Many people have wondered why, given his reckless cheating, Tiger Woods didn’t have a crisis manager (or “cleaner,” like Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction or the title character in Michael Clayton) ready to clean up potential messes.
It turns out he did, and his crisis managers bailed him out of sticky situations with women more than once before he knew about his sordid double life.
According to TMZ, Woods’ lawyers and PR firm got him out of a messy situation over an Orlando woman he hooked up with even before he was married.
Theresa Rogers, perhaps?
Whoever it was, Tiger had met a waitress at an Orlando bar and the two drove off together, pulling over and stopping on the side of a remote road.
A police car drove by and an officer became suspicious. There was an exchange between the officer and Tiger, but no one was arrested or cited.
Tiger had “fixers” on speed dial, but they could only do so much.
Tiger’s PR firm and lawyer were worried the woman might sell the story and “negotiated a carefully-crafted settlement” with her to keep her quiet.
There were other situations where Tiger’s team resolved messy situations with women that “could reflect negatively on his squeaky-clean image.”
His reps were especially worried because of the morals clauses in contracts Tiger had signed (Accenture dumped him as its pitchman yesterday).
While the cleaners did a good job for years, they were in over their heads with the crap Tiger pulled that ultimately blew the lid off the scandal.
After all, the National Enquirer outed his affair with Rachel Uchitel after he had her flown to Australia to be with him. Hard to explain that away.
Even harder to clean up, even for professionals? Getting attacked by a golf-club wielding wife and crashing your car after she reads the Enquirer.