Tiger Wood, Phoenix Open, and Missing Tooth

Golf Master Tips, Pro Golf Shop - When Tiger Woods met with the media after a nine-hole practice round here before the Waste Management Phoenix Open. Woods fielded just about every other question, though, adeptly and in pretty good spirits.

Tiger Woods is back. He’s not just a big deal, he is still the biggest deal in golf, with apologies to Rory McIlroy.

ToothGate, or whatever you want to call it, was one long, overblown media timeline that even Woods had a laugh about, although he said the whole broken-tooth thing was no laughing matter. He described what happened in such detail that he was very convincing, which should shut down those conspiracy theorists who imagined all kinds of scenarios.

He even cracked a few jokes in the retelling of the story about how his tooth got broken and came out after he watched Lindsey Vonn break the World Cup skiing record for career victories. Photos of him with a missing tooth became international news, plus he’d been wearing a skeleton’s mask at the time.

Tiger Woods is all smiles talking with the media on Tuesday about losing a tooth at girlfriend Lindsay Vonn's ski race Italy last weekend.

“I had the mask on so no one knew who I was, I was trying to blend in because there are not a lot of brown dudes at ski races, okay?” he said, laughing. “So all the camera guys are below me on their knees or moving around trying to get a picture because Lindsey is hugging people and congratulating other racers as they’re coming down.

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 one tooth and cracked the other. I’m trying to keep this thing so blood is not all over the place. Luckily, he hit the tooth I had the root canal on. That one chipped. But the other one had to be fixed because it had cracks all through it.

“The flight home was a joke. I couldn’t eat or drink until they were fixed. I couldn’t have anything even touch it. Even breathing hurt because any kind of air over the nerve, that tooth was still alive. I had to fly home and get it done first thing in the morning.”

Asked if the photographer knew what he’d done, Tiger said, “He didn’t care.”

He was also asked if he was surprised that it became such an international news story. “It’s a new world, we have to fill up space,” Woods said. “The story is Lindsey breaking the record. You get teeth knocked out in every sport but unfortunately, I wasn’t actually competing and got my teeth knocked out.” (Lates Golf News source: Golf.com)

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