It may have been the loudest cheering ever generated by Tiger Woods. At dusk on March 29, 2009, the gallery around the eighteenth hole at Bay Hill in Orlando could be heard a mile away as Tiger’s sixteen-foot putt banged in, capping one of the biggest comebacks of his career. In his 239th start, Woods had won his sixty-sixth PGA Tour event. More important, the victory at the Arnold Palmer Invitational was his first tournament win since undergoing knee surgery nine months earlier. The NBC announcers referred to Tiger’s performance as “magical.” In this instance, adjectives like supernatural and otherworldly would not be exaggerations. It had been only three months since he had blown out his Achilles. The stress fractures in his tibia were healed, and he had a reconstructed ACL. Whatever Lindsay and Galea were doing was working. After starting the final round five strokes behind, Woods had come roaring back, demonstrating more emphatically than ever that he remained the greatest individual performer in all of sports.
As Woods walked off the green to the chant of “Ti-ger, Ti-ger, Ti-ger,” he was greeted by the King, Arnold Palmer.
“What did I say to you last year?” Palmer asked him. “I said Earl would have loved it. He would have loved it.”
Woods smiled and thanked him. It felt exhilarating to be back on top.
In Tiger’s career, the year 2009 will forever be remembered for what happened to him off the course—a mysterious motor vehicle accident, followed by the exposure of an infidelity crisis so big that he would never again be looked at in the same light. But his spectacular fall from grace would not come until the end of the year. Prior to that, Woods played some of the most remarkable golf of his life. He ended up winning seven of the nineteen tournaments he entered that season. In sixteen of those tournaments he finished in the top ten. He was first in birdie average, scoring average, iron play from 175 to 200 yards, and greens in regulation; he topped the money list with more than $10 million; and he finished the year ranked number one in the world. It was also the year that he became the first athlete in history to exceed $1 billion in career earnings. By every visible measure, Tiger Woods was alone at the pinnacle of professional sports, the most talented golfer to ever play the game, the greatest athlete of his generation, and the richest athlete of all time.
But Woods was living in denial, deceiving himself and those closest to him. In February, he and Elin had welcomed their second child, Charlie Axel Woods, into the world. It should have been an occasion of immense joy, a family milestone that could have inspired Woods to spend more time with his wife and children. Many of the game’s greatest golfers experienced at least a modest decline in their competitive edge after children came along and priorities changed. “When I was younger, before I had children and money, all I wanted to do was play golf, work at my golf, get better at my golf,” Tom Watson said. “But when the children came, my time with them was very important to me. I definitely lost some edge.” Woods, on the other hand, never lost his competitive drive to dominate his sport, to win every time he stepped onto a golf course. At thirty-three, he was untethered from his family by a narcissism that fed his self-destructive addictions to bodybuilding, painkillers, sleeping pills, and sex.
His upbringing, so critical to his development into a machine-like athlete, forever stunted his ability to form—much less maintain—the kind of intimate relationship with a spouse that is built on self-sacrifice, loyalty, trust, and selflessness; nor was he equipped to cope with fatherhood. He loved his children, but his lifestyle virtually assured that he would be an absentee dad.
In June 2009, Woods was in New York City to attend yet another promotional event, this time for EA Sports. The video-game maker was rolling out a new product, and Tiger was on hand for the launch. Afterward, on the same day that Michael Jackson died after fatally overdosing on a cocktail of pain and sleep medications, an obviously worn-down Woods talked to People magazine writer Steve Helling. The subject quickly turned to parenting. “My dad passed away before Sam was born,” Tiger told Helling, “so I didn’t have a chance to talk to him about being a father. I regret that. I will always regret that. I think of him every day. He taught me everything. I hear his voice.”
There is a lot to unpack in that statement. Woods, who started taking Ambien to combat sleeplessness back when his father was dying, was still in the grip of insomnia. Racked by regrets stemming from the loss of his father and his own perceived inadequacies as a dad, Woods desperately missed communicating with his best friend. But the saddest part of Tiger’s statement wasn’t what he said but who he said it to. Instead of opening up to his wife or a genuine friend, he was talking to a writer at a celebrity magazine. It was an indication that by 2009, Woods was more alone than ever. Yet he was signaling that he needed help.
