from David Jones
For a man who prepares for golf tournaments with obsessive dedication, Tiger Woods seemed somewhat distracted this week during the U.S. team’s putting practice session for the ryder Cup, which tees off in Paris this morning.
You would think that preparation for the three-day battle against America’s European opponents would be consuming his attention. Yet after every few strokes, I watched him pause to remove his phone from the pocket of his immaculate white slacks and check his texts, occasionally tapping out a hasty reply.
Inevitably, one of the spectators clamouring to catch a glimpse of Woods — who fell from grace nine years ago when it was revealed he’d had affairs with a plethora of porn stars and cocktail waitresses — couldn’t resist a ribald Gallic dig.
‘Hey, Teegeur! Are you talking to your fancy women?’ rasped the wag, doubtless recalling how the golfer’s ex-wife, Elin Nordegren, discovered his serial adultery by sending a bogus text to one of his mistresses, whose numbers he recklessly saved in his phone.
The smutty jibe brought one or two sniggers, but most people tutted disapprovingly.
From the moment he stepped off the plane at Charles de Gaulle airport on Monday, closely followed by his latest girlfriend, Erica Herman, 34, who manages his Florida restaurant, Woods has been greeted like a messiah. Among a stellar cast of most of the world’s best golfers, his is virtually the only name on anyone’s lips.
‘Allez, Teegeur!’ people cry adoringly, imploring him (almost always in vain) to sign autographs and pose for selfies.
As for Woods, if he heard that snide remark, he didn’t seem to care. Never has the notoriously surly golfer seemed so happy and relaxed. For the change in his fortunes has been dramatic.
Barely a year ago, he appeared in a Florida court after being found slumped at the wheel of his idling Mercedes, having swallowed a cocktail of painkillers. From his bug-eyed police mugshot it was painfully clear he had hit rock bottom.
THIS was the final humiliation in a ruinous decade, during which he not only lost his squeaky-clean image, his family, and at least £100 million in alimony and cancelled sponsorship contracts, but suffered such serious spinal injuries that doctors feared he might not walk again, let alone recover the form that made him arguably the finest golfer ever to swing a club.
Yet now, aged 42, balding and slightly stooped after four back operations — the last of which entailed fusing two vertebrae — Tiger is roaring again, on and off the golf course.
Last weekend, after five years without a competitive win and a slump as low as 1,199th in the world rankings, he pocketed £3.5million after triumphing at the prestigious PGA Tour championship in Atlanta and, by so doing, coming second overall in the FedEx Cup.
From the scenes of wild euphoria when he sank the clinching putt, it was clear his fans have forgiven him his indiscretions.
Meanwhile, Woods’s business affairs are flourishing again. Such was his universal appeal, as the first black person to dominate a sport that belonged to the wealthy white elite, that Woods became the planet’s highest-paid athlete soon after turning professional at 20. He has since amassed an estimated £1.1 billion in prize money and endorsement deals.
At the nadir of his self-inflicted woes, however, when he was dropped by sponsors and embroiled in a divorce wrangle, his finances appeared so precarious that he considered selling his beloved 155 ft yacht, ‘Privacy’.
But all that is in the past. His resurgent popularity has secured him fresh tie-ins with Bridgestone and golf brand TaylorMade, while he retains his £152million-a-year partnership with Nike. The Woods empire, reportedly worth £573 million in 2016, seems set to expand.
Then there is his new girlfriend Erica, with whom he may have been exchanging texts as he practised on Wednesday. With her understated looks, mousy hair, and blue-collar background (her mother, I have discovered, lives in a mobile trailer home) not to mention her chequered business dealings — more of which later — Miss Herman is not exactly Woods’s usual type.
His Swedish ex-wife is a statuesque former