Erica Herman, Tiger Woods’ ex-girlfriend, is fighting a non-disclosure agreement with the famed golfer according to court documents filed in Martin County on Monday.Herman, who dated Woods for about 5½ years and worked as the manager of his Jupiter, Florida, restaurant, filed a complaint in October 2022 under the Florida Residential Landlord Tenant Act after Woods ended the couple’s relationship earlier that month according to court filings. The couple had been living together in Woods’ Hobe Sound home in southern Martin County since 2017.In the complaint, Herman was seeking up to $30 million in damages as well as restitution for $40,000 cash she claims was misappropriated from the property upon her eviction. According to a story by USA TODAY, Herman also filed a lawsuit against a homestead trust he controls. Herman also claims to have an oral agreement that she could stay in the house for up to five years.
It's really hard to tell what's going on here, but the first surprise is how long they've kept this under wraps. But one thing there will be little disagreement om, that being that Tiger is the last guy on the planet that needs a bad break-up aired publicly. Because, in case you haven't noticed, most women still hold a grudge from 2009.
That $30 million large demand will of course generate suspicions, cue James Carville and his quote about dragging a $100 bill through a trailer park, though the venue in question here was actually Tiger's restaurant.
Of course the allegations have a bizarre aspect to them, none least than this:
“Plaintiff has continually demanded to be allowed back into her home, but Defendant’s agents have refused,” said the lawsuit against the trust, which was filed in October but has not been previously reported until Wednesday.The suit against the trust said she was forced out by “trickery” by agents of the trust, who convinced her to pack a suitcase for a short vacation. When she arrived at the airport, they told her she had been locked out of her residence, in violation of the oral tenancy agreement and in violation of Florida law, the suit states.
Why would she want to continue residency in the home of the man who had dumped her? And the source of that $40,000 in cash will puzzle many as well....
On the flip side, many of us will be wondering about the consideration paid for that NDA. Being as famous as Tiger isn't easy, and there is a legitimate concern about privacy, though Tiger has taken that understandable issue to Howard Hughes-like levels.
But this is the bit that has folks justifiably concerned:
Herman argues in her legal documents the NDA should be declared unenforceable. The arguments include a citation of the federal Speak Out Act, which prohibits the enforceability of an NDA agreed to before a dispute arises involving sexual assault or sexual harassment.No specific allegations of sexual assault or harassment have been made against the 47-year-old Woods. Herman is represented by Benjamin T. Hodas from the Fisher Potter Hodas PL law firm.
Don't know your experience, but I've been reliably informed that we should believe all women....
Yes, we all know the exclusions to that rule, rendering it rather foolish.
It is funny watching the golf media run away from this story.... Oh, they've mostly had to at least acknowledge it, but the details are sufficiently cloudy that they can bury it pretty quickly. But Tiger has assumed a rather important role as the defender of the status quo ante, and it would be a rather awkward time for his personal life to explode into the public consciousness in manner similar to Thanksgiving 2009.
This obviously has a smell of being about money, though I find myself wondering about the effects on Tiger's kids. They've certainly seen him cycle through some girlfriends/step-mothers, leaving aside his rather public humiliation of their mother. Elin continues to impress me with her ability to stay focused on her children (and out of the public eye), but she can't love this....
I'll be watching to see how Team Tiger plays this. So far, they haven't had to react, as the proceedings have been private. The more aggressively they go after Herman, the more I'd suspect they're worried about that which she can disclose. But this strikes me as something Tiger needs to make go away, leaving me wondering whether the real issue is his legendary cheapness.... remember, Rachel Uchitel never got so much as dinner and a movie.
Can't blame the LIV bots for piling on, can we?
How good is this. Not a single word on the timeline from @KylePorterCBS @NoLayingUp @JoelMBeall @DJPie @kclairerogers @BenColeyGolf @RiggsBarstool @JasonSobelTAN @ForePlayPod @Sean_Zak about Tiger Woods sexual assault?
— LIV Golf Insider (@LIVTracking) March 8, 2023
Crickets!
Not shocking. PGA scribes are the absolute pits
Obviously the bot is ahead of itself (do I need to check with a bot about their pronouns?) on that sexual assault bit, but it's pretty clear that no one wants to touch this story.
Stay tuned.