On the same day that Tiger talked to Helling, he met up with his friend Derek Jeter. They ended up at a Manhattan nightclub with three women in their twenties. One of the women in the group was Mark O’Meara’s niece, Amber Lauria. Tiger had known Lauria since 1997, when they were introduced to each other at O’Meara’s home. Woods had spent countless hours with Lauria at Isleworth and around Orlando during her teenage years. From the beginning, their bond was more like a brother-and-sister relationship than a friendship. By 2009, Lauria had graduated from college and was working at Fox News, and they would meet up from time to time when Woods was in New York. He also communicated with her frequently by phone and text.
After Earl died, Lauria said, her conversations with Tiger took on a more depressing tone. From that point on, he seldom seemed happy.
“He looked at me like a family member,” Lauria said. “But I remember thinking he’s in a really bad spot to be calling and crying and being this upset for this long. That’s when I really started seeing a big change in him. He would just go to a dark place.” Lauria admired Elin and remembered thinking, I wish Elin were here with him at a time when he’s so upset. But she also recognized that it wasn’t practical for Elin to be on the road with Tiger. She had two young children at home.
Lauria agreed to meet up with Woods at the nightclub because she still cared about him as a friend. “He was alone, and he needed people around him,” she said. Still, it was clear that things were amiss. “I said to him, ‘I’m here for you, but you should be with your wife or calling your wife. I know you’re traveling. But what’s going on?’ ”
Emotionally, Woods was adrift, constantly moving from city to city, hooking up with one woman after another. Most of the women whose names and numbers filled his cell phone directory were ones he had met in nightclubs and casinos. He persuaded one after another to believe that she was his only mistress. All of these women—the ones he paid and the ones he picked up—were women he could control. For the most part, they were younger than he was, less sophisticated, enamored of his status, and in the dark about his exploits. It was a situation that made it easier to maintain his secret life.
But during his visit to New York City that week in June 2009, he met a woman who represented something different. Thirty-four-year-old Rachel Uchitel, a glamorous beauty, had grown up a child of privilege in Manhattan. Well-educated and possessing a degree in psychology, she first encountered fame after the 9/11 terror attacks. The New York Post ran a photo of her weeping while holding a picture of her missing fiancé, who worked in the World Trade Center, and the image was distributed around the world via the internet. Uchitel went on to become a television producer at Bloomberg before transitioning to VIP hostess/manager at highend nightclubs from the Hamptons to New York to Las Vegas, earning high praise for her people skills and attention to detail. Uchitel gained another measure of fame when it was reported that she’d had an affair with actor David Boreanaz. She also knew Derek Jeter.
Woods was taken with Uchitel. She was a year older than he was, and she lived a lifestyle that was more akin to his than the other women he knew. She was a jet-setter, accustomed to flying around the world and running in the same circles as celebrities and CEOs. By the time Tiger left New York, he’d added Uchitel to the directory on his phone, and she’d added him to hers, under the code name Bear.
Uchitel started flying down to Orlando, where Tiger would put her up in a condo near his home. When Woods arrived, he would close the blinds. They would stay up watching late-night comedy on television. And despite being plagued by insomnia, Tiger didn’t have trouble going to sleep when he was with Uchitel. Their sexual intimacy and mutual familiarity with grief—he was still suffering from the loss of his father, and she had lost her fiancé in an act of terrorism, as well as her father to a cocaine overdose—enabled them to bond in a way that provided a deeper element to their relationship. On one occasion, while with Uchitel in the Orlando condo, Tiger said, “This makes me so happy.” It was a sad admission, considering he was practically around the corner from his home, where Elin was taking care of their newborn son and two-year-old daughter, blissfully unaware.
At this point, Hank Haney didn’t know what was going on either, but he recognized a drop-off in Tiger’s practice hours and in his effort. “There were times at Isleworth,” Haney said, “when I’d say, ‘Where is he?’ I mean, he’d say he’s going to the store and be gone for an hour or two. Or Elin would be out of town, and he’d be getting ready to go out. ‘Where are you going?’ I’d ask. And he would make up some story about how he was going over to Bryon Bell’s house. I could tell he was lying.”
