People mag reporter details Tiger Woods' philandering ways in new tome 'Tiger'
People mag reporter details Tiger Woods' philandering ways in new tome 'Tiger'
Tuesday, May 4th 2010, 4:00 AM
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Steve Helling, People magazine reporter and author of 'Tiger', says he had a chance to expose Tiger Woods as a cheater long before his scandal broke in November 2009 - but chose not to.
Tiger Woods may have been caught with his pants down a little sooner - if only People magazine reporter Steve Helling had had the guts to write about it.
"Over the years, I had heard rumors of Tiger's partying - drunken nights at the clubs, dirty dancing with other women, phone numbers slipped to pretty blonds - but I didn't follow up on the tips," the, er, reporter admits in his new tome, "Tiger," hitting bookstores Tuesday.
The reason? Helling didn't want to be cut off from the golden golfer.
"Negative coverage of Tiger - or even positive coverage that wasn't approved and micromanaged - would often result in swift, permanent excommunication from the Tiger Woods camp," he writes. "It was in everyone's best interest to sweep the rumors under the rug."
But now that the cat is out of the bag, Helling is spilling, too.
"Marriage hadn't changed Tiger's appetite for sex, and he was always on the prowl for women," he writes of Woods, who was apparently looking around as soon as he and Elin Nordegren said "I do" in 2004.
According to Helling, a television producer source said: "[Tiger] dated a lot of girls even after he was married to Elin. When he was filming some commercials at Universal Studios, he asked out a few girls, and this was after he was married. If they said no, he'd move on.'"
Helling insists that he wasn't the only one who ignored the whispers of Tiger's infidelities. He claims that a club owner in Florida who saw Tiger "drinking and dancing with a woman who wasn't his wife" in 2006 called several weeklies with the story.
"No one returned his calls, and the one person he spoke with told him that they weren't interested in the story," Helling says.
That's precisely why Tiger stayed in bed with his mistresses - and out of the headlines - during his supposedly squeaky-clean 13 years in the public eye.
Until now, that is.
Says Helling: "It took 13 calculated years to meticulously shape his image. It took two weeks to destroy it."
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