GO GET ’IM, TIGER

As my devotees will readily testify, low gossip and idle speculation are unknown to me. But oh boy, how can one resist Tigergate?

Hot off the net is the news of fall-out from the “scandal”: the entire writing team of Late Show with David Letterman have today resigned in protest at the host’s rejection of all their Top Ten list of gags about Tiger Woods and his insistence on penning them himself – his team agree that they are “not funny”. So you see the Tiger Woods “scandal” is a big story.

“What’s Tigergate?” some may ask. Here’s the bare bones of it. Eldrick Tont Woods is the world’s most successful sportsperson in history, certainly if you measure it by income. Of course his sport is an especially lucrative one. Whenever you see men playing golf on television, you can be sure that not one of them is less than a dollar millionaire unless (and golf is one of the few sports where this is still possible) he is an amateur. Well on the way to becoming sport’s first billionaire, Woods has been ranked number one golfer in the world for 575 weeks to date (more than ten years in total) and continuously for nearly four-and-a-half years, despite having been out of action with an injury for eight months during that period.

By no means all of his wealth derives directly from playing golf. Tiger Woods is a highly marketable brand because he is highly popular and brings a huge following to his sport, both on the courses and on worldwide television. He also has always appeared squeaky clean, something PR people look for. Shrewdly, he has subscribed to the writer JM Coetzee’s philosophy of handling public attention: “I don’t perform cartwheels for the media”. It is twelve years since Woods granted an extended interview. He has remained private, aloof and therefore largely untouchable. So he is able to command top dollar for advertisements and endorsements.

This weekend’s incident has blown much of this out of the water. According to the official version, Woods drove his Cadillac Escalade 4x4 out of his driveway shortly before 2.30 on Friday morning. Almost immediately, he collided with a fire hydrant and then a tree. The car’s speed was not sufficient to engage the airbags. Both Woods’ lips were cut in the impact. His wife, Elin Nordegren, following on foot, tried to open the automobile, then smashed a window with a golf club and dragged the semi-conscious Tiger from the vehicle.


Mrs Woods in her modelling days

Police were summoned and determined that “no alcohol was involved in the accident”. How this finding was reached is not revealed. Can you effectively use a breathalyzer on a semi-conscious driver who has lip lacerations? At any rate, by around 3.00 Woods was being treated in hospital from whence he was discharged shortly thereafter. Later on Friday, Nordegren denied police entry to their home, saying that her husband was resting.

The internet duly heaves with theory and rumour about this sequence of events. An already running tale about Tiger and a woman described as a “nightclub hostess” suddenly acquires much greater significance. If that story may be accessed by you and me, it may be accessed by Mrs Woods. She wouldn’t be best pleased, goes the theory.

For what it is worth, I have my own take on this event. It has the merit of tidying up those elements in the official account that seem somewhat unconvincing. First I ask this question: did the cops breathalyze Elin Nordegren? Because, you see, my theory is that she was driving the Cadillac (damn it all, Tiger endorses Buick). She hit a hydrant and then a tree because, you know, she’s a girlie. Oh no, wait, that’s completely wrong (sorry, just twitting my women readers). She hit a hydrant and then a tree because she’d had a couple of bottles of vino. Concerned about her rushing out of the house and jumping in a car, Tiger pursued her on foot. She stepped out of the car, having picked up a stray golf club – I expect David Hockney has paintbrushes lying around in his car too – and slugged him in the face. He fell down. Aghast, she wondered what to do and decided to smash the Cadillac’s window so that she could claim she had done this to release the central locking and pull her husband from the wreck. “There is no blood in the car” screams The Hollywood Gossip site in italics (that’s how I know it was screaming). You bet your ass there’s no blood in the car.


Tiger – he means it

If my theory is what the Irish call bollix, Mrs Woods is free to sue me. I doubt her husband would welcome the further publicity of such a case. After all, while the matter is not sub judice (and it will remain so for at least as long as the Woods decline to talk to the Florida Highway Patrol), we are all free to speculate without prejudicing justice.

Meanwhile, if Tiger Woods still wants to reach that magic figure of a billion dollars, he had better come up with a convincing account of what transpired in the early hours of Friday morning. Otherwise, the endorsements might prefer to go to … um … John Daly.