The world of Tiger Woods began to unravel in Melbourne

The world of Tiger Woods began to unravel in Melbourne in 2009.

Tiger Woods lines up a putt on the way to winning the 2009 Australian Masters. Picture: AFP

At some point in 2009, Tiger Woods soared past $1bn in career earnings. Woods was flying. There were no majors during the year but his golf remained top shelf — he won seven of the 19 tournaments he entered and led the US PGA Tour in birdie and scoring average.

He was indisputably the best player on the planet and well on his way to becoming the greatest golfer in history when he boarded a plane in November for Melbourne to headline the field at the Australian Masters.

Masters officials and the Victorian government had spruiked his signature months earlier, Woods secured for the princely sum of $3m.

He was managed at the time by IMG and the tournament was run by the same organisation. Masters promoters had the inside running but that didn’t mean Woods came cheap and there was the inevitable backlash.

Amid the stock-standard calls for money to be spent on hospitals or schools, there were concerns raised by British Open champion and Australian golfing icon Peter Thomson about the potential for Woods’s appearance at the Masters to suck up all the sponsorship dollars and damage the Australian Open.

Woods responded with a shrug of the shoulders. He had played the Masters on one previous ­occasion — in 1997 only months after turning professional, where he finished well behind Peter Lonard.

READ MORE: When Tiger was warned away from Norman | Golf’s big bang | The comeback from hell

At that time, Woods arrived on these shores to relative anonymity, his father Earl later putting his growing fame into perspective when he talked about a phone conversation between the pair.

Woods had been scuba diving in Australia when he called his ­father. Earl reacted by asking whether his son was aware that great white sharks were prevalent in our waters.

Woods responded that he wouldn’t bother them so they shouldn’t bother him.

“But when I hung up, I felt a little sad,” Earl Woods told writer Tom Callahan, author of His ­Father’s Son. “You know why he scuba dives, don’t you? Because the fish don’t know who he is.”

When Woods returned to play the Australian Masters in 2009, even the fish knew who he was. Woods was the man, the most ­famous athlete on the planet.

He was primed and ready to give Australia an intimate look at his greatness. Woods didn’t disappoint, although the Masters would prove to be a turning point in not just his career, but his life.

Woods was harbouring a secret when he touched down on the tarmac at Melbourne Airport. It was about to become apparent to the public, the catalyst for one of the most spectacular falls from grace in sporting history.

Life, and the sport of golf itself, were about to dramatically change.

Hitting the fan

Lucas Parsons had given Woods a tour of Kings Cross on the American’s first trip to Australia in 1996.

Parsons would be close at hand in 2009 as well, only this time as a television commentator for the Nine Network.

Nine had bumped up its coverage of the tournament in anticipation of Woods’s participation, dipping into its cricketing pool of talent to flesh out the coverage.

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Mark Nicholas was among those in the commentary box. So too ubiquitous Melbourne media identity Eddie McGuire. Parsons managed to get a start and he was given one job — shadow Woods throughout the tournament and try to take the viewers inside the mind of the world’s best golfer.

Easier said than done. Woods’s mind was racing when he arrived in Melbourne. Tabloid newspaper The National Enquirer had the whiff of a scandal and it was hot on his tail. Like many, Parsons had no sense of what was about to explode as he set about his commentary duties.

“Twenty years I played on tour in Australia and I had never seen anything as big,” Parsons said.

“It had major nostalgia about it. On the Tuesday, they had to shut the gates, things like that. It was a classic Melbourne week. Beautiful weather. People everywhere.

“It had everything. All four days they just put me on him — that was my only role. I was to follow him and see if I could get a few words out of him.

“He didn’t say much. To be honest he had his game face on. I know the stats afterwards — everyone complained he got $3m — but the state government came out a week later and said he added $30m to the economy.

“Then the crap hit the fan — ­literally a day later. A mate of mine — you know the cricketer Mark Nicholas — Channel 9 were covering it. Nicho the next day rang me and said, ‘the shit is going to hit the fan’. I said, ‘no way there is any truth in that’. I was wrong, boy was I wrong.”

Parry’s close-up view

Woods played a practice round with Craig Parry on the Tuesday, the pair casually strolling nine holes before calling it quits.

Parry and Woods knew each other well. They both had homes in the affluent Isleworth gated community in Florida, where the warm weather, pristine golf course and absence of income tax enticed some of the game’s best. On occasions, they would practise together at the Isleworth Country Club, originally designed by Arnold Palmer, located on Payne Stewart Drive and recognised as one of the best courses in the state.

“I first played with him when he was 17 at the Scottish Open,” Parry said. “I think we played the third round. I finished third in the tournament. Wayne Riley won it, Tiger Woods finished second.