Haves and Have-Nots - I've been ahead of the curve on calling Tiger a d**k, but also ahead of the curve in calling the Tour one as well. At least in the treatment of its sponsors.... And Alan Shipnuck has a very interesting interview to share:
Shortly after PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan met the press on Tuesday at the PlayersChampionship, offering a rosy assessment of the state of play, my phone rang. The caller was someone I’ve never met or even spoken with. He is the tournament director at an old, proud PGA Tour event and he wanted to vent. “With all the change happening at the Tour,” he said, “there is one side to the story that is not being told: ours. Monahan, Tiger, Rory, all the other top players—they seem to have forgotten their biggest customer, which is the title sponsors of the tournaments. Honda, Dell Computers, Mayakoba… they’re gone. If the Tour keeps losing big, longstanding sponsors, none of this other stuff matters because the business model is going to collapse. Those of us at the tournament level, we’re on the front lines right now, trying to hold everything together.”This gent agreed to participate in a Q&A on the condition of anonymity, to avoid retribution from the Tour and blowback from his event’s sponsor.
Why, did the Tour pull a Tiger and make him sign an NDA?
Fire Pit: Your tournament this year is not an elevated event. Do you feel like there’s a really exclusive party you weren’t invited to?Tournament director: I enjoyed Bay Hill as much as everybody else. It was a great show and I’m happy for the Tour to have some wins. We’re fine this season because everyone knows this schedule was thrown together as part of a very transitional year. The real concern is 2024 and beyond. Nobody knows what the future will look like. We remain hopeful, but there are still so many unanswered questions. The most frustrating part is that the Tour has done so little to engage with the title sponsors and the tournaments. The communication has been clunky and minimal at best. It’s almost like a form of avoidance. They do the absolute minimum and that has led to a lot of animosity between the Tour and the sponsors, which is unbelievable to me. You would think they would be working overtime to make their corporate partners feel valued and get them to buy into this new vision they are trying to create.
Had he been reading Unplayable Lies. he might be far better informed. It's rather a simple decision tree: Is the ink dry on your contract? If not, Jay is your BFF. If yes, he doesn't recognize your existence unless and until he needs you to pony up more scratch.
FP: How concerned are you about your strength of field in the future?TD: Very. We have been told nothing about how much the top 50 players will have to play non-designated events next year. [Ed. note: In 2023, top players must compete in three non-elevated events to collect their full Player Impact Program bonus.] The only information we get is from the public press releases and that language appears to have been stripped away now. Of course, we joke that’ll probably change three or four more times based on which players complain. This is part of the frustration and animosity: None of this feels like a well laid-out plan. From the very beginning, the Tour has been reactionary all the way across the board. They’re just making this stuff up by the seat of their pants.
Sounds about right up until the Delaware meeting. Now Jay is just Rory and Tiger's stenographer....
FP: How is your title sponsor reacting to the changing landscape?TD: We had already been in conversations about reupping. In our mind it was a done deal coming out of last year, when we had a spectacular field. Now, it’s how can we show them value? How can they justify a $15 million investment? And if they can’t, candidly, how do we find someone else? It’s getting harder to ask for more and more from the sponsor without having answers. If we knew that every third year we would be designated, that would calm a lot of nerves. When you lose starpower, it definitely hurts. It hurts more from a perception standpoint. Make no mistake, when no big names show up at a tournament, like Honda, the news media around non-designated events turns very negative. Casual fans take note and the perception becomes they are being sold an inferior product. All of our local golf fans have been pinched by inflation, and discretionary spending has never been tighter. Fans are asking why they should spend 50 or 60 or 70 bucks to watch a bunch of players they’ve never heard of. Objectively, it’s a valid question.
Run, don't walk, away from a renewal.... This is what I don't understand. You see how they treated Honda, their longest continual sponsor. If they treat Honda like that, they'll do the same to you eventually.
This deserves a deeper dive than we have time for:
FP: The Tour hosts an annual end-of-the-year gathering for the tournament directors, and I know you talk among yourselves. How would you describe the mood among your peers?TD: When the news broke last summer and big names started leaving for LIV, multiple sponsors looked into how they could get out of their contracts. They felt they could do it since the product had been irrevocably harmed, but nobody wanted to be first. It would have been a lose-lose for everyone involved. It never happened, but that tells you what the mood has been like. There is more animosity now because it’s become two tours. If you’re not a designated event, there is a lot of stress and uncertainty about how you are going to keep, or find, a title sponsor. It all boils down to eyeballs for the sponsors: Am they getting what they signed up for? The ratings have been pretty staggering for non-elevated events, down 20 percent or more. I’m curious what TV is going to feel like for non-designated events next year. How does NBC feel? They paid $1.3 billion for TV rights; now the Tour is switching up the game on them. If two-thirds of their events are shit fields, with nobody in the top 20, what incentive do they have to invest in the broadcast? We’re asking them to spend a lot of money on a fringe sport, a regional sport. If they’re not getting eyeballs, that is a huge problem.
