Then came the first bizarre revelation. The local police chief told The Associated Press that Elin had smashed in the back passenger windows of the Escalade with a golf club, ostensibly to help get her husband out.

The Florida Highway Patrol was curious to hear more. Inside the Woods mansion, though, they were already hunkering down.

Troopers went to the home the day of the accident, only to be told Woods was asleep. They arranged to come back the next day, only to be told he was too sore to talk. When they came back a third time, it was clear that no one would be saying anything. Not to authorities, certainly not to the media.

The silent strategy had always worked well for Woods whenever he didn't want to discuss other issues, whether it was women at Augusta National or his responsibilities to be a role model for young African-Americans. He had always controlled the message and, if he really wanted to make a point, it would be done in a clever Nike ad or from the safe confines of his Web site.

But this was different. This didn't just appeal to golf writers or the mainstream media.

The other tabloids geared up to find whatever dirt the National Enquirer didn't. Celebrity Web sites were suddenly filled with pictures of other women and tales which had never been told.

Helicopters hovered over his house in the gated community of Isleworth, looking for video of something that would sell. His mother was followed by paparazzi through an airport, and a small army of media fanned out looking for anything Tiger-related.

Woods wasn't giving them anything. He stayed out of public view, saying nothing even as rumors flew and speculation intensified about what he was doing when he drove wildly over a fire hydrant and into a tree. There were even more questions about what his wife was doing with the golf clubs.

His first public comments came the Sunday after the accident, and they weren't much, just a statement on his Web site saying the accident was his fault and asking that it remain "a private matter." The next day he issued another short statement saying he was withdrawing from his own tournament, sparing himself the spectacle of facing media in Los Angeles who would be ready with questions about everything except golf.

Woods almost certainly hoped that would be the end of it. The events of Thanksgiving weekend may have been embarrassing — even a bit humiliating — but Uchitel was denying she had an affair with him, and authorities didn't seem all that interested in pursuing the backstory to the crash.

The next day, Florida state troopers dropped their probe, citing Woods for careless driving and fining him $164. That bit of good news was short-lived, however, as Grubbs, a Los Angeles cocktail waitress, told Us Weekly she had engaged in a 31-month affair with Woods and had the text messages and a voice mail to prove it.

Three hours after the voice mail appeared on the magazine's Web site, another statement was issued on Woods' Web site, under the almost comical headline "Tiger comments on current events."

This was a more contrite Woods, apologizing for the first time for unspecified "transgressions" and saying he had let his family down. But he still stubbornly sparred from a distance with the media encircling him, saying he had a right to privacy no matter how high profile of a life he led.

"The virtue of privacy is one that must be protected in matters that are intimate and within one's own family," Woods' statement read. "Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn't have to mean public confessions."

By now, events were clearly spiraling far beyond anything Woods could have ever imagined. In less than a week he had gone from being one of the most admired people in the world to a punch line to jokes flowing freely in offices everywhere and on late-night television.