The most important person – the person who’s “temperature” the media should “take” in gauging whether Tiger Woods is really learning from this experience and is on the road to recovery – is Elin. She’s been wronged, humiliated, and followed by the paparazzi. She’s been lied to repeatedly, belittled, and watched as her seemingly perfect family shattered in a heartbeat.
So if reports are true that she is happy with Tiger’s progress at Gentle Path clinic for sex rehab, that’s a good sign. Although it seems far too early to speculate too deeply, CBS reports – through two tabloid sources – that she was still interested in trying to save their marriage.
Several news outlets are reporting that Woods wants to stay married as a sham, a show for the cameras and the sponsors, but I don’t believe that Elin – after all she has been through – will allow IMG to run the show any more, not after they have been pandering and enabling serial philandering with strippers, hookers, waitresses, and Z-list celebutards like Jaimee “Money” Grubbs. Elin has 300 million reasons to leave, if she doesn’t like a single step in Woods’s post-rehab gentle path towards the future. If Tiger wants his life back to as-normal-as-it-can-be-post-scandal, he’ll have to do what she says when she says it.
After years of being the cat that ate the bird – in fact every bird that came along – now Woods is the most henpecked man in America. Elin will have him on double secret probation, which bodes well for better transparency, access, and altruism from Tiger, the lack of which helped blow the situation through the roof in the first place, and the continued lack of which will continue to result is a deserved vilification and demonization.
Nevertheless, now that the tabs are not only on his trail, but angry at the games being played and the addition of even more security around his family, Tiger better be squeaky clean, because they will continue to walk 360 degrees around him to find any and all dark corners, and woe to him if he relapses. They’ll also find out in a heartbeat if staying with Elin is really staying with him as a sham, and if someone else is sleeping in her place when the golf media aren’t looking.
And that is the real question isn’t it? Now that the golf media have taken an uppercut to the chin form the tabs and the blogs – who are not afraid of IMG or the Tour’s retribution and not beholden to them for access to Tiger which rank and file golf writers never got before, aren’t getting now, and never will get, world without end, Amen – now that golf writers have every right and duty to ask hard, probing questions, are they going to let Tiger and the Tour skate through the thin ice in the name of The Chase to Make Money off Breaking Jack’s Record?
