Should Tiger Woods Get Ready For a Downpour?

Tiger Woods’ “indefinite break” from golf seemed like a thumb in the dam at the time, a last-ditch attempt to salvage some privacy and dignity after two weeks of tabloid headlines. Already, it has failed: The deluge is upon him. Consulting group Accenture dropped him as an endorser today, saying he was “no longer the right representative” for its brand. The company’s withdrawal comes just days after Gillette shelved ads featuring Woods.

Losing money is an insignificant thing to a near-billionaire; losing his family, purportedly the reason for his hiatus, would not be so easily dismissed. So reports of the Florida Department of Children and Families paying the Woods residence a visit probably don’t help him perpetuate that perception. Even though the visit was likely benign in nature, this story has grown so grotesquely that this is the sort of detail the kitchen-table talk about Tiger might hit on as evidence of a family out of control.

The most damaging revelation, though, may be only in its infancy. A doctor connected to Woods -- one who helped him recover from knee surgery in 2008 with a technique known as “blood-spinning” -- was arrested in Canada in October. That alone shouldn’t do much to scare Tiger; there’s no proof linking him to the shady substances that got that doctor arrested. But if others seize on that fact and start digging, it might not be hard to trigger an avalanche.

After all, with BALCO founder Victor Conte taking to Twitter to throw out rhetorical questions about what could cause both muscle growth and a surge in Tiger’s libido, I’d hazard a guess that the whispers about Tiger and performance-enhancing substances may be amplified shortly. And if there are bombshells to be dropped there, ones that affect the perception of both Woods’ golf career and personal life, they will dwarf the already bizarre series of shocks the last fortnight has brought.

In the near future, while Tiger waits out the storm over his extramarital activity before resuming his golf career, a new set of concerns may hang as the next front of dark clouds, this one much more worrisome than the last.

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