Time heals all wounds, but we may need a few more years under the belt before Tiger and former caddie Steve Williams bury the hatchet.

The Kiwi caddy has dished the dirt in his new book Out of the Rough, saving some of his harshest criticisms for former world number one and serial womaniser Woods. Williams was Woods’ caddie for all of 13 years, the two sharing great success and becoming firm friends.

All that changed in the wake of the sex scandal that eventually saw Tiger admit to a sex addiction amongst other things. Stuff have published a lengthy extract from Williams’ book so we’ll pull some quotes that sum up the sentiment:

Whenever I stayed at the same hotel as Tiger, he would usually give me a key to his room and I’d let myself in to pick up his golf bag. On this trip, however, he brought a couple of old mates with him and I wasn’t given a key. So during the week, I’d normally knock on the door and walk in. But this Sunday morning the door was locked and my repeated knocks got no response…

Finally, after 15 minutes – which for Tiger is like being an hour late – the door opened and I immediately knew something was different. He had friends there but they were dressed as if they’d recently come in from a night on the town. Tiger had a suite with a number of bedrooms and there was more than enough room for them all to stay, but I thought it was odd that they’d elected to go out all night and then disturb Tiger in the early hours of the morning when he was due to play the final round of a tournament.

Tiger looked the same – I didn’t notice anything unusual about him – except he wasn’t ready to play golf and seemed a bit preoccupied. He told me there’d been a change of plan and he was packing up all his gear now and would be going straight to the airport from the golf course in a helicopter without calling back to the hotel to shower and change.

As the media hype went into overdrive and more women came forward Williams’ name was dragged through the mud by association:

I repeatedly asked for Tiger’s management to release a statement that would clear me of any involvement in this lurid news. They simply wouldn’t do it because there were others in his group who knew exactly what was going on, and management felt they couldn’t single out one person as innocent. Angry, frustrated and hung out to dry, I was also in limbo about when I would next work…

Williams also revealed that Tiger wasn’t quite the gentleman on the course he was portrayed as:

But he had other bad habits that upset me. I wanted him to prove to me he could change his behaviour and show me – and the game of golf – more respect.

One thing that really pissed me off was how he would flippantly toss a club in the general direction of the bag, expecting me to go over and pick it up. I felt uneasy about bending down to pick up his discarded club – it was like I was his slave. The other thing that disgusted me was his habit of spitting at the hole if he missed a putt.

One hopes that his spitting managed to land in the cup, no one wants their ball skidding to a halt because it has become entangled in a Tiger gob ball.

Want to know just how bad things are looking for Tiger in terms of his performance on the course? The man who has spent a combined 683 weeks (more than 13 years) as world number one now sits at number 351.

One can only guess what he’s up to whilst he recovers from a back operation.

[source:stuff]