What to make of Tiger’s early-morning brush with mortality – or more accurately mortification? They don’t call her Mrs Woods for nothing.
Through his own blinkered determination on the golf course and almost fanatical privacy, Elin Nordegren’s bloodied and bruised husband has become a veritable sporting automaton as much as a phenomenon; successful and surly in almost equal measure.
Woods’s obvious antipathy towards the fourth estate is one of the reasons a revengeful media are now frenziedly ‘Big Game Hunting’ at the slightest sniff of scandal.
This after all is the globe’s biggest and wealthiest sports star: a billion-making business in Nike branding, the Muhammad Ali of this millennium, albeit without the charisma. While Ali’s allure forgave a multitude of sins, Woods wears a face wetter than an Irish winter.
Last weekend’s bizarre episode within Eldrick’s gated Florida enclave shows the machine is flesh and blood, warts and all, just like the rest of us. “I’m human and I’m not perfect,” he admitted afterwards. Who knows, he might even smile if David Feherty dares to crack a gag about his driving the next time a Tiger tee shot strays off course. Or maybe not.
