Fallen golf legend Tiger Woods paid a high price for turning up to surprise his girlfriend, champion Alpine skier Lindsey Vonn, as she conquered all before her to take a record 63rd World Cup race win in Italy this week.
The former world golf number one alleges he became caught up in a media scrum, which resulted in a cameraman accidentally knocking out one of his front teeth.
Mark Steinberg, Woods’ agent at Excel Sports Management, said in an email that during a crush of photographers at the awards podium, ”a media member with a shoulder-mounted video camera pushed and surged toward the stage, turned and hit Tiger Woods in the mouth. Woods’ tooth was knocked out by the incident.”
Vonn backed up the story, posting on her Facebook account: ”When he was in the finish area a cameraman accidentally knocked into him and took out his front tooth.” Vonn added: ”He was still in great spirits though and didn’t complain once or ask for any special assistance or security. We were both just happy to share the moment together.”
But race organizers have told The Associated Press they were not aware of the incident and that Woods did request extra security and a snowmobile to exit the finish area.
”I was among those who escorted him from the tent to the snowmobile and there was no such incident,” Nicola Colli, the secretary general of the race organizing committee, told AP. ”When he arrived he asked for more security and we rounded up police to look after both him and Lindsey.”
To add to the intrigue, when he arrived at Cortina for the event, Woods had uncharacteristically been wearing a skull-adorned scarf over his nose and mouth that Michael Jackson would have been proud of. Maybe this was because he didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Maybe he wanted to remain incognito because . . . . . he is Tiger Woods after all. But those theories are quite weak because any Black man is going to find it hard to be inconspicuous on a World Cup ski slope; he’s the one standing by the generators shivering and cursing.
A covered face is nothing extraordinary when snow is the surrounding landscape, but the suspicion is that the tooth was already missing and that the cameraman story was quickly concocted when photographs emerged of an unguarded moment when the tooth, or the space the tooth would have occupied if it had made the trip to Italy, peeped out from behind the mask. All of which poses an obvious question.
It is possible the truth about the tooth will never see the light of day, but the incident will be pun heaven until the circus tiger gets back his golfing mojo or, more likely, morphs further into this strange amalgam of Michael Jackson, O J Simpson and Diego Maradona.
