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An insight into Tiger Woods
Why would the world’s greatest sportsman cheat on his lovely wife, Elin? Is it really just because he can?
Why do they do it, these extravagantly rewarded celebrities who have everything — these gilded people who capture our admiration and often our adulation?
Why do they end up crashed into a fire hydrant in the early hours of the morning, pursued by a furious wife and with a cocktail waitress excitedly jabbering to the press in the background, the police cars making their ominous and noisy approach? Or fall to their knees in a public convenience attempting, unwisely, to offer some sort of service to a police officer? Or get caught with some Los Angeles hooker in the front seat of a rented car in a bad-ass neighbourhood?
Shrinks will tell you that it is about a yearning to live life on the edge, the need that these alpha males, who have everything that money can buy, have for still more excitement and transgression. But it’s not that, I don’t think. It’s simpler than that.
They do it because they can. Because they can — and frankly, if we’re being honest, because you can’t. And also because it is easier to do it than not to do it. It is easier to succumb to temptation than to tell temptation to get lost — and, in the end, nobody will think any the worse of them for it. Or maybe they will briefly think the worse of them for it and then forget about it altogether.
So they all do it, they all succumb, or almost all. Even the really, really boring ones.
Never — we fondly thought — has there been a crueller and less apt misnomer for a man than “Tiger”, as applied to Eldrick Tont Woods. Surely the Tiger thing must be satire, we thought, like you might refer to Nick Clegg slightingly as “Goliath”.
The most relentlessly boring man in the entire history of the world’s most boring game, golf, a man seemingly bereft of personality, hinterland, mischief, hidden depths — you name it, Tiger Woods doesn’t have it. Even within his game, among people so boring that you would pay an awful lot of money never, ever to meet them, young Eldrick was regarded as deeply boring.
Superb, perhaps the best ever, but boring. He won tournaments, the experts whined, not by the flash of mercurial brilliance, or by nerve and inspiration, but by making sure he never played a terribly bad round; ie, it was his game plan never to do worse than anyone else. He was cautious, consistent, unspectacular and relentless, and some argued that he was so dully brilliant he was bad for the game.
I know nothing of the sport and wish to know even less; for me, the difference between a bogey and an eagle is that the latter hurts a hell of a lot more if it is lodged in your left nostril. But Tiger would succeed in making me even more bored than I otherwise would have been if he hove into view in a golf tournament that cropped up on the television.
In America, where the bland and colourless is worshipped as an ideal to which we all might aspire, Tiger was dutifully adored. Not merely brilliant, but brilliant and black. There are plenty of sporting heroes in America who are persons of colour, but they do not always live the Tiger life. Sometimes they murder their wives — which is not on, frankly.
Sometimes they merely have colourful private lives. Wilt Chamberlain, one of the greatest basketball players of the 1960s, boasted in his autobiography that he had had sex with 20,000 women. His lawyer famously said: “Some people collect stamps. Wilt collects women.”
Michael Jordan, another basketball legend (who, incidentally, mentored the young Tiger Woods), was dogged by rumours of extramarital affairs; but he largely avoided scandal until his wife of 17 years, Juanita, sued for divorce in 2006 and obtained a settlement estimated at more than $150m (now £90m). There were reports that she had hired a private eye who spied on Jordan with six different women.
White celebrities have also been caught, of course, and some have given a lesson in how to confess. Hugh Grant’s public display of contriteness in 1995 is widely regarded as having saved his box-office image after he was caught with a prostitute.
Then there’s David Letterman, the late-night chat show host who got out in front of a damaging story about sexual relations with members of his staff, gave his own version, talked about it until everyone was bored with it and is now more successful than ever.
Tiger, though, didn’t do that stuff. Tiger had a nice, intelligent and lovely blonde wife called Elin Nordegren, imported from beauty contests in Sweden, a woman with cool, faraway blue eyes to whom he was, we were assured, utterly devoted. Tiger had a spectacularly unremarkable private life. He was a person of colour who was nonetheless, metaphorically, not a person of colour at all. Nothing moved behind the shadows — indeed, there were no shadows.
Tiger was, in American icon terms, more than a person of colour — he was not just plain ol’ bog-standard African-American. He was part African-American and then part Dutch, part Thai, part Chinese, part Native American.
He was a sort of distillation of what it is to be American from Ellis Island, via the San Francisco railroad, through the Pennsylvanian farmlands and then the Georgia cotton fields, all the way to Wounded Knee. He was a social studies and civics lecture made flesh and blood — assuming he was flesh and blood, which was what we sometimes doubted.