If? No one watches golf even when the big boys are there...
To some extent, the Tour absurdly diluted its own product, and some sort of rationalization is required. That said, many sponsors signed up for a certain deal, and the Tour has simply changed that deal, in some cases dramatically diminishing the product, and expects the sponsors to simply fall in line.
And then we get to that dark underbelly that we're not supposed to know of:
FP: Even if you aren’t given designated status, are there things you can do to attract players?TD: Our tournament doesn’t pay players. We just don’t. Do some ask? Absolutely. A lot of the guys who used to ask have gone to LIV, but others are still on Tour. How do you think Travelers gets so many top guys to show up? That tournament is the king of appearance fees, though they call them personal service contracts or something like that. Bubba [Watson] went public with some of these details, but it’s been going on for a long time, basically paying guys to show up at a cocktail party and things like that.FP: How much money are we talking?TD: I’ve been told $250,000 to $500,000. Must be nice. The CEO is a golf nut, and they turned that tournament into a top event. Now they’ve bought their way into designated status so it’s hard to argue with the results.
Well, they bought themselves into it for 2023. Not sure how much I like their chances for 2024, with only eight such events (and three are spoken for with Riviera, Arnie's and Jack's).
FP: It seems inevitable there is going to be some contraction of the schedule. You come from the business world, you must understand the market forces involved. But how challenging is it to put all this effort into hosting a tournament under these circumstances?TD: It makes me sad because the Tour is choosing the winners and losers. Yes, in the past there had always been different tiers of tournaments based on how the schedule fell, but it wasn’t official policy and you always felt like you could overcome it. Maybe you’d give a sponsor’s exemption to a kid and he’d become a superstar and keep coming back year after year. Or maybe some top players would want to work on their game and add your event. But now we can’t control our own destiny and that is frustrating. You can do everything right but one or two decisions in Ponte Vedra Beach, or even from Tiger and Rory, can change everything. And that has a big effect on how your tournament is viewed in your community and the charitable impact you can have. And for what? Just so the top guys can make more money, even though they were already making a ton of it. It’s really sad.
But, wait, Max Homa assured me it wasn't a money grab....
He makes the relevant point very clearly, which is that there was already a hierarchy of events, but that each event had flexibility in marketing themselves to the players. The problem with the new system, either the '23 or '24 models, is that the top players will be compelled to play in that select list of events, rendering it almost impossible for the non-designated events to grab any talent.
As a matter of basic fairness, this isn't what they signed up for. I just wish some reporter would ask Rory whether the Tour has any obligations to those that have paid the bills.... Yeah, I know, good luck with that.
The State of Jay - The Commish is typically front and center at the Tour's signature event, and I'll give him mixed grades. Like Mike Bamberger, I agree this was handled deftly:
Reporter: “Has it been complicated to navigate the fact that the defending champion, Cam Smith, has gone to LIV Golf but also lives in the area?”Commissioner: “Listen, Cam Smith had a great performance in 2022. He was a deserved champion. I think as I look to this week and I look at the field that we have here and the strength from top to bottom, I think when we leave here on Sunday night we’re going to crownanother deserving champion. To answer your question directly, yes, it’s awkward. But you know, ultimately that’s a decision he made.”Textbook.
Flying the Australian flag in tribute to the defending champion is a nice touch as well....
Eamon Lynch does a deeper dive on our Commish, including this apt metaphor:
When it comes to delivering his message, Jay Monahan is more mechanic than missionary, at ease in a boardroom but less so in the pulpit. He is defensive by disposition, on record as saying that he wakes each day thinking that someone is trying to steal his lunch. Meeting the press at the Players Championship, the PGA Tour commissioner’s words suggested he knows the tide has turned in his favor in the war with LIV Golf. His body language, however, hinted at a man who might consider a padlock in a sock among his negotiating tools, a slouchy wariness spiked with a faint whiff of almost amiable menace.
A mechanic, at best. I still remember the bumbling Jay at that 2020 Players, the guy who kept mumbling about golf being played over hundreds of acres, contemptuously ignoring that his paying customers were jammed into shuttle buses and grandstands. Kind of a trend, that, Jay ignoring those that actually pay the freight.
