The New Inside Story On Tiger Woods
I've received the "Inside Story On Tiger Woods" email over 50 times and I see the esteemed Furman Bisher posted it causing several outlets to take notice. However, today I received a new and I believe far more accurate version of the letter. I'm reluctantly sharing with you exclusively.
I talked to a Member who lives 10 subdivisions and one Disney theme park away from Tiger in Isleworth. As we know Tiger’s agent is Mark Steinberg, his father was named Earl and his wife was Elin. My Member plays golf and is friendly with an IMG Agent, well, as friendly as one can be with an IMG Agent. This agent is very good friends with Steinberg, again as friendly as one can be with Steinberg or another Agent of any kind. They share offices on the planet earth. This information came from the other IMG Agent to his masseur who then shared it with his personal trainer who heard it from his own massuese's personal trainer, who then gave it to me today, and according to them this is up to date as of yesterday when the Member left Orlando to vacation in the lower Galapagos Islands in search of endemic species.
On Thanksgiving Day, after Tiger and Elin and the family had a nice skinless turkey dinner followed up by an HGH-laced pumpkin pie, Tiger spent the rest of the afternoon on the couch watching cartoons with the kids, texting Rachel and proofreading the paperback gallies of "How I Play Golf." After each received and sent text message he would clear his message box to rid himself of the evidence of Rachel's pregnancy (octuplets apparently, and she and Tiger were texting possible names back and forth). Sometime in between there, one of his Orlando buds called him to see if he wanted to get together at the Clubhouse to play strip poker with several Perkins waitresses, to which Tiger said "Hell yeah!." Tiger left the house around 7:30 to go play strip poker, but left behind his non-AT&T cell phone….and one message he had forgot to delete from Rachel in which she suggests the name "Sam" for one of the triplets, regardless of whether it was a boy or a girl.
When Tiger returned home around 11:30 -12 that night, Elin confronted him about the text message in the phone, and they started a heated discussion about why the hell she let him talk her into naming a girl Sam in the first place. According to what I was told, there was more “incriminating evidence” than just the text message (i.e. photos of all 14 since-revealed mistresses and a recipe for an Actovegin smoothie that Elin had been looking for). Tiger tried to play it off to Elin by telling her she was reading too much in to it, and did not know the story, etc. that Dr. Galea was a great guy and those were just his nurses he had forwarded photos of and Tiger was merely being given a choice of which one would administer future in-house blood platelet treatments.
Tiger then went upstairs to change into his gym shorts and a Nike Dri-FIT UV fabric t – shirt, came back down, and Elin confronted him again; to which Tiger gave the same story only this time he admitted that even he had reservations about the name Sam for a girl. Tiger then sat down in a chair in the living room, and Elin sat across from him urging Tiger to just come clean, all the while pointing a 12-gauge shotgun at him. Tiger stuck to his guns--no pun intended--and denied everything except the part about resorting to HGH and Actovegin-laced blood platelet therapy. At one point Tiger turned away to look at the TV because he heard a Golf Channel promo for Tiger Week, and as he turned back, Elin hit him on the right side of the face with the head of a prototype Nike Victory Red Forged Split 9 – iron with conforming grooves. When she struck Tiger, she put a huge gash in the right side of his face next to his nose (causing his nose to bruise some, knocking two of his upper teeth out, breaking the bone on the upper right side and in general leaving him looking like Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent/Two Face character in The Dark Knight).
Tiger ran like Usain Bolt out of the house (which is why he had no Nike-branded shoes on, a possible contract violation that IMG is quite concerned about) with Elin swinging the golf club throughout the hallway to the garage (i.e. causing the severe damage which has been reported, including some light denting to his 2007 PGA Tour Player of the Year Award). Tiger jumped in the Escalade and tried to leave; and as we know from various Asian television re-enactments, Elin knocked out the windows in the Escalade even though the car was on loan from GM. When Tiger did his best impersonation of Woody Allen pulling out of the driveway and crashed, Elin panicked and was not sure what to tell the police (which is why there are two conflicting stories from her, and she decided the attempted murder version might be a mistake to share). When this happened, Elin immediately called Mark Steinberg to tell him what a crappy driver Tiger was, and Mark told Elin to tell him what hospital they were going to, and he would meet them there with both of his cell phones fully charged and ready to start renegotiating any and all deals except the pre-nup.
Tiger is transported to the hospital with Elin in the ambulance calling him various names all in a noble attempt to help him regain consciousness, and as they arrive Mark is there waiting for them whiter than Casper and sweating like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News. The people from the hospital and the doctors take Tiger in for X-Rays etc to check out the damage caused. The doctors tell Mark there is not much they can do to repair the teeth, the gash, or the Elephant Man look to his face, but the doctor knows a guy who knows another guy that the guy met at an outing at Pinehurst back in October who knows a cosmetic dentist and plastic surgeon in Phoenix who turned down Michael Jackson but who can make Tiger look as if nothing happened, even promising to take the V-groove gash lines out of his cheek. Tiger tells Mark to prep the jet and let’s head to Phoenix to get this done and to get away from that crazy Swede who tried to kill him.
Friday morning after Tiger is released from the hospital, he does not return home; he and Mark board the plane for Phoenix and call Dr. Galea to see if he has any thoughts on blood platelet spinning for facial injuries. If you remember, FHP kept showing up at Isleworth to talk to Tiger, and was told by another FL attorney (who Tiger hired for PR reasons and to deal with the inevitable fallout of 14 women falsely claiming to have slept with him) Tiger was not ready to talk. Well, now we know why, he was in Phoenix having a total face transplant, and did not arrive back in Orlando until either late last Wednesday night or early Thursday morning after he'd stopped in at the MGM and played a few hands of poker.
