Tiger woods had revield Things that affected his game’s
Tiger Woods stood before reporters at the Ridgewood Country Club on Wednesday and for two minutes answered the kinds of questions that golfers are used to answering. The course played long, he said; he drove well.
Then came the kinds of questions that Woods admitted have made playing golf this summer almost impossible at times. Does he still love his ex-wife, Elin Nordegren, whose face is splashed across the cover of this week’s People magazine? Has he been able to avoid being distracted by their divorce proceedings, which were completed Monday?
No, Woods said to the second question, confirming what has been obvious to anyone who has seen him string together a summer of wayward tee shots and off-kilter putts.
“It was a lot more difficult than I was letting on,” he said.
On the eve of the Barclays, the first of four tournaments that make up the FedEx Cup playoffs, Woods said that the repeated questions about his personal life, the distraction of going through a divorce and the sadness that goes along with it have made playing golf an almost impossible task.
“As far as my game and practicing, that’s been secondary,” he said. “We’re trying to get our kids situated to our new living conditions and how that’s going to be. That’s where our focus is going to be right now.”
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Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren before their divorce.Credit…Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Woods’s comments came a few hours after People published an interview with Nordegren, who had not spoken publicly since Woods’s car accident last November led to revelations of his infidelity.
In the People interview, the product of four visits to her Florida home spanning 19 hours, Nordegren said she “never suspected” that Woods was being unfaithful to her. She described feeling “absolute shock and disbelief” upon learning of his infidelity and said she began losing her hair before the divorce proceedings concluded.
“I’ve been through hell,” she said. “It’s hard to think you have this life, and then all of a sudden — was it a lie? You’re struggling because it wasn’t real. But I survived. It was hard, but it didn’t kill me.”
Nordegren refused to disclose to People the amount of the divorce settlement. What she did emphasize was that she never hit Woods and that she did everything she could to get him out of the S.U.V. he crashed into a fire hydrant and a tree outside their house.
Asked for his reaction to her comments, Woods expressed contrition, although he did not answer the question about whether he still loved Nordegren. “I wish her the best in everything,” he said. “It’s a sad time in our lives.”
