Even taking the various injury ailments of Tiger Woods into account, the necessity to explain mouth damage on Tuesday proved fresh territory.
Woods was all smiles and apparently in rude dental health before his first golfing appearance of the year, at the Waste Management Phoenix Open in Arizona. Last week, when watching his girlfriend, Lindsey Vonn, celebrate skiing success in Italy, Woods was photographed with a chunk out of one of his front teeth. It was revealed that a stray camera had caused the damage.
“That didn’t feel very good,” Woods said. “I was looking down and all the camera guys are below me on their knees or moving all around, trying to get a picture because she’s hugging people, saying congratulations to the other racers as they are coming down. Some already finished, some are there already in the changing area.
“A dude with a video camera on his shoulder, right in front of me, kneeling, stood up and turned and caught me square on the mouth. He chipped that one and cracked the other one.
“I’m trying to keep this thing so the blood is not all over the place and luckily he hit the one I had the root canal on. That’s the one that chipped but the other one had to be fixed as well, because it had cracks all through it. In every sport you can get teeth knocked out. Unfortunately I wasn’t actually competing.”
Woods’s journey home to Florida for treatment was not a particularly pleasant one. “The flight home was a joke,” said the 39-year-old. “I couldn’t eat and couldn’t drink. I couldn’t have anything touch it. Even breathing hurt, because any kind of air over the nerve, the tooth that was still alive, was cracked.”
Asked if the cameraman in question was aware of the damage, Woods replied: “He didn’t care.”
Other aspects of Woods’s physical condition will understandably be under the microscope in Phoenix, where he is appearing for the first time since 2001. He revealed the battling of flu since he last played competitively but, typically, offered a positive outlook for the year. “I had to take a bit of a break, that flu bug got me pretty good for three weeks,” Woods said. “We have a game plan of where we want to get to and we are ahead of schedule on each stage of that.
Of his golf game, Woods added: “I’m cranking up the [swing] speed, the speed is going back up. This is going to be a fun year. I’m a lot longer with the driver than I ever thought I could be again.”
