Kerre Woodham: Tiger's pitch perfect fall

Back in the 80s, if you knew a money market trader, you had access to the best jokes in the world. Phone lines buzzed red hot across time zones and continents with the latest gossip and one liners. For the price of a glass of champagne, the wide boys would give you the best of the day and kept you on the cutting edge of international pop culture.

Nowadays we don't need traders. We have the internet so the news of Tiger Woods' bizarre car accident and then the subsequent implosion of his carefully protected image have come to us almost in real time.

And the jokes have been particularly good - much better than the Michael Jackson crop that circulated in the days after the gloved one's death. Like, all the top pros are ringing Elin Nordegren asking her what the best club is to beat Tiger with. And that he's no longer a Tiger, but a Cheetah. How about that it's the first time Tiger's failed to drive 400 yards. And my favourite, from the Emmerson cartoon in the Herald, all that glorious fairway and he chooses to play in the rough.

Which brings us back to earth. Why would a man who appears to have everything, including a hot young wife who has mothered his two children, risk it all for a cocktail waitress called Grubbs and a couple of other speakeasy girls?

What on earth would possess a man to gamble everything's he's worked for and everything he claims to value? And how did he think he'd get away with it? After all, there aren't many men who look like him who operate at that level of society.

For a man who obsessively guards his privacy, the relentless publicity must be hell for him. The whole world is not just peering through the curtains, but gazing through the windows now that the curtains have been ripped open.

He is undoubtedly the author of his own misfortune but you can't help but wonder what on earth made him do it. Maybe he was sick and tired of being Mr Perfect.

Maybe he'd had a gutsful of living up to people's expectations - something he's been doing since a club was first put into his hand at the age of 2.

Or maybe, when his dad died three years ago, he lost his moral compass. Surely it's no coincidence that Tiger's affair with the cocktail waitress - or cocktail waitresses - began shortly after the death of his much-loved father. Maybe he just wanted to live dangerously. After all, when you've got everything, how the hell do you get your kicks? Fooling around, playing with fire, might have given him the rush he used to get when he won golf majors. Who knows?

He's not the first man and he certainly won't be the last to find out how precious his life is when he is on the brink of losing everything and maybe these very public transgressions will make the golfing machine seem more human.

Given how perverse human nature is, we might even find him a more attractive human being.

But talk about the curse of Gillette, which signed up the biggest names in three sporting codes for heavens knows how much money. First Thierry Henry brings football into disrepute for his notorious handball. Then Tiger gets caught putting in the rough. That just leaves Roger Federer. And I swear if that nice, clean-cut Swiss boy gets caught shagging Portuguese midgets, I'm going to take Carmelite vows. Surely one of these guys has the strength to resist temptation.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY