Woods saga couldn't fail to make headlines

America At Large:We can only speculate how this might have played out had Tiger been more immediately forthcoming, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

EACH NIGHT when the family dog and I embark on the final walk of the evening, our customary route to the park takes us past a spot overlooking the Hudson River where, in 1936, 43-year-old Eugene Merritt, landed on Riverside Drive after throwing himself from a 15th-floor apartment window.

The 11-room suite at 173 Riverside Drive from which Merritt leapt belonged to his brother-in-law, America’s most celebrated athlete, George Herman (Babe) Ruth, but the family tragedy scarcely made a ripple in what was then an 11-newspaper town.

There was no hint of scandal or foul play (Eugene had been gassed in the war and suffered intermittent bouts of depression since) and when Babe and his wife, Eugene Merritt’s sister Claire, hastened back from Florida after the suicide, the press kept a respectful distance.

“An unwritten, sometimes-spoken code existed, not only with [Ruth] but with virtually everybody in public life,” noted Leigh Montville in his definitive biography The Big Bam. “A boundary existed between the public and the private . . . affairs of the heart and matters of the bedroom, drunken vulgarities, and four-star orgies were not reported. This code prevailed not only in sports, but in politics, the arts, even show business. If the president of the United States urinated into a fireplace at the White House – as Richard Vidmer [of the New York Times] saw Warren Harding do – it didn’t make the newspaper.”

That the rules have changed in the age of tabloid journalism – and tabloid television – is evident from the sometimes unseemly coverage of the ongoing Woods family drama down in Windermere, Florida, over the past several days.

The generated heat had showed no signs of abating, and by yesterday morning Tiger Woods felt constrained to own up to what he deemed his “transgressions” when he posted an acknowledgement on his website that “I have not been true to my values and the behavior my family deserves.”

As a general rule, you’d have to say that a private tiff between husband and wife has no place on the sports pages, even if the husband in question happens to be the world’s best golfer. On the other hand the line of journalistic propriety is less clear when the result of said tiff results in injuries that lead to Eldrick’s abrupt withdrawal from a golf tournament whose beneficiary is the Tiger Woods Foundation, followed, in short order, by the announcement that Tiger is done competing for the rest of the season.

As we’ve attempted to point out to our sporting heroes many times over the years, they have every right to withhold comment and force us to draw our own conclusions, but in that event they can hardly then object to the conclusions we have drawn.

You’d have to say that Tiger has thus been somewhat off-base in criticising “irresponsible” reporting of the facts as we know them, particularly since his disingenuous and far-fetched cover story is what invited speculation in the first place.

In yesterday’s post, Tiger at once acknowledged his status as “a well-known person” while simultaneously complaining that “for the last week, my family and I have been hounded to expose intimate details of our personal lives”.

Even in the more innocent age of Ruth, one imagines that it might have been deemed newsworthy had a familial argument spilled out into the street and seen Mrs Ruth flailing away with a baseball bat as she chased Babe’s Cadillac down the street at two o’clock in the morning. (“Hey, take it easy there, honey,” we can imagine Babe shouting as the Caddy’s rear window explodes in a shower of auto glass, “that’s a game-used Louisville Slugger!”) And had this merry chase resulted in Ruth running over a fire hydrant, losing control of his car, and impaling it on a tree in Riverside Park, we’re just guessing that even 85 years ago it might have made the newspapers.

Nor should the role of the local constabulary in this proceeding be diminished. The cops not only bent over backward not to contradict Tiger and Elin’s rather preposterous version of the evening’s events, but even, with straight faces, tried to assure the press there was “no indication” that the episode might have involved a domestic disturbance at all. They similarly ruled out alcohol as a factor. If you or I wrapped a car around a neighbour’s tree at two in the morning, do you think the cops would just take our word for it that we hadn’t been drinking? Yet there is no indication that either Mr or Mrs Woods was invited to take a breathalyzer.

On three subsequent occasions officers arrived to take a routine statement from the involved parties only to be told “Don’t feel like talking now. Come back some other time”, and on all three occasions they meekly turned tail and retreated.

Some might say that Woods was merely asserting his constitutional right against self-incrimination, but I can promise you that if it had been me or you the message would have been: “All right, we can do this here or we can do it down at the station house.”

There is no indication, in fact, that Woods ever intended to co-operate until the boys from the Florida Highway Patrol got involved, and it all smacked so patently of a cover-up that it not only invited, but demanded independent scrutiny.

How did a man attempting to negotiate his own driveway achieve enough speed to not only wreck his car but knock himself out? Or did he? Were the “facial lacerations” described by emergency personnel incurred concomitantly with the presumed concussion, or were they the cause of it? And were they inflicted by the car-hydrant collision, by the car-tree collision, or by a five-iron? (In Elin’s version, she merely used a golf club on the back window to help free Tiger from the wreckage of his SUV. How she happened to have one in her hand is left to our imagination, as is the question of why she would smash out the rear window when her husband was in the front seat.)

The smokeys concluded their investigation by determining there was enough evidence to merit a citation for “careless driving”. That, and Tiger’s failure to buckle his seatbelt in his apparent haste to escape an angry, club-wielding wife will cost him $164 (€109) and a four-point penalty on his driving licence.

That nationally-syndicated celebrity gossip shows and magazines had expanded the scope of their inquiry and unearthed not one but two mistresses was probably unfortunate. That this information found its way into the sporting sections of some newspapers is even more so, if only because it tends to demonise “the media” as if it were an entity.

Even before implicitly confirming the infidelity stories with yesterday’s website posting, Woods had to his credit accepted responsibility. “It’s all my fault,” he said, in what seemed an attempt to shield his wife from even further embarrassment.

We can only speculate how this might have played out had Tiger been more immediately forthcoming, but “It’s a private matter and I want to keep it that way” was never going to fly, and he should have known that from the outset.