He described himself as Cablinasian, a sort of acronym from his constituent racial parts. In politically correct terms he out-Obamas Obama and has been no less successful: he won tournaments, he trousered $110m (£70m) last year from prize money and endorsements, he did the mega-charity thing, he smiled for the cameras. And now this.
THE fire hydrant was just the start — and even that was evidence of the old Tiger Woods’s caution and control because, although he smashed into the thing, the airbags did not burst open as he was not driving sufficiently quickly (above 33mph) for them to do so.
In other words, he left home in a fury, apparently, but it was an Eldrick Tont Woods sort of fury and made him drive only slightly more dangerously than usual, with a degree of furious reserve. The radiator crumpled, the hydrant collapsed, the sirens began to sound. And behind the police, behind his wife — emerging from a different place altogether — was a certain Jaimee Grubbs, a cocktail waitress.
Soon we began to get an insight into the stuff that had been bothering Elin Woods, the sort of stuff that might lead them to have a filthy stand-up knock-down row late at night and Tiger to drive off in a cautious fury and knock the hydrant down.
Tiger had been doing what the celebrities always do. He had been doing what golfers always do: he had been playing around.
Golf isn’t as tedious as I thought. Yes, it keeps white, middle-aged bores off the streets. But Tiger’s brush with the fire hydrant has given us a glimpse of something else.
An investigation last week by The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s enterprising website, turned up “groupies, carousing and wild sex as a central element for many players” on the professional golf circuit.
One of these “hounds” or “wild men” — as the sexual predators are known within the small professional fraternity — confessed all in the first draft of his autobiography a few years ago, but his advisers warned that it would ruin him.
Golfers are away from home on the professional tour for weeks at a time; they stay in hotels; they have plenty of money; and (at least in Tiger’s case) they have athletes’ bodies. So it’s no surprise that groupies make their way to the ropes separating the crowds from the players — who send their caddies to do the pick-up.
Did Jordan, when he mentored the young Tiger, know about the dangers of text and phone messages? Perhaps not, because Grubbs kept acres of text and phone messages and neatly annotated details of sexual liaisons with Woods, which she was only too happy to share with the world. Why shouldn’t she be? There’s gold to be had from this sort of stuff.
Even when he hit that fire hydrant, Tiger still thought it might be little more of a problem than the ball falling into a patch of rough 30ft or 40ft from the fairway. A reason to be worried, but not much more. You can tell that from the phone message he left for Grubbs, betraying just the tiniest glimmer of panic towards the end: “Hey, it’s, uh, it’s Tiger. I need you to do me a huge favour. Um, can you please, uh, take your name off your phone. My wife went through my phone. And, uh, may be calling you.
“If you can, please take your name off that and, um, and — what do you call it? — just have it as a number on the voicemail, just have it as your telephone number. That’s it, okay. You gotta do this for me. Huge. Quickly. All right. Bye.”
You gotta do this for me. Uh, no, golf-boy — I don’t gotta.
Have we all been there, the gilded and the less gilded? That moment when the balance of power suddenly and decisively shifts within a clandestine relationship, a relationship you believed, delusionally, would be kept for ever sotto voce?
Not a nice moment for Tiger, still less for Elin, that shift in power, when the cocktail waitress begins to demand a bigger tip, when she finally realises the power she has. Tiger had been ordering, uh, vodka martinis for 31 months from the pouting, pneumatic and now sulphurous Ms Grubbs. Who knows the original terms of exchange between them? Whatever they were, they have been torn up: they always are, in the end. We learnt from one of Jaimee’s “pals” that Tiger was horrible in bed. Well, he would be, wouldn’t he? And she had also bedded George Clooney, who was amazing, which some Clooney-watchers may find surprising.
Then more emerged, as always happens. It is never just one cocktail waitress. This is the law of the tabloid revelation: as soon as one emerges, others quickly materialise, each with her own claim and her own spot on the early evening news, each with a need to confess to the truth, preferably if there is a cameraman and a director with a chequebook standing nearby.
Rachel Uchitel, Kalika Moquin — crazy names, crazy gals. Rachel is a New York night club promoter. Her “friends” revealed that she and Tiger took Ambien, a sleeping pill with a reputation as a disinhibitor, before having sex. Her newly hired Hollywood lawyer, Gloria Allred — the US equivalent of Max Clifford — is handling her negotiations with Team Tiger, to say no more.