Yet it never crossed Haney’s mind that Woods might be meeting up with other women. Haney was around Tiger more than almost anyone, and he said he never witnessed any flirting, never mind infidelity. “I never saw him with anybody,” Haney said. “I’m the kind of friend that if I saw something, I would say something. Steve Williams was the same way.”
The one thing that Woods couldn’t hide from Haney and Williams was his increasingly surly behavior on the golf course. Almost immediately after Woods returned to the Tour in 2009, both his swing coach and his caddie started seeing red flags about his emotional state. The first one went up at the 2009 Masters. After playing poorly at Augusta, Woods went on a rant to the press: “I fought my swing all day and just kind of Band-Aided it around, and almost won the tournament with a Band-Aid swing.” Without naming Haney, Woods had given him a backhanded insult, igniting rumors that Haney was on the verge of being fired.
Haney responded with an email to Woods: “You didn’t make any friends or fans with the way you acted at the Masters. You just looked stressed and pissed the whole time you were there.”
It became even clearer that Woods was reaching the end of his emotional rope at the 2009 PGA Championship at Hazeltine National Golf Club outside Minneapolis. After scores of 67 and 70 in the first two rounds, Woods held a four-shot lead going into the third round. He appeared to be well on his way to closing to within three majors of Nicklaus’s record. But in Friday’s post-round press conference, an enterprising reporter summoned the courage to inquire if Woods ever felt he had choked in a major.
Furious, Woods just stared him down.
Finally, moderator Kelly Elbin broke the awkward silence. “We’ll take that to be a no?” he said.
“Be creative,” Woods finally said to the reporter. “You usually are.”
But the question would prove prescient.
After the third round, Woods maintained a two-stroke lead, and the outcome seemed like a foregone conclusion. Tiger had never lost a major when leading after three rounds. He entered the final round two strokes ahead of South Korea’s Yang Yong-eun, better known as Y. E. Yang. Yang, who was thirty-seven, hadn’t picked up a club until he was nineteen, and hadn’t broken par until he was twenty-two. Earlier in the year, Yang had been forced to sink a seven-foot putt on the final hole of the last day of qualifying school just to make the Tour. He had a grand total of one victory on the PGA Tour. He was the longest of long shots to beat Woods.
All day long, Woods and Steve Williams barely said a word to Yang, employing the kind of gamesmanship—isolation, slow play, crowding—Tiger was famous for. But Yang never got rattled. After twelve holes, he had pulled even with Woods. On thirteen, Woods stuffed a 3-iron from 248 yards to within eight feet of the hole. When Yang buried his tee shot in a greenside bunker, it appeared a birdie-bogey swing was in the works and Woods was on his way to his fifteenth major. But then Yang hit the shot of his life, blasting out of the bunker to twelve feet. Moments later, he snaked in a tough putt for par.
Still, all Woods had to do to stay even with Yang was make an eight-foot birdie putt, the kind he’d dropped hundreds of times under pressure. Only this time, the unthinkable happened. Woods missed. His putt burned the left edge of the cup and failed to fall. The look on Woods’s face was a mix of anger and disbelief.
Inside the clubhouse, players—many of whom had crumbled in similar pressure-packed situations against Woods—were jumping up and down on a couch, cheering Yang on, hoping somebody, anybody, even the South Korean son of a vegetable farmer, would finally slay the dragon.
With five holes still to play, Woods had plenty of time to overtake Yang. But something was amiss; the failure to drop the kind of putt he hadn’t missed, even under pressure, in two decades had shaken something loose in Tiger. When Yang chipped in for eagle on the next hole, Woods never recovered, missing two more critical, makeable putts on the last four holes. He ended up losing to Yang by three strokes. His perfect record of 14–0 in winning majors after holding or sharing the third-round lead was broken.
