Tiger Woods is in good spirits as he gears up for his first PGA Tour event of the year, despite having recently gotten a tooth knocked out of his head.
ESPN reported that Tiger teed up for a nine-hole practice round on Tuesday ahead of the Waste Management Phoenix Open, and later spoke with reporters about his literal run-in with a TV camera at girlfriend Lindsey Vonn's ski race in Italy last week.
"Lindsey had finished," Woods explained, launching into his short tale. "I still had my mask on so no one knew who I was, trying to blend in, because there's not a lot of brown dudes at ski races, okay? So that was the whole idea of why I wore the mask."
"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, cracked the other one. And so then, you know, I'm trying to keep this thing so the blood is not all over the place . . ."
Tiger said he had to power through the rest of the Jan. 17 event, and got patched up when he returned home to Florida.
"Oh Jesus, the flight home was a joke," he said. "I couldn't eat, couldn't drink until he fixed them, put the temporaries on. 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."
Several photos of Woods with a missing tooth were snapped at the race, however a writer at
Yahoo Sports expressed doubt about his story, amplifying the skepticism of many on social media.
"The fact that there is no photographic proof of this incident is curious," wrote Eric Adelson. "There was no picture of Woods covering his mouth, stanching the blood, or doing anything except watching Vonn win with a hole in his mouth and a mask on his face . . . You'd think someone with a cell phone would have snapped a shot of the most famous golfer in history getting a Chiclet knocked out."
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