UPDATE: Tiger Woods released a statement on Sunday afternoon.
IT’S ODD TO THINK that the biggest golf story of the year happened in the early morning hours of November 27, the day after Thanksgiving. But that may be the case. As you’ve probably heard by now, Tiger Woods was involved in a single-car accident outside his home in Isleworth, a gated community in Orlando, Florida.
According to reports, Tiger, driving a Cadillac Escalade, struck a fire hydrant and tree at a fairly low speed. (The airbags didn’t deploy.) His wife, Elin, hearing the accident from inside the couple’s house, came to Tiger’s aid. She broke the back window of the vehicle with a golf club to rescue her husband. Tiger had cuts and blood in his mouth, and was unconscious for several minutes. He was treated at a local hospital and released.
The good news: Tiger is apparently OK. The bad news: the story doesn’t end there.
The accident came just two days after the National Enquirer published a story that Tiger was having an affair with Rachel Uchitel, the Director of VIP Services for Pink Elephant, a company involved in the nightclub scene. Ryan Ballengee of Waggle Room interviewed Uchitel on Friday and published her denial early Saturday morning. (Other outlets have also reported that she denied the affair, including the Associated Press.)
Late on Friday celebrity news site TMZ.com wrote that Tiger’s facial scratches were, instead, the result of a domestic dispute with his wife. TMZ.com also wrote, “… but according to our source, Woods says his wife followed behind with a golf club. As Tiger drove away, she struck the vehicle several times with the club.”
I don’t know what’s fact and what’s fiction. I do know the feeding frenzy has only just begun and that this story must be the worst-possible nightmare for the intensely private world No. 1 golfer. Bad news for Tiger is almost always bad news for golf.
2009 was already set to go into the books as a dismal year in golf. It just got worse.
−The Armchair Golfer
(Image: Keith Allison/Flickr)
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