Tiger Woods has been seriously injured in an automobile accident, ESPN is reporting.
Tiger Woods has been seriously injured in a car wreck in Florida, authorities said Friday.
The Florida Highway Patrol said Woods hit a fire hydrant and a tree as he pulled out of his driveway early Friday in his 2009 Cadillac sport utility vehicle.
Woods was taken to Health Central Hospital. His condition was not immediately known, though the news release said his injuries were serious.
The airbags in the car did not deploy, according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel. The newspaper said that airbags typically do not deploy if a vehicle is traveling less than 33 miles per hour.
The highway patrol says the crash is still under investigation, and charges are pending. However, the highway patrol said the crash was not alcohol-related.
The news is just breaking and details are obviously sketchy. CBS television is reporting “facial lacerations” but otherwise no news on the seriousness of the injury.
If alcohol was not involved and he was driving slowly, it’s also not clear what laws Woods is alleged to have broken. I suppose “reckless driving” is a catch-all. [UPDATE: Michael Reynolds speculates in the comments that Woods is unlikely to have been wearing his seltbelt, given serious injuries at low speeds in an Escalade. That strikes me as quite likely.]
Golfwise, one hopes Woods is not out of commission very long. Once considered a lead pipe cinch to break Jack Nicklaus’ career record for Majors victories, Woods has missed considerable time of late recovering from injuries. He certainly doesn’t need another long recovery period.
UPDATE: A CNN Breaking News alert informs me that Woods has been released from the hospital. Good news, indeed.
UPDATE II: The story gets much murkier. An AP report Saturday afternoon:
The Florida Highway Patrol says Tiger Woods and his wife, Elin, are not available to be interviewed by state troopers and asked police to return Sunday to try to clear up questions about how he crashed his SUV into a neighbor’s tree.
FHP says the announcement that Woods and his wife could not speak to police on Saturday came from his agent. Troopers previously visited Woods’ home Friday afternoon to speak to him and were asked then to come back Saturday.
Woods smashed his Cadillac near his $2.4 million mansion at 2:25 a.m. Friday and was briefly hospitalized, police said. His lips were cut, and Windermere police chief Daniel Saylor has said Woods’ wife used a golf club to smash out a back window and help Woods from the car.
None of this makes any sense if Woods was sober and driving slowly. How does his Escalade get so banged up that his wife needs to break into it from the back with a golf club? And why’s she carrying a golf club in the middle of the night, anyway? And why are they refusing to answer questions from police?
All this makes more sense if we factor in the rumors that Woods was having an affair and believe his wife was furious enough to scratch his face and chase him with a golf club.
