statement on his website, the world’s top golfer said he had let his family down and that he regretted those “transgressions with all of my heart. I have not been true to my values and the behaviour my family deserves.”

But Woods did remain true to his image as a man who fiercely guards his privacy by combining the public apology with an impassioned plea for the right even of superstars to have a life free of media intrusion.

In words that will be pored over by those on both sides of the privacy debate, he said: “No matter how intense curiosity about public figures can be, there is an important and deep principle at stake which is the right to some simple, human measure of privacy.”

Paradoxically, he used the medium of a press release to make his public confession and to argue against the need for precisely that: “Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.”

The statement came as Woods’s problems with the American tabloid media deepened. The crisis started last week when the National Enquirer carried allegations of an extramarital affair with a nightclub hostess. After the car crash on Friday morning, in which Woods hit a fire hydrant and tree with his SUV outside his home in the exclusive neighbourhood of Isleworth, the gossip website TMZ claimed his facial injuries were not incurred in the crash but were suffered during a row with his wife, Elin Nordegren.

Then yesterday, hours before he released the statement, US Weekly magazine ran a cover story with detailed allegations from a cocktail waitress, Jaimee Grubbs. The magazine posted on its website an audio file it alleged was a voicemail recording on Grubbs’s phone left by Woods three days before the car crash in which he appealed to her to help him cover up their affair from his wife.

The question that now hangs over Woods’s mansion house, where he continues to be holed up with his family, is whether the statement will succeed in stemming the flurry of media coverage, allowing him to repair his marriage and preserve the powerful and lucrative Tiger Woods brand.

Howard Rubenstein, the doyen of crisis PR experts, said the statement was “a little late in coming but it was absolutely the correct thing to do”.

In his opinion, if a similar apology had been issued within 48 hours of the car crash the furore would not have been anything like as intense. But apology or no apology, Rubenstein believes the image of Tiger Woods the perfect husband and family man has been shattered. “I don’t think it will ever be restored.”

The other big question is what now happens to the many commercial endorsements that have combined to make him the world’s most marketable athlete and pushed his personal wealth up to an estimated $1bn (€662 million). They include Nike Golf, the Buick Rendezvous SUV, Gillette and Gatorade.

Several of his sponsor firms have already indicated that they intend to stand by their man, and experts in sports marketing expect his purely commercial desirability to be untouched.

Laurence DeGaris, a professor in marketing at the University of Indianapolis, said: “We are looking at possibly the best golfer of all time – and that’s what companies like.”