The tale of Tiger Woods and his car crash is entirely fascinating: not for the story itself, but for the story we’ve been presented with and asked to believe.

The straight facts we’re asked to swallow are that Tiger Woods got in his car at 2.30 am or so at his home in Florida and while driving slowly away from his house he hit first a fire hydrant and then a tree in the garden of his neighbor’s house. We know he was driving slowly (under 33 mph) because the airbags did not deploy. We also know he was sober, for the local police force has stated that alcohol was not involved.

After the crash, he was then rescued by his wife who used a golf club to smash a back window and drag him out. Which is where it all starts to get a little bizarre, really. For who attends the scene of an accident with a golf club in their hands? Yes, I know the Tiger Woods household and all that. But really. And if the club was in the car then, well, if she could get the car open to get that then why smash the window? And would you really need to smash a window to get someone out of a car that had hit something going less than 33 mph? And in an American SUV like an Escalade?

Then we find out a little more: both the National Enquirer (not always the most accurate of newspapers but then again, they did get John Edwards) and The Star have been reporting that Tiger has been having an affair with one Rachel Uchitel (no, I don’t know either, a nightclub hostess apparently). She denies this, saying it’s just some vague aquaintances of hers making up stories for the journalists”€™ brown envelope of cash.

Surveying the various newspaper stories on the subject you can read a little between the lines. There’s something that they’re sure they’re not being told as yet but they’re not quite sure what it actually is.

So let’s go back and tell the story without the famous names. Good looking, very famous and rich young man has been married a few years and has two young children. He travels a great deal for his work while the wife and the children stay home (most of the time, at least). The arrival of young children is when male eyes start to rove. Whether our good looking young man is, indeed, doing this or not isn’t the point: the young wife, in this modern world where celebrity is all it takes to get a quick invitation to putt on an away green, would be somewhat foolish not to at least suspect that something might be going on. Suspicions that may or may not be founded, of course.

Then two muckraking mags announce that, yes, our young man is, indeed, driving where he promised he wouldn’t. I think we can then all recreate the next scene in our heads can’t we?

A screaming match between a young wife betrayed and quite possibly (given the third party’s insistence on this matter, Ms. Uchitel above) the young husband protesting his innocence. Tempers do indeed get frayed in such circumstances. Rather than escalate matters with the enraged wife our hero decides to leave, go for a drive and let everyone calm down a little. At which point one of the ever present golf clubs is thrown through the window as he drives away, the surprise making him crash the car, the by-now-worried-rather-than-angry wife coming to his aid.

Now, of course, all of that is speculation of the purest and possibly basest sort. But that is what TMZ (yet another muck raking site and possibly even less accurate than the Enquirer) is alleging is the full and correct story. But it is a more interesting story, isn’t it?