“We were members of the same golf course in America. I used to go down to the practice range and he would be down there. If there was a shot I couldn’t play I would go and ask him. If he wanted a short game tip — which he would quite often ask for — he wasn’t afraid to ask for help. He loved the golf courses out here; he thought they were the best in the world, especially the sandbelt area.”

Woods and Parry were followed by record crowds on the Tuesday, a portent of what was to come.

“He was asking a lot of questions about the golf course,” Parry said. “It was pretty unprecedented the amount of people who were out there trying to watch him play at that point.”

Woods had come a long way from the wide-eyed 20-year-old who finished fifth behind Greg Norman on his first appearance in Australia 13 years earlier.

“In 96 when he played at The Australian, I was there,” said ­Andrew Langford-Jones, the tournament director of the Masters.

“He was a 20-year-old kid. I remember going around with him in the pro-am and I remember talking to him. He said every night was booked out. All he wanted to do was go to McDonald’s or the pub.

“He played in 97 at the Masters and he was a bit grumpy that week. I think it was getting him down that he was mobbed everywhere he went and couldn’t do anything.

“But 2009 was the most interesting. The place was a sellout. He rocked in on the Tuesday and played nine holes with Craig Parry — the back nine. I got a call that Tiger was in the office and wanted to have a word with me. I went into the office and was shitting myself because I was thinking he didn’t like the greens or something.

“I walked in and said, ‘g’day mate, we got a problem?’ He said ‘no problems, I am doing my press interview in 15 minutes, I wanted to get some background, tell me a bit about the preparation’.

“I said, ‘look this is the biggest and longest drought we have ever had in Victoria, we have had no water, the Melbourne sandbelt is a lot better in February than it is in November and December’.

“I went through a whole lot of stuff. He said, ‘I better go, I have to go to the press conference’. The first bloke asked Tiger what he thought of the course. He said, ‘as you know we are going through the longest drought we have had in Victoria’. He regurgitated word for word what I said to him. I thought, this bloke is a professional. Norman would never have done that. Greg would just wing it.”

As good as he was in front of the media off the course, Woods was even better on it. Remarkable given what was unfolding in the background.

Catalyst for downfall

Rachel Uchitel first came to prominence in the days following the September 11 attacks in America when she was captured by the New York Post holding a photo of her fiancee, who worked at the World Trade Centre. She meandered through jobs, working as a television producer at Bloomberg ­before moving to Las Vegas and becoming a VIP hostess at high-end nightclubs.

Her meeting with Woods would be the catalyst for his downfall. As he prepared for his trip to Australia to play the Masters, Woods was also arranging a tryst with Uchitel.

The National Enquirer had been on the scent for more than two years and it was closing in. While Woods was in Australia, Uchitel was staying in a suite at Crown Towers in Melbourne.

A surveillance team staked out the hotel and as Uchitel entered the elevator, a reporter confronted her. Uchitel denied her relationship with Woods but realising she was fighting a losing battle, she scarpered back to America.

Meanwhile, Woods had a tournament to win.

A Woods masterclass

A fellow journalist was recounting a story this year of an interview with one of rugby league’s biggest stars. The player was going through turmoil off the field and when the tape recorder was turned off, the journalist asked the footballer how he managed to keep his mind on the board with all that was going on behind the scenes.

“Compartmentalise,” he replied. Woods could no doubt empathise. As his personal life was on the verge of unravelling, he produced a spectacular performance over four days at Kingston Heath.

Tickets were sold out six week before the tournament and Woods gave them their money’s worth. For the opening two rounds he was paired with Parry and another Australian, Rod Pampling.

Woods put on a masterclass. The signs were ominous in the pro-am as Woods played with three representatives from the tournament’s major sponsor, JBWere.

Woods made five birdies in his opening nine holes, prompting bookmakers to slash his odds and Thomson to suggest he could lay siege to Kingston Heath.

By the end of the second round, Woods was three shots clear of Australian Greg Chalmers. One betting agency was so convinced it paid out punters who had wagered on the world No 1. At that point in his career, Woods had won 33 of the 41 tournaments he led after the second round.

“It was like playing in a major the way the crowds were,” Parry said. “That is probably the last time we have seen big-time crowds in Australia.”

Tiger Woods poses with the trophy and the gold jacket after winning the Australian Masters at Kingston Heath in 2009. Picture: Getty Images

Crowd pleaser

Woods would use the driving range at the nearby Capitol Golf Club before arriving at Kingston Heath to practise his putting.

“We knew the crowds were going to be astronomical,” Langford-Jones said. “So we spent a full day — the IMG blokes and myself — going around and trying to work out where we could move crowds and where we couldn’t move crowds. It really was a logistical nightmare knowing how many people were going to turn up. I remember them coming down the sixth fairway — which was the ninth that week — and they came over that hill as a wave.