Steve Williams later told a friend that he thought the loss of the PGA Championship to Yang was the first crack in the armor. It was the beginning of what he called the Snowball Effect. In his 2006 book Golf at the Top, Williams described the effect as an unexpected moment that “allows a flash of self-doubt to enter the conscious mind and then to penetrate all the way to the imagination.” Then, having opened a wound in the most sensitive part of the brain, the person begins to “listen more and more closely to the negative interpretations the imagination is placing on events and project them onto the next shot and the next round and the next tournament.”
In other words, when you miss once when it really counts—like an eight-foot birdie putt late at the PGA Championship—the dark whispers in your mind grow louder and louder. As summer turned to fall, Woods was hearing such whispers seemingly at every turn. Weeks after losing to Yang at the PGA, he came unglued at the Deutsche Bank Championship in Massachusetts, throwing his driver in a fit of anger. Then at the Australian Masters in November, he lost his temper again. After a bad tee shot, he threw his club down with such force that it landed in the gallery. It could easily have injured someone.
Hank Haney was watching the outburst on television and thought to himself, This is a troubled guy.
The problems in Australia ran deeper than Haney or Williams ever imagined. Back on August 29, Woods had sent a series of dark, denigrating texts to porn star Joslyn James, another mistress, that signaled his state of mind:
4:08 p.m. Hold you down while i choke you and Fuck that ass that i own.
4:10 p.m. Then im going to tell you to shut the Fuck up while i slap your face and pull your hair for making noise.
5:00 p.m. I really do want to be rough with you. Slap you around
5:15 p.m. I want you to beg for my cock. Kiss you all over to convince me to let you have it in your mouth
5:26 p.m. Next time i see you, you better beg and if you don’t do it right i will slap, spank, bite and fuck you till mercy
In October, he was texting Jaimee Grubbs, the cocktail waitress from San Diego: “I will [see] you Sunday night. It’s the only night in which I am totally free.”
If that wasn’t enough, Woods was reportedly hooking up with a twenty-seven-year-old marketing manager for a Las Vegas nightclub, confiding to her that he wasn’t happy in his marriage and telling her how much pressure he felt.
In the middle of October, Woods was back at it with Grubbs, hoping to arrange a rendezvous in Newport Beach. But on the 18th, he texted:
Change of plans. Meet me at the island hotel. It’s a little safer. Got us a room for the night. Room 905. It’s on the east side of fashion island.
Then he followed up with further instructions:
It’s under the name Bell—Mr. and Mrs. Bryon Bell.
At the same time, Woods was arranging a rendezvous with Rachel Uchitel.
Acting on a tip, the National Enquirer was hot on Tiger’s trail once again. Back in 2007, it had seemed like a coup when IMG and sophisticated lawyers managed to squelch the Enquirer story about Woods and the pancake-house waitress in Orlando. But after that great escape, Tiger overlooked the fact that tabloids are like sharks that can detect prey from the scent of a single drop of blood in the water. Once Woods was wounded in ’07, the Enquirer never stopped tracking him—and after Uchitel entered the picture, the chase was on. The tabloid staked out her apartment and waited to see what would happen.
“It just became, well, let’s follow her,” said a source at the Enquirer. “Following people looks good on TV, but in real life the success rate is, like, two percent. Amazingly, this actually worked out all the way right up to the room.”
The room in question turned out to be a suite on a special floor at the Crown Towers in Melbourne, Australia, where Woods was staying during the Australian Masters. Uchitel was headed there after receiving this email from Bryon Bell: “Here are the details for all the flights. Sorry for all the changes. I look forward to meeting you tomorrow.”
Bell was a critical cog in the setting up and maintaining of the secrecy of Tiger’s trysts. But this time a surveillance team photographed Uchitel’s arrival at the Melbourne airport and hotel. Then, as she entered an elevator on her way to the thirty-fifth floor, an Enquirer reporter slipped inside and confronted her as she walked to Woods’s suite. At first Uchitel denied any connection to Woods, but the futility of that approach quickly became apparent. She eventually returned to the US, leaving Team Tiger to sort out how to handle its most explosive scandal to date.
