Tiger Woods may be a prat but his wife certainly isn't!
Tiger Woods tries to repair damage to his marriage, and his golf brand.
In a lakeside Florida mansion, marriage counsellors, lawyers and public relations advisers are engaged in a bizarre and expensive round of shuttle diplomacy between the world's richest athlete and his furious wife.
For Tiger Woods, a control freak accustomed to calling the shots both on the fairway and in his private life, the unravelling of an image as carefully manicured as a country club green is both agonising and self-inflicted.
Tiger Woods' friend 'bought' Rachel Uchitel a plane ticket The scandal of his philandering is so damaging to his "Mr Clean" brand that the publicity-averse superstar is even considering an invitation to appear on the sofa of talk show queen Oprah Winfrey, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.
For that interview to work, quite possibly with Elin Nordegren, 29, the wife on whom he cheated, by his side, Woods, 33, would have to engage in the sort of public confessional that has previously been anathema to him.
His minders have not granted such access since a 1997 interview with the men's magazine GQ backfired badly when the young sportsman was quoted telling dirty and racial jokes.
That profile also hinted that when he was not playing the fairways, he was playing the field from what some in the sport call the real PGA - the "Party Groupie Association" (rather than the Professional Golfers' Association).
The Oprah strategy is under discussion in Camp Tiger as a series of tawdry new claims emerge about Woods' alleged infidelities after he admitted unspecified "transgressions" and "sins" last week.
In the most recent, it emerged that an as-yet unnamed waitress at a "VIP cocktail bar" in Orlando has hired a lawyer as she prepares to go public with claims of an alleged two-year affair that began in 2004 when she was 20, according to the usually reliable entertainment news website TMZ.
There were also reports of several other alleged affairs in the US and even one some years ago in London, purported to have been with an unmarried television newsreader.
Over the previous few days he had been linked in a string of reports to Rachel Uchitel, a New York nightlife party planner, Jaimee Grubbs, a Los Angeles cocktail waitress and reality television show contestant, and Kalika Moquin, a Las Vegas club marketing manager.
A financial deal was reportedly underway to secure the silence of Miss Uchitel, whose sexual hook-ups with Woods were allegedly fuelled by the prescription sleeping drug Ambien, according to friends quoted on radaronline. Meanwhile, Miss Grubbs said she has racy texts and voice messages to prove a 31-month affair.
Jared Shapiro, executive editor of Life & Style magazine that ran the Moquin story, said hundreds of thousands of dollars were being offered for the stories of other alleged paramours.
These latest claims come as the couple's lawyers negotiate an unprecedented upgrade of the "prenuptial" agreement signed before their Barbados wedding in 2004 - even as marriage counsellors work on getting the couple to talk through their problems.
While it is usually divorce that hits the rich and famous hard in their wallets, Woods will have to dig deep just to keep the mother of their two young children married to him. Miss Nordegren will receive an immediate $5 million, with staggered payments worth up to an additional $55 million if she stays with her husband for another two years, a lawyer familiar with the negotiations told The Daily Beast website.
That would mean she would receive more than $75,000 per day just to remain with him for two more years and sign a permanent non-disclosure agreement in what is being described as the most expensive "stand by your man" deal in history.
But for Woods, this is not simply a case of avoiding marital meltdown for the sake of love and the children. His advisers know there is also a crucial financial incentive to shore up the relationship in the eyes of nervous sponsors who made him the world's first athlete to earn a billion dollars.
Woods' main commercial backers, who have been receiving daily calls from his high-powered management team at IMG, have so far stuck by their one-man sports industry.
Those businesses will be studying their "morality" get-out clauses - and Gillette could review its commitments if his face was badly cut - but few industry analysts expect them to walk away from a cash cow. Nike for example pays him $30 million a year, but the golf division it built from scratch on his name brings in annual revenues of $800 million.
"It will take a catastrophe for his corporate sponsors to pull away from him," Rick Horrow, a leading sports business analyst, told The Sunday Telegraph.
