What’s new, pussycat?
Bagged by a photographer for the first time since his serial catting around sent his career — and marriage — into a nose dive, Tiger Woods emerged from a Mississippi sex-addiction treatment center looking nothing like the clean-cut golf superstar who once commanded millions of dollars a year in endorsements.
The new photos show Woods atoning for his philandering ways at the rehab clinic — and he’s there only because his wife, Elin Nordegren, threatened divorce if he didn’t get immediate help for his addiction to busty blondes, according to a published report.
The first photos of troubled Tiger since his Thanksgiving-weekend car crash show a newly bearded Woods wearing a baseball cap with a hoodie draped over his head and shoulders.
He’s doing his best to keep a low profile at the Pine Grove Behavioral Health and Addiction facility in Hattiesburg.
But the National Enquirer, which nabbed the snapshots of the big swinger creeping around, also revealed that Woods, 34, is getting red-carpet treatment from that facility’s Gentle Path sex-addict program. And other patients are displeased that his celebrity status is giving him a mulligan when it comes to house rules.
Unlike other patients, Tiger doesn’t have to clean his room or toilet, make his bed, plan meals with other patients or attend every group counseling session — as all other patients must.
Instead, Woods has a maid tidy up his quarters, and typically undergoes one-on-one “behavior modification” counseling sessions.
And Tiger was allowed to do about $100,000 worth of renovations to a cottage before moving in, angering patients, who got even madder when their regular trips to the YMCA for exercise were canceled so that reporters couldn’t ask them questions about Woods.
“Other patients share a cabin, but Tiger has his own. His special privileges are causing a lot of resentment,” a source told the Enquirer.
But that doesn’t mean Tiger is thrilled to be taming himself in the six-week rehab, which he began in late December.
Nordegren wanted Woods caged after a series of shocking reports linking him to more than a dozen women, including prostitutes, porn stars, party girls and pancake-restaurant hostesses.
“After the scandal broke, Elin was constantly on Tiger, demanding answers,” a source said.
Elin then threatened to take the couple’s two young kids to her native Sweden and divorce Woods unless he entered sex-addiction treatment, the Enquirer reported.
Tiger tearfully agreed.
Star magazine reported that Woods seems to be giving rehab less effort than he gives golf.
“Sometimes he participates in activities like group therapy and meals with other male patients, but most of the time blows off therapy and stays in his room or hits the gym,” said a source close to Woods.
And “he said he’s ‘mentally exhausted’ and tired of saying he’s a sex addict,” the source disclosed.
“He can’t wait for it to be over. He’s doing it for his public image, and that’s what he cares about most.”
But before he returns to golf, Woods should come clean in public, perhaps on Oprah Winfrey’s or Larry King’s TV talk show, said Geoff Ogilvy, an Australian fellow golfer who won the 2006 US Open.
“I think he should come out [of hiding] away from a golf course, one, out of respect for all of the other players, and two, to defuse the circus part of it,” said Ogilvy.
“That would be the best thing for him, for every other player and the tournament. I don’t believe a lot of tournaments want all the tabloid media floating around.”