“It looked unbelievable. He was fantastic. He was so professional. Before the tournament started his manager came in and said we need to put metal barriers all around the back of the 18th green and down the side to hold the crowd back,” Langford-Jones said.

“I said we can’t do that. There is only an area of five metres between the back of the green and the grandstand. If you get a back pin, what is going to happen is the players will fire it into the grandstand, pick the ball up and drop it inside the metal barriers which would be on the back edge of the green.

“It would wreck the integrity of the hole. We had this argument on the Wednesday about how it was going to be set up. Finally, we were able to convince (Woods’s agent Mark) Steinberg that Australian crowds would respect the tournament and he would not get mobbed on the 18th green. To the Melbourne crowd’s credit, not one person burst under the ropes.”

Woods dominated and was in control at the halfway mark of the tournament. Chalmers and James Nitties were amid the chasing pack and intent on keeping him honest, although their hopes seemed forlorn.

The National Enquirer cover that unleashed a tsunami.

The mystery woman

In hindsight, their best hope lay with the scandal that was about to envelope Woods. Tournament organisers harboured genuine fears as whispers began to take hold about Uchitel’s presence in Melbourne.

One prominent Australian player approached a senior official midway through the tournament with the grim news.

“It was midway through that week and I still can’t to this day­ ­remember who it was and they said to me the (woman) he had at the British Open was in town,” the official told The Weekend Australian. “I was shitting myself all week that it would come out. He would have been on a plane and out of there.”

Fortunately for the tournament, that didn’t happen.

The rivals

It may have been fortunate for the Masters, but it didn’t help Chalmers. Nor Nitties. The pair had gone into the final round breathing down Woods’s neck. They had genuine hopes of running him down.

“It was funny because we played the third round and we were finishing — I had putted out and me and Chalmers were on the same score — and my caddie Steve Potts said, ‘dude, make sure you have it signed, everything ready and hand it in first’,” Nitties ­recalled.

“Tiger was playing behind us and he goes, ‘if Tiger birdies the last, then you will play with him in the last group’. I got my card in as quick as possible. Then Tiger came up the last and he horseshoed from 12 feet.

“That meant me and Chalmers continued to play together.”

Nitties had secured his US PGA Tour card earlier that year. He had played in tournaments with Woods on a handful of occasions, but nothing like this.

“I had met him once or twice when I was out there on my rookie year (on the US PGA Tour),” ­Nitties said.

“He kind of said ‘hey’ to me on the putting green. I remember it because I found it weird that he was talking to me.

“It was kind of cool. I remember hitting a couple of putts and seeing a Nike ball roll over next to my hole. I remember feeling really nervous because I knew it was Tiger’s ball.

“I am that guy who keeps to himself. I am not going to yuck it up with heaps of guys.”

Chalmers was more worldly at that point in his career. He had been a mainstay in America and had given Woods a run for his money only months earlier at the Buick Open.

“What if he has an average day and you have a great day?” Chalmers said.

“Everybody knows who he is and how talented he is. That doesn’t mean in golf things can’t go wrong sometimes. There is no question if I play my best and he plays his best, I will never beat him. What if he doesn’t?

“That’s what you keep telling yourself. There was dust everywhere because the crowd was so big. There was a sea of people, helicopters overhead. It was the typical craziness and incredible atmosphere.

“There was great energy about the event. It was a really fantastic tournament. The thing that amazed me was that it was all following one hole.”

Woods set up victory with a blistering start on the final day. By the time he walked off the ninth green, he was in command. He eventually won by two shots.

“I look back at it as not a missed opportunity, but a fond memory,” Nitties said.

“I think I have only played in six or seven events he was in. In America, he adds steroids to an event as far as crowds and buzz.

“It is just a different feeling.”

Woods flew out the next day and life would never be the same.

“I suppose you could say it was during that tournament that it got found out,” Nitties said.

“It mentally put him in a body bag. He had a lot of injuries that caught up with him as well. For me, I am a Tiger fan.

“I am happy to see him back.”

Tsunami on the horizon

Uchitel was long gone by the time Woods slipped on the garish gold jacket and held aloft the Waterford Crystal trophy for winning the Masters.

She had bailed as the walls closed in. Woods’s camp circled the wagons in the days that followed but a tsunami was about to hit and Woods’s people were plugging holes in a leaky dyke.

Woods left Australia with a gold jacket in his luggage and a sinking feeling in his stomach. As Robert Lusetich detailed in his book on Woods’s 2009 season, Unplayable, the world No 1 bumped into a fellow professional at Isleworth soon after returning home and acknowledged he was about to come out on the wrong side of a big media story.

Woods wasn’t wrong. Days later, his career was on life support, his reputation in tatters and his marriage over as news emerged of his many indiscretions.

It would be three years before he would win again and 10 years before he won a 15th major. For a long time, it looked like there was no way back.