"Tiger Woods is the most recognisable man on the planet after Osama bin Laden and the Pope. He is only 33 years old, he may have another 15 years of playing golf and another 30 years of designing courses. You can be sure that he has only made his first billion dollars and he makes a lot more money for the businesses associated with him."
By contrast, several other US athletes have paid a serious financial penalty for public relations disasters. Just this year, Kellogg's did not renew its contract with swimmer Michael Phelps after he was photographed apparently smoking marijuana.
Woods has doubtless already reached out for advice to his friend, Kobe Bryant, the baseball star, who has redeemed himself after losing major sponsorship deals when he was accused in 2003 of sexual assault in charges that were later dropped.
Indeed, according to TMZ, Woods told a friend shortly after the scandal broke that he was going to have to give his wife a "Kobe special" - an apparent reference to $4 million diamond ring that the Los Angeles Lakers star reportedly bought his wife after his affairs became public.
The golfer's only communications with the world since he was found bloodied and burbling in the street next to his frantic wife nine days ago have been two statements posted on his website.
The first was vague and brief. The second mea culpa apologised for "transgressions" and letting his family down, but spent somewhat longer lecturing readers on his right to privacy.
The strategy was criticised by Mike Paul, a high-profile New York public relations and crisis management executive who knows both Woods and Miss Uchitel from the world of celebrity clients. "He has not been well-advised by the strategy of laying low," he said.
"The first big mistake was not to talk and get his side out in the first 24 hours. He should have taken control by apologising early and clearly. That would have taken the air out of the balloon.
"The second big mistake was when he did issue a statement, it came on his website and reads like it was drafted by a lawyer. Real men don't talk about transgressions. Real men admit what they did. Now he is asking for privacy. But when you sign that first big money contract, you also in effect are signing a contract with the public. You gain a lot in terms of money and fame, but you also give up your privacy."
Such is Woods' influence in the game that virtually no voices within the golf world have been willing to speak on the record. He has been quick to dump those within his inner circle who have spoken out in the past, most notably former caddy Fluff Cowan - and even he was keeping his counsel last week.
Off-the-record, former players and sports journalists said that his womanising was well-known and that he had long been rumoured to be supporting a mistress on the West Coast.
A notable exception to the wall of silence was Swedish golfer Jesper Parnevik, for whom Miss Nordegren was working as a nanny when she caught Woods' eye.
"I would probably apologise to her and when you're a world-class athlete you probably should think a bit more before you do stuff and maybe not 'just do it', like Nike says," he said. "He's lost all my respect, I mean, all the respect I had for the guy is gone, that's pretty much all I can say."
Woods should have been enjoying one of the highlights of his calendar last week - a post-season tournament near Los Angeles to raise funds for his charitable foundation.
Instead, he remained holed up at home in Florida, more than a week after the scandal broke. Police were called following a car crash at 2.25am on Nov 27, at the end of the Thanksgiving holiday, and 36 hours after the Enquirer supermarket tabloid reported he was having an affair with Miss Uchitel.
Woods was treated and released from hospital after he was found semi-conscious in the street, his wife hovering over him, his SUV crashed into a tree after hitting a fire hydrant, its back windows smashed out.
TMZ reported that he had driven off after a row with Miss Nordegren who had chased him down the drive wielding a golf club. Then US Weekly, another downmarket glossy, featured the claims by Miss Grubbs.
The tmz.com site also featured emails that it said showed that a Woods friend and employee bought airline tickets for Miss Uchitel to meet the star in Melbourne last month during the Australian Masters.
"This is classic narcissistic behaviour by someone who thinks he is special and that normal rules don't apply to him," Dr David McDowell, a prominent New York psychiatrist, told The Sunday Telegraph. "He's fawned over by an adoring public, he's a powerful guy in a bubble and he thinks he can get away with his actions."
His long-cultivated aura of mystery and detachment is now destroyed. Of his wife and himself, he once observed: "I think we've avoided a lot of media attention because we're kind of boring." That at least is a claim he will never again be able to make.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/golf/t ... brand.html
by Oracle » Thu Dec 03, 2009 10:16 pm 