Kalika, an employee at a Las Vegas nightclub, is a glowering brunette who, frankly, scares the hell out of me. After initial ambiguity, she has denied anything more than a nodding acquaintance with Tiger; but of course the tabloids and bloggers don’t believe her. I bet there will be more stories. Why three when you could have six, or nine, or 12 — or 20,000?
The mainstream American media have turned themselves inside out, in paroxysms, in agonies, about Tiger — rather as if they had suddenly discovered that Abraham Lincoln was a secret member of the KKK.
The jeremiads on the subject must be seen to be believed. Who is to blame for this state of affairs? How can it have happened? Do we not all, the people, bear responsibility for Tiger’s sins? Is this not our tragedy, as a people?
Lawks-a-mercy, as Brer Rabbit was wont to say — spare us. Perhaps over here we’re inured to shag’n’run stories, whether they involve famous sportsmen or the other high priests of slebdom, rock singers, actors and actresses. Ashley Cole leaves Cheryl at home to vomit over some babe he picks up in a nightclub; well, sure, he would. It’s not a national tragedy; if you’re being callous, it’s far from it.
Nor do we expect saintliness from our slebs, no matter how much they or their image- makers might impute such a notion. If Cliff Richard were found in bed with nine cocktail waitresses it would occasion, I suspect, our great surprise and perhaps the odd comment along the lines of: “Well, about time too.” But we would not tear our hair and weep.
The bloke who introduced Elin to Tiger wishes he had never brought them together in the first place. Jesper Parnevik, a Swedish golfer, said sadly: “We thought he was a better guy than he is . . . I hope she uses a driver next time instead of the three iron.” I think that last bit is a golfing reference; either way, next time Jesper introduces anyone he’ll be asking for CVs and maybe a Criminal Records Bureau check.
Tiger Woods has sort of apologised, as you do. In his apology he referred to his family several times, although not his wife directly by name. She is the one who, upon checking through his mobile telephone account, apparently rang up one of his floozies and said: “You know who this is. You’re f****** her husband.”
Good line, if true. But you can imagine her anguish at having been put in that position and the fury. If she’d been driving that car, the airbags would certainly have burst open: Elin Woods, with that pale Nordic face, rage and tears.
Her husband’s apology was the sort you hear from someone who is more annoyed at being got caught out than truly remorseful. And appended to it was the traditional lamentation of the celebrity — how ghastly the press can be, that while people in the public eye are bound to come under a certain amount of, you know, scrutiny, isn’t this all a bit too much, the stuff that has happened to me?
Well, yes and no. The fact that Tiger is a celebrity makes it slightly more humiliating — for Elin, largely — and one supposes slightly more awkward when you’re teeing off in a high wind and the snappers are alongside, watching for signs of weakness or of despondency.
Kathleen Hessert, president of Sports Media Challenge, a public relations firm, said: “If Tiger stays silent between now and the next tournament that he’ll play in, there’s just going to be quadruple the number of journalists there waiting to hear what he says. It just draws it out even further.”
By stalling the police and hiding in his mansion, he has been compared to John Edwards, the former Democratic presidential candidate who cheated on his cancer-stricken wife, lied about it and demolished his political career in the process.
Tiger won’t suffer as much. The American public will get over the fact that its pristine hero is not quite so pristine — after which his stock will soar. Tiger Woods — not so boring after all!
There’s no serious suggestion that his endorsements will be much affected — as long as he remains a champion golfer.
Plenty of other celebrities have endured romantic turmoil but remain in demand as pitchmen — notably Tom Brady, the star quarterback who married a supermodel (Gisele Bündchen) after his previous actress girlfriend (Bridget Moynahan) had given birth to his child; and Alex Rodriguez, the baseball slugger for the New York Yankees, who was variously linked with Madonna, prostitutes and numerous other women .
Tiger might lose Gillette (close-shave razors, anyone?) but Nike and many others will always want to associate themselves with his professional skills.
So all that is left is to repair those bridges with Elin, the only real victim in all of this. Tiger and his lawyers are reportedly showering money on her and revising their pre-nup agreement so that she can reap $80m (£50m) if she sticks it out for another seven years.
It’s not yet clear how hard to get she is playing. Does she realise how valuable her loyalty is to the Tiger brand? Will she demand that Tida, his pushy mother — who is seen by some as another reason for their marriage problems — backs off?
The real solution lies with Eldrick Tont Woods himself. It would be nice to think that — even under siege in their home — the new, not quite so boring Tiger could summon up the remorse to say sorry to his wife and mean it.
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