While performing a staggering juggling act in his private life, Tiger won the Australian Masters by two strokes and pocketed a $3 million appearance fee. Afterward, he talked at length with Australian golf writers about the nuances of shot-making. “I felt this was a tricky golf course in a sense,” he said. “It’s not overly long, but you can hit marginal shots and have them in pretty bad spots. You had to make sure that you understood where to miss the golf ball. That’s one of the things that I love on a golf course—it gets fast like this, and you have to maneuver the golf ball correctly.”
Woods’s press conference was an insightful illustration of the compartmentalization performed by a man living a double life. At a time when he was careening toward a steep cliff that threatened to expose his duplicity and ravage his marriage, he calmly talked about the thrill he derived from shaping a shot away from danger zones. Immune for so long to the responsibilities of everyday life, Woods had, no doubt, developed a gaping blind spot that covered the consequences of his narcissistic ways, enabling him to believe he could cheat on his wife with impunity and forever escape detection.
On the other hand, it’s also possible that the high-stakes risks he was taking with so many women—arranging clandestine trysts and lying about his singular devotion to each woman on his overgrown list of paramours—may have breathed oxygen into his creative genius as a golfer. Perhaps Woods had scaled Everest so many times as an athlete that he was forever searching for external sources of adrenaline rushes—deep-water diving, Navy SEAL training, extreme workouts. The women in his life, in that respect, were just another way to fill a void and satisfy an urge. As strange as it may sound, Tiger played some of his best golf in the years when his life was most out of control. It was as if the chaos in his life outside the ropes propelled his play on the course to new heights.
But on the flight home from Melbourne, a feeling of foreboding set in. Back in Isleworth, he confided to a fellow pro: “I think I’m about to come out on the wrong side of a big media story.”
Complicating matters was the fact that despite her attempts at discretion when confronted by the reporter in Australia, Uchitel had previously disclosed details of her affair with Woods to other people, one of whom had passed a polygraph and sold her story to the Enquirer.
Woods tried to get the story killed. “We probably heard from every lawyer Tiger’s ever employed in his life,” said a source at the Enquirer.
This time, however, there would be no deal to save him from exposure. With his gold-plated, family-friendly reputation facilitated by the likes of Nike and Disney and American Express, Woods was too alluring a target. For the better part of four years, he’d managed to elude the Enquirer. But now the superhero-like athlete with the magnetic smile that appeared on everything from Wheaties boxes to airport billboards was finally locked in the tabloid’s crosshairs.
“You don’t go in until you have the smoking gun, and then it really doesn’t matter what they say,” a source at the Enquirer said. “Then it’s like, ‘Go ahead and sue me.’ And we’ll sue you for malicious prosecution.”
When it became apparent that even the combined forces of IMG and a platoon of high-priced lawyers were not going to be able to derail the story, Woods and his team started circling the wagons. Mark Steinberg telephoned Hank Haney, who was on his way to China to establish a junior golf academy. “Hank, I want to give you a heads-up,” Steinberg told him. “There’s going to be a story coming out about Tiger and this girl. It’s not true. Everything is going to be fine. But if anybody asks you about it, don’t say anything.”
Steinberg also sent a text to Steve Williams: “There is a story coming out tomorrow. Absolutely no truth to it. Don’t speak to anybody.”
It fell to Woods to convince his wife. He told her the tabloid story was a lie, that there was no affair between him and Uchitel. But on Monday, November 23, in advance of publication, the Uchitel exposé began circulating on the internet. It contained a quote attributed to her that read like a dagger directed at Elin: “It’s Tiger Woods. I don’t care about his wife! We’re in love.”
Blindsided, Elin didn’t know what to believe. It was the week of Thanksgiving, and little Charlie had just learned to walk and was starting to say his first words. For Elin, these were monumental milestones of joy. But the suspicions in her mind were making it impossible to focus on anything else. In need of someone to confide in, she called the one person she trusted above all—her identical twin, Josefin. They had been best friends since childhood. Elin knew Josefin would know what to do. After obtaining a Master of Laws from the London School of Economics and Political Science, Josefin received her law degree in Sweden and joined the American-based firm McGuireWoods LLP. When Elin called her, Josefin was working out of the firm’s London office, where she specialized in mergers and acquisitions. She immediately came to her sister’s aid, providing emotional support and advice.
