Fore!

The news broke last Friday. Tiger Woods had been “seriously” injured in a car accident near his home in Florida. As the reports began to be updated on both CNN and the web, it was reported that the hospital where he was taken was saying that he wasn’t a patient there. As a member of the healthcare community, I know from experience that whenever a hospital says something like that it can mean one of four things: the patient was transferred, the patient requested no publicity, the patient was discharged, or the patient died. There was no further explanation from the hospital but before the night was out the news broke that Tiger had indeed been discharged with minor injuries. No “serious” complications at all. He was home.

Evidently the golf phenom drove over a fire hydrant and then crashed into a tree. A neighbor called 911 while his wife, Norwegian model Elin Nordegren, knocked out the back glass of his Escalade with a golf club (fitting choice, don’t you think?) in order to unlock the vehicle and get to him. People immediately began to ask how Tiger could do a thing like that. Speaking as a driver for over twenty-five years, if I ran over a fire hydrant I might lose control of my car too. You never know. What caused him to run over the hydrant remains in question but he wasn’t charged with DUI or anything similar. In fact he’s only going to get a ticket for $165. So what was up?

In the days since all this happened it has been revealed that Tiger and Elin were involved in a family dispute over his apparent infidelities as a husband. In other words, he was having an affair. Possibly with three other women. One says yes, there was an affair. One denies it. The other has no comment. Whatever, Tiger has admitted “transgressions” that have “let his family down.” He and Nordegren have two children.

The other women in question are reality TV veteran Jaimee Grubbs, nightclub promoter Rachel Uchitel, and marketing manager Kalika Moquin.

Grubbs was first seen on VH-1’s hit series Tool Academy with her then boyfriend, Shawn Southern. She was publicly humiliated when another woman entered the show claiming to be Southern’s true girlfriend and then at the show’s reunion episode, she appeared with Southern and the lady who upstaged her during the series, only to find out that Shawn had a third girlfriend who was pregnant. Maybe four-way hook ups are her specialty? Jaimee is the lady who admits to having an affair with Tiger. She’s gone public with it and says that right before all this hit the press she received a “frantic” voice mail from her paramour.

Rachel Uchitel, the New York club promoter, emphatically denies the allegations that she was romantically involved with Tiger. While it is known among her circle that she is relentless in her pursuit of celebrities, she is so adamant that she and Woods aren’t lovers she’s offered to take a lie detector test. Hey, Rachel, the guilty dog always barks loudest. You might want to tone it down a bit.

Kalika Moquin is the lady who has no comment. Her association with Tiger is really only a rumor, with nothing but hearsay to back it up. She isn’t saying anything at this point. If I were her, I wouldn’t either. Kissing and telling, or not kissing and not telling, as we all know can drive media interest in a person through the roof.

All this is making for great headlines and tabloid fodder. Tiger is perhaps the most famous and the highest paid sports star in the world and he is always in the news for something. His last big story was when he injured his knee and had to undergo surgery to repair it, throwing his golfing career’s continued momentum into question until he recovered. Since all this car wreck/runabout stuff hit the news he’s withdrawn from a charity golfing event he is sponsoring due to his injuries and he seems to be mostly laying low after his public confession to “transgressions.”

No one knows what’s going on at home with Tiger and Elin right now. Evidently they are keeping things under wraps as they work out whatever really happened between them last Friday. Tiger Woods seems like a decent guy. He burst onto the international stage as one of the youngest Masters winners ever and has since seen his career do nothing but go up and up with nothing but effortless ease. His public image has been practically spotless and the father who spurred him on to become a golfing giant, whom Tiger had a close relationship with, died a few years ago, prompting outpourings of sympathy from around the world. So people are understandably shocked by the news he’s generating right now.

I would say that no matter how likeable or how beloved Tiger Woods might be, he is still just a man. A man who achieved a lot of fame and became extremely wealthy at a very young age. All this has to have had its effects on him over the years, both good and bad, and while people often don’t make the best decisions in life they usually don’t screw up on purpose or with ill intentions when they get themselves into these messes. Sure, Tiger made his own choices and is now apparently paying for them. He travels a lot and obviously either felt lonely or was just overcome by hormones from the attention of however many women he had on the side. Either way, he could have avoided this public embarrassment if he’d just kept it zipped, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty, right?

There’s no excuse for extramarital affairs. No matter how happy or unhappy a person is at home, sleeping around is always something society frowns upon. Tiger Woods isn’t the first person to make “transgressions” and he won’t be the last either. Fame is a powerful aphrodisiac and when there is big money involved the heights of lust know no boundaries. Those who succumb to the temptations are always guilty of acting first and thinking later. They never elude the impacts of their actions.

But with possibly three women on the line, and a wife at home to boot, Tiger Woods is definitely giving a new meaning to the term “Fore!”

And that is my sole focus for now.