Two images tell the story of Tiger’s sad decline
HE’S got his head thrown back, laughing as a large dog licks his face. He is holding his newborn baby son in the crook of his arm and beside him, his beautiful blonde wife Elin smiles happily while their toddler daughter, on her knee, giggles as a second large dog nuzzles her neck.
Even if you didn’t know that the man in the picture was one of the world’s richest sportsmen, even if you didn’t know that he was already a golfing legend, the ambitious young black outsider who made it to the pinnacle of the privileged, white man’s game, one thing was abundantly clear: this was a guy who had it all.
They’re not expensively dressed or styled. They’re in denims and sweatshirts, and Elin’s hair looks like she pinned it up any old way, without even glancing in a mirror, and she hasn’t bothered with a scrap of make-up.
And yet there is a honeyed gloss to the family in the picture, as if their obvious bliss and good fortune was a coat of rare golden varnish that would hold them together and protect them from the knocks and scratches that ordinary mortals weather.
In that picture of this delightful little family, gilded by youth and beauty and bountiful fate, their lives really did seem set for a storybook happy-ever-after.
Nobody ever looks more alone in a picture than when it’s a police mugshot. Even at that, though, the Tiger Woods who is staring, glazed and blearyeyed, from this week’s Florida State Police image cuts an uncommonly forsaken figure.
The adoring fans have moved on, the rest of the golfing elite are busy with their careers and tournaments and training, the sponsors and courtiers and corporate toadies have slowly drifted away. And the lovely family, he’s lost them too.
The perfect front was fractured in 2009 when he was exposed as a serial cheat after a Thanksgiving night bust up at the family home.
Elin challenged him over ‘sexts’ to other women on his mobile phone and, in a rage, grabbed a golf club and chased him out of the house.
When he crashed his SUV into a fire hydrant, she smashed in the rear window and shattered forever the image of Tiger Woods as the wholesome family man the world thought it knew.
Though they’ve rebuilt a friendly relationship since their divorce in 2010, Elin has ruled out a reconciliation and Tiger’s much-publicised new romance with skier Lindsey Vonn has also hit the skids.
He has suffered badly with back problems and hasn’t played competitively in months. He’s blamed the medication he’s been taking as he recovers from recent spinal surgery for the state he was in when Florida traffic cops found him slumped in his Mercedes on a roadside in the small hours of Tuesday morning.
The car had two flat tyres and a damaged bumper on the driver’s side, the engine was running and he had parked in a cycle lane.
There was no alcohol in his system, but it’s hard to believe that even the strongest painkillers, taken alone, could have accounted for his condition in the dash-cam footage which was later released by police.
HE couldn’t say where he was or where he was heading, though at one stage he seemed to think that he was on his way to Orange County in California – quite a drive from his Florida home.
He couldn’t walk a straight line, or tie his shoelaces properly, or follow a flashlight at the cop’s request and, when asked to recite the alphabet, he believed he’d been asked to sing the American national anthem backwards.
Later he apologised to ‘family, friends and fans’, blaming the incident on an unexpected reaction to prescription drugs – but adding that ‘I expect more of myself ’.
When he apologised, seven years ago, for his infidelities, he confessed that ‘I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to... I felt entitled.’
But he went on: ‘I was wrong. I was foolish. My failures have made me look at myself in a way I never wanted to.’
He looked at himself, and wanted us to see him as the man in the gilded family photograph.
Instead he must look at himself, as the world now sees him: dishevelled, humiliated and achingly alone.