The New York Times does some real — and maybe really damaging — reporting on Tiger Woods
Dave Kindred |
Dec. 17, 2009 8:01 a.m.
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For weeks, about the only confirmed facts came from the police report of Tiger bouncing off a fire hydrant and into a tree as he tried to drive away from his home at 2:30 in the morning. The subsequent bimbo eruptions were one-source stories done with quotes from cocktail waitresses and night club hostesses, women who worked, it seemed, only in the dark, as vampires do. The rest was six kinds of innuendo supplied by bottom-feeders getting fat on blog glop.
Now the Times has connected Tiger to a sports medicine doctor, Anthony Galea, who was arrested two months ago by Canadian police, is under investigation by the FBI, and is suspected of having provided athletes with performance enhancing drugs. His patients have included NFL players, world-class sprinter Donovan Bailey, Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, and the Cadillac Escalade thrill driver from Windermere, Florida.
In addition, the New York Daily News reported that Galea’s partner in a Toronto clinic, Mark Lindsay, has treated Alex Rodriguez, Tim Montgomery, Marion Jones, and Bill Romanowski, athletes infamous for cozying up to PEDs.
Galea told the Times he flew to Orlando at least four times early this year to treat Woods with a blood-spinning therapy because Tiger’s agents were concerned about his slow recovery from knee surgery of June 2008. Galea denies having supplied PEDs to anyone, let alone Woods. The golfer’s agent, Mark Steinberg, usually a hard-case gatekeeper, came off as a plaintive petitioner in an e-mail to the Times. He wrote, "I would really ask that you guys don’t write this? If Tiger is NOT implicated, and won’t be, let’s please give the kid a break."
Later, Steinberg was back on his game. An e-mail to the Associated Press denied that anyone at his agency had ever met Galea or so much as recommended him. Nor were his people worried about Tiger’s recovery, "as the Times falsely reported." As for the blood-spinning treatment, Steinberg said it is a "widely accepted therapy and to suggest some connection with illegality is recklessly irresponsible."
Wait. Re-wind the tape.
Did he call Woods a kid?
Eldrick Woods is 33 years old, wealthy beyond imagining, a husband, father of two, and the most famous athlete in the world.
He’s a kid?
The bimbo count is near a dozen, give or take another porn star slithering on-stage. A kid?
Give us a break.
His singular accomplishments for almost 20 years had earned Woods a safety net of goodwill. But that net isn’t big enough for this. Admissions of "transgressions" and "infidelity" have now cost him the trust of anyone foolish enough to believe – borrowing here from Steinberg’s lexicon – that Woods’s widely accepted image suggested some connection with responsibility.
The Nike boss, Phil Knight, has said that in time the scandal would be seen as a "minor blip" on Woods’s career graph. That’s why I purposefully used the words "bimbo eruptions" – to evoke memories of William Jefferson Clinton, who seems to have outlasted his problem. Maybe Knight is right. Maybe Tiger can make us forget his harem.
Or maybe not, not with this doctor thing. It adds a disturbing dimension. Ask Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Roger Clemens if performance enhancing drugs are minor blips in their biographies. What’s with Galea and his human growth hormone fetish? (At age 50 he injects himself five times a week in hopes of growing happily old with his wife, only 28.)What’s with this illegal drug extracted from calf’s blood? And someone – paging Victor Conte — please explain blood-spinning.
For a decade, Galea has been hailed as a sports medicine magician. Here’s the lede on an April 2007 feature done by his hometown newspaper, The Toronto Sun:
"Some athletes call him The Healer.
"Others refer to him as The Miracle Doctor."
Two and a half years later, on Oct. 15 this year, he was arrested in Toronto. Human growth hormone and Actovegin, the calf’s-blood drug that is illegal in the U.S., had been found in his medical bag at a Canada-U.S. border crossing. Galea told the Times he has used H.G.H. for himself and patients but has never treated a professional athlete with the drug known to build muscle mass. It is banned by the World Anti-Doping Association in all major athletic competitions
Wait again. Re-wind to that "blood-spinning."
We have 12 mistresses a-spinning, an agent spinning, now blood’s spinning. Makes my head spin.
Blood-spinning is a process using a centrifuge to separate platelets and red blood cells in a small amount of the patient’s own blood. The resulting plasma – supplemented with certain hormones – is reinjected into a joint or soft muscle tissue. It is said to speed healing, sometimes at a rate five times faster than normal. ‘No more than a teaspoon" is injected into the damaged area, the Times reported. So if Galea did an injection on each visit to Windermere, he injected Woods’s knee at least four times.
Nothing illegal there (if Galea had a license to practice in Florida).
Nothing unethical there (though skeptics wonder about blood-spinning).
In any case, it still looks bad when a doctor, flown in from Canada to work his magic on you, is later arrested after illegal/unethical drugs are found in his medical bag. And it looks worse if your personal behavior has taught people that you are capable of deceit, betrayal, and self-indulgence so disgraceful as to give self-indulgence a bad name.
There is no consolation for Tiger in what I’m about to say, but all this talk has reminded me of Thomas Jefferson. Tiger thinks he’s had bad press about his private life? Not even close.
Tiger has the National Enquirer while Jefferson had the Richmond Recorder. The first is mild, milquetoasty, and mannerly in comparison to the second, a raging, raving, rapacious rag. Tiger has Jon Stewart making sport of his transgressions while Jefferson had James Callender cutting his heart out and eating it with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
Callender wrote, "It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past, has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking resemblance to those of the president himself."
According to Eric Burns, whose book, "Infamous Scribblers," is a history of journalism’s gutter-running infancy, Callender was the first newspaperman who printed the Sally Hemings rumors as fact, once writing, "By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and a few who know it."
Callender dared Jefferson to bring legal action against him, but none came – and DNA tests almost 200 years later showed the infamous scribbler almost certainly had his facts right. And now that actual news organizations are putting actual reporters on the story, I’m thinking we won’t have to wait 200 years on Tiger.
Dave Kindred’s next book will be "Morning Miracle," an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed at Twitter.com/DaveKindred and facebook.com/people/Dave-Kindred/509353295
