LADY-KILLER

THE SUPERMARKET TABLOID National Enquirer started it
all when it published a small article about an alleged extramarital
affair between professional golfer Tiger Woods and a nightclub
manager. Five months later, the story was everywhere, as a seem-
ingly endless stream of mistresses was uncovered. The Enquirer ran
a headline claiming that, over the course of his six-year marriage,
Woods had slept with more than 121 different women. “Tiger
Woods’s whole thing was that he was so wholesome, a clean young
man who sponsored many products. You just didn’t think of him
doing something like this. And the whole scandal just kept getting tawdrier and tawdrier, as more
and more women stepped forward,” Barry Blitt remembers. “My image (above and opposite) is,
on the surface, so clean because you really have to have some remove from the tabloidness of a
story like this, otherwise it wouldn’t seem New Yorker-y. To see him in bed with a whole bunch
of women, that wouldn’t work.”

VANITY FAIR’S COVER featuring
Woods (above), taken pre-scandal by Annie
Leibovitz, caused a stir: Was this, as Leibovitz
said she intended, a portrait of an “intensely
competitive athlete” or, as various bloggers
claimed, the portrayal of a hypersexual black
man—the racist trope of the black brute?

JOHN CUNEO’S SKETCH of Woods
caught in a sand trap (right), though at first
glance similar to Barry Blitt’s, is far less
wicked—the reader doesn’t have to fill in
the blanks.

82