Woman who finally TAMED TIGER
His affairs with 120 women cost him £100m — and ruined his career. Now, as he tees off at the Ryder Cup, he’s back on a high thanks to the ...
model with an impeccable pedigree, and his two most recent girlfriends — U.S. Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn and personal styling company owner Kristin Smith — are similarly striking, high-powered blondes.
Nor, to her credit, does Erica bear comparison with many of the 120 women whom Woods reportedly admitted bedding when he under-went treatment in a Mississippi sex addiction clinic in 2010.
Among his secret harem, bleached hair, revealing outfits and, one suspects, surgically enhanced figures were the common denominator.
However, he is evidently smitten, for Erica is installed in his suite at the five-star Waldorf Astoria Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles, where the American team are staying, and she was on Woods’s sinewy arm on Wednesday evening at a Ryder Cup gala dinner.
Indeed, this has been something of a ‘coming out’ week for the couple. Though they have been together for a year, during which she has travelled the golf circuit with him and moved into his mansion, it was only last weekend, after he won in Atlanta, that they made a public show of affection.
AS A damp-eyed Woods walked off the 18th green, Erica greeted him with a prolonged hug, and TV microphones picked up their whispered exchange of ‘I love you’.
Should the U.S. team’s reborn talisman seal one of the least likely sporting comebacks ever seen by leading them to victory over Europe on Sunday, Erica will share the champagne.
According to one of Woods’s early mentors, Wally Goodwin, his golf coach at Stanford University in California, it will be well-deserved.
‘I have been watching Tiger this week, and there’s a new calmness about him,’ he said. ‘Something has fundamentally changed. There is a difference in the way he walks and carries himself. He even has a calmer expression.
‘If this new girl of Tiger’s comes from a fairly humble background and is down to earth, I believe he will be responding well to that.’ We must hope he is right. So how has Tiger arrived at this pivotal point in his life? And can this flawed genius ever change his stripes?
Though he has passed many milestones in his glittering career, should he surpass Jack Nicklaus’s record of winning 18 major championships (Woods stands second in the all-time list, with 14 victories) it would surely be his greatest triumph.
As he rose to the golfing summit, he was regarded as the man who had it all, and then some. He was courted by presidents and big cor-porations, respected for the chari-table foundation he’d set up to educate less fortunate children, feared by his sporting opponents, pursued by beautiful women, wealthy beyond imagination. And he appeared to have found his soulmate in his wife Elin, the daughter of a radio journalist and an eminent Swedish politician.
Elin bore him a daughter, Sam, now 11, and a son, Charlie, aged nine. Then, on Thanksgiving Day in November 2009, Woods’s world came crashing down. When the National Enquirer tabloid published a bombshell story about his affair with New York VIP nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel, he swore to his wife it was a lie.
However, when he was asleep she found Uchitel’s number in his phone and sent her a text saying ‘I miss you’. Almost instantly, Woods’s mistress replied that she was desperate to see him. His duplicity had been exposed. In the ensuing months, as an array of clandestine lovers sold their tawdry stories, the astounding double life he had been leading for years, all the while being portrayed as an upstanding sporting role model, unravelled.
During the next eight years, his public decline became a parable for the misery that lies in wait for those who abuse their wealth, fame and God-given talent.
But even for a man who betrayed his wife perhaps 120 times, maybe more, it seems there is redemp-tion. With commendable kindness, his ex-wife Elin — who earned a
psychology degree after the divorce — has forgiven Woods, and they are now said to be on good terms, sharing custody of the children to whom he is, by all accounts, a devoted father.
Now, after a couple of romantic false dawns, he has found apparent stability with Erica. Given her background, it is some elevation for her. In the Florida town of Boynton Beach, where she was raised in an unremarkable rented bungalow, her former next-door neighbour remembers her father Charlie, who died prematurely, as an habitual drunkard.
Her mother, Arlene Parton Dunne, now remarried, lives in a trailer — albeit a rather nice one. The neighbour describes Erica as ‘a smart girl’ who was singleminded in her ambition to better herself.
After gaining a degree, she went into business with her then boyfriend, Jesse Newton, and a third partner named Ricky McIntosh, borrowing £153,000 with plans to set up a string of five nightclubs in Orlando.
However, the venture failed and public records show their investor, Tom Morris, successfully sued Miss Herman for the return of his money, plus more than £31,000 in fines, interest and costs.
As she was ordered to pay this off in instalments of around £225 a week — to be deducted at source from the money she earns for running Woods’ Jupiter restaurant — it will take her many years to repay the debt. Unless, of course, her notoriously parsimonious boyfriend is suddenly seized with generosity.
But her past financial problems don’t end there, the court papers reveal. In 2012, a bank sued her for the £9,900 she borrowed to buy a BMW, and in 2014 she and Jesse Newton — who declined to comment when I called him this week — were served with an eviction notice after allegedly failing to pay rent to their landlord for two years.
Then, last December, debt collectors filed yet another lawsuit against Miss Herman, this time for thousands of dollars’ worth of items she allegedly bought on credit for the failed nightclubs. The case was dismissed after the debt agency failed to locate her. Presumably they didn’t look on the golf course.
All that must seem a world away from the magnificence of Versailles and the manicured greens of the Ryder Cup venue. Having caught Tiger’s roving eye while working in his restaurant, and impressing him with her savvy and unswerving devotion, she is his girl now.
Photographs released yesterday show her posing proudly beside him in a silver gown as the Ryder Cup players lined up with their wives and girlfriends.
If the great comeback rolls on, and Woods does beat Nicklaus’s record to become the most decorated golfer of all time, she will have played a small, but significant, part in one of sport’s most unlikely and uplifting stories.