With the situation worsening, Woods took the extraordinary step of arranging a phone call between Elin and Uchitel, who corroborated Tiger’s account that there had been no sexual relationship between them. Unconvinced, Elin wanted to see Tiger’s phone. Afraid that she would find out about the other women in his life, Tiger frantically tried to cover his tracks. He left an urgent voice mail with Jaimee Grubbs: “Can you please take your name off your phone? My wife went through my phone and may be calling you. So if you can, please take your name off . . . [and] just have it as a number on the voice mail. You’ve got to do this for me. Huge. Quickly. All right. Bye.”
The following day, the Enquirer landed on supermarket racks in the Orlando area. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and the “World Exclusive” headline “Tiger Woods Cheating Scandal” splashed across the cover intensified the already dire atmosphere in the Woods home. The tension was amplified by the fact that Tiger’s mother was visiting for the holiday. Nothing triggered anxiety in Woods like the fear of disappointing his mother, and nothing had ever disappointed Kultida more than family betrayal—first when her parents abandoned her, and then when her husband was repeatedly unfaithful. It was overwhelming to contemplate how she would react to the realization that her son had far eclipsed his father in the infidelity department.
The holiday provided a false appearance of reprieve. The Enquirer story got very little play elsewhere. But Tiger’s cell phone was an explosive electronic record of his illicit affairs. His device had also become another addiction. On Thanksgiving Day, Woods couldn’t resist texting multiple women, including Grubbs. In a short exchange, he wished Grubbs a happy Thanksgiving, and she replied, “u too love.”
At the same time, Elin remained fixated on Tiger’s phone. After he fell into an Ambien-induced sleep on Thanksgiving night, she searched his text history. She found one from him that said: “You are the only one I’ve ever loved.” He had not sent that text to her.
Unsure of the recipient’s identity, Elin sent a text to the person from Tiger’s phone. It read, “I miss you. When are we seeing each other again?” Before long, a reply came back. While her husband slept, Elin called the mysterious number, and Uchitel picked up. Immediately recognizing her voice, Elin lost it.
In the intense moments that followed, Woods awoke and emerged from his home barefoot in the middle of the night and got into his SUV. Speeding out of his driveway, he lost control, clipping a hedge and swerving into his next-door neighbor’s yard, driving over a fire hydrant and plowing into a tree. When police arrived after responding to a 911 call from Tiger’s neighbor, they found that the windows on both sides of the back seat of his vehicle had been smashed out with a golf club that had been swung by Elin.
Renowned marriage therapist Esther Perel has worked with hundreds of couples who have been shattered by infidelity. “Few events in the life of a couple, except illness and death, carry such devastating force,” Perel said. In her best-selling book The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, Perel explains that the agony suffered by a betrayed spouse goes much deeper than just a violation of trust. “It’s a shattering of the grand ambition of romantic love. It’s a shock that makes us question our past, our future, and even our very identity. Indeed, the maelstrom of emotions unleashed in the wake of an affair can be so overwhelming that many psychologists turn to the field of trauma to explain the symptoms: obsessive rumination, hyper-vigilance, numbness and disassociation, inexplicable rages, uncontrolled panic.”
In the case of Tiger Woods, it would be an understatement to say that Elin’s discovery of his infidelity unleashed a maelstrom of emotions. As Woods lay unconscious on the road at 2:25 a.m. on November 27, 2009, blood on his teeth and lips, he finally appeared as he truly was—a vulnerable, fragile, deeply wounded person. In shock, Elin tended to the man who had broken her heart—placing a pillow under his head, slipping socks on his feet, covering him with a blanket, and pleading with him to open his eyes. Frantic, Kultida ran from the house, yelling, “What happened? What happened?” Soon police officers and paramedics were on the scene, asking the same question. As Tiger was placed on a gurney and rolled toward an ambulance, he momentarily opened his eyes and tried to speak. His lips moved, but there were no words. Then his eyes rolled back in his head, as if he were dead. Elin screamed and Kultida wept as the medics closed the doors and the ambulance lights slowly faded into the Florida night.