The surgeries were more intense than what they had originally planned, which meant Tiger was in PHX longer than he should have been and he's considering suing the doctors for keeping him away from home, where Elin was waiting to make him clean up the mess she'd made and to have him take the 2007 PGA Tour Player Of The Year Award to FastFrame to get re-framed before FHP could be let inside. Upon arriving back in Orlando, Tiger and Elin have been in intense marriage counseling sessions (up to 6 to 7 hours a day, with 15 minute breaks every second hour for full body blood platelet spin sessions complete with double HGH) every day! Both Tiger and Elin have told the counselors they love each other dearly and want to make the marriage work because they know a chain email like this will make it around eventually and the sponsors have said that a married Tiger is worth a lot more to them than a single Tiger. The reports you are reading on TMZ and RadarOnline are about 30% accurate at best according to Mark, who says he knew nothing, knows nothing and never did know anything except that only 30% of the stories are accurate.
In regards to Tiger’s boat being in Palm Beach this week, along with Rachel; that part is true. However, Tiger is not physically on the boat, nor is he actually in Palm Beach, but instead in an unincorporated marina on a boat about 5 minutes away; and Rachel is not on the boat as far as Steinberg knows. Her proud parents live 6 blocks from where the boat is, but that is it, Tiger and Rachel are not screwing 10 times a day like they did in the past because she's starting to show and she wants to look as good as the Octomom when she delivers. She may even explore a reality show depending on what happens with Tiger's marriage.
Tiger has not returned to his house at Isleworth since the day of the accident except to pick up his favorite pair of Nike Dry-FIT underwear, his golf clubs and attend the therapy sessions that he tells everyone have been wonderful soul-searching awakenings. IMG has enlisted the assistance of about 150 lawyers to cover their rears and also dragged one of most recognized sports figures to help ease the PR nightmare, so Tiger has taken up residence in Arnold Palmer's Bay Hill. IMG contacted Arnold Palmer because of the high regard in which Tiger holds Arnold's devotion to his wife Winnie and because Arnold finally changed the 16th hole back to a par-5. Arnold has agreed to help if Tiger will commit to the Arnold Palmer Invitational for the next 40 years, and IMG has said if anyone can get through to Tiger, Arnold may be the only person since he's about to move back ahead of Tiger in annual endorsement money after this episode settles down.
The moving trucks being shown on TMZ and RadarOnline are moving out pictures and furniture which were damaged when Elin practiced her golf swing in the hallways well after their Thanksgiving Day argument; not of her moving to Sweden with the kids so she can live happily ever after. Yes, Elin has retained a divorce attorney, but has not filed any papers because she's determined to save the all-encompassing Tiger brand, and as of yesterday, according to my barista at Starbucks who dated a friend of the waitress from Perkins that Tiger never denied having an affair with, she has no intention on doing so. Tiger has not made any public appearances or statements due to the surgery and plastic surgery he had in PHX, and because the only thing he really has to say at this point is, "Go $#%@ Yourselves." It will be about another month if not more before he gets in front of a camera, and even then it will not be in HD and it'll be under a silhouette lighting package with post-production work by Industrial Light and Magic or, if they haven't dropped him, his EA Sports created digital persona. Yes, Tiger is hitting golf balls late at night at Bay Hill and still spraying the driver all over the place, even shanking one off a side wall in their teaching center (which is equipped with lights, a couch for sleeping, fully stocked refrigerator and The Golf Channel).
That is as up to date as I have……..
Monday, December 28, 2009 at 10:02 AM
Reader Comments (34)
Ghost written perhaps. Rather sophisticated parlance.
More, please.
I can't wait for the texts to start between the Commish and Tiger!
I dunno about accuracy, but there is a commonality of details from multiple sources
Geoff, Splendid.
I hate to interrupt your budding standup career, but the infamous e-mail story actually does raise a good question: How did it start, and where did it come from?
I was my understanding, along with that of Brad's, that a 20-year old discussion board member at www.GolfWRX.com posted it to that site. And that it spread from there.
For one of the grand old men of golf journalism, and a fixture at Augusta in April, Furman Bisher has a lot of 'splainin' to do. I can think of no reason why Bisher would feel constrained to keep secret the identity of another journalist who forwarded to Bisher a second-hand account of things. What is the journalistic basis for that grant of anonymity? Why doesn't Bisher give a better, more detailed explanation of the provenance?
Is it the case that (gasp!) it is all a gigantinc joke by Bisher? Is he ridiculing the e-mail by posting it? Or is he repeating it in all seriousness?
I'm sorry, I don't get it.
I'm thinking that Furman Bisher got punked, big time. But really, I just want to know. Does anybody think that Bisher's blog entry was intended as a gigantic bit of sarcasm? It doesn't appear that way to me. But I'll accept either answer. All that I'd like is to have Furman Bisher say, one way or another. This is the Journalist Emeritus of the Augusta National Golf Club, right?
BTW, I admit to not even considering that Furman Bisher really believes this account...but he is 91. A young 91, but still 91 and going pretty strong.
You should read Furman's column after Tiger won the Masters in 97. It could be best summed up as, There goes the neighborhood.
Anyway, that email is a fantasy because Mark Steinberg was in Cleveland with his young family the night of Thanksgiving and couldn't possibly have gotten to that hospital ahead of Tiger and Elin.
Does anybody know of this tale having appeared anywhere else, before the posting on GolfWRX.com? (I am not aware of it appearing anywhere else. There are more than 600 replies; none of them referencing the original post appearing anywhere else previously.) The GolfWRX.com posting occurred on Dec. 19; Furman Bisher's blog entry is dated Dec. 26.