As Eamon notes, there are places he's not going publicly:
Like most executives, Monahan is disinclined to tackle speculative questions. What hashappened, or what will happen, is fair game. What might happen is for backroom conversations, particularly in the charged environment in which Monahan now exists. At TPC Sawgrass, he swatted away those abstract inquiries with a practiced hand.“Getting into hypothetical situations given where we currently are is not a worthwhile effort,” he replied when asked about the possibility of merging with LIV, against which the Tour is locked in bitter litigation. “I think any other hypotheticals are just not worth talking about.”“I know this is hypothetical,” another questioner began gamely, asking about the status of the DP World Tour’s arbitration case as it seeks to bar LIV-allied players from its events.“I can’t speak to, you know, what’s happening with the resolution panel,” Monahan said. “I’m going to leave that for you guys to understand, and I’m not going to comment on it.”
Strategic ambiguity makes sense for sure.
The third such query he fielded was on how the PGA Tour might handle requests to return by players who have defected to LIV.“The players that are playing on that Tour are contractually obligated to play on that Tour, so any hypotheticals at this point really aren’t relevant, and I think you know me well enough to know I’m not a big fan of hypotheticals,” he responded. “But our position, to answer your question directly, has not changed.”Experience has taught Monahan that the problem with hypotheticals is that they often become theticals. So while the Tour’s position hasn’t changed, it will.
Theticals? probably, but not until the Saudis tire of writing checks, and I don't know when that might be....
But Eamon does get into some interesting speculation:
Only LIV’s most punch-drunk parasites continue to delude themselves that the Saudi-financed league has a pathway to success. The combination of a lousy product, no audience traction and perilous legal exposure for its secretive owners doesn’t portend a long life. However the end eventually comes — whether slow and agonizing (like the ’96 Masters) or in a sudden, crushing blow (say, the ’87 Masters)— it poses the same problem for Monahan: how to rehabilitate LIV players back into the PGA Tour’s ecosystem.There’s no sentiment favoring that in the locker room, where attitudes have hardened amid costly litigation and public sniping. Nor it is considered a pressing issue, since no LIV player has publicly asked to return. But what happens when one or more do so? Or when Greg Norman’s maladroit mismanagement renders all of them professionally homeless?
The Norman digs are good fun, as I enjoy revisiting those almost as much as rehashing the Kashoggi murder.
But I'm not sure he actually has his finger on the pulse of that locker room. Max Homa had some very conciliatory thoughts recently, and this guy is pining over the friends that deserted him. I might question if someone that deserts you and tries to damage the place where you make your living was ever a good friend, but I can be a tad cynical....
This is interesting:
At TPC Sawgrass there are renewed whispers about multiple LIV players having buyer’s remorse, especially in light of the lucrative new structure taking shape at their former workplace. As noted by the judge in California’s Northern District, LIV contracts are iron-clad and escaping wouldn’t be easy for players. But breaches go both ways if LIV falls short of what players were promised, whether in expenditures, team prize money payments or schedule commitments. The potential for players seeking a path back is not as remote as it might once have seemed.
Shipnuck had the rumors about Brooks, and also interesting is that the poster child for LIV entitlement, Talor Gooch, signed a contract that expires at the end of 2024. Of course, he's been so obnoxious and is convinced that LIV's team competition is just like the Ryder Cup, so let him hang is my suggestion...
This is probably right:
LIV’s ranks include many of stout résumé, albeit weak character. There are others to whom fans might still relate, if only they could see them in action. And more they’d simply like to root against, since LIV selfishly signed all the jerks, or at least the ones with a profile as such. Eventually, whether under pressure from fans or top players — or simply to avert the possibility of another rival league taking shape with less amoral baggage — the PGA Tour will want to recycle LIV’s refugees. Privately, some executives admit as much with a weary resignation.That will eventually become Monahan’s problem to solve, but it is not his solution to initiate.
But on what basis? This guy is easy:
Complicating matters is the reality that some LIV players, like Phil Mickelson, would be as welcome in a Tour locker room as foot fungus. Bryson DeChambeau too, still a litigant in the LIV antitrust suit. Or Patrick Reed, for reasons so numerous that only a serially censured attorney could ignore them. Yet any process to return can’t draw lines in the sand that exclude some while embracing others. Anyone resistant to seeing some of their former peers would just have to hope that shame would prevent them from showing face again, an optimistic outlook given their priors.
To me, Phil is the easiest, that's a lifetime ban. If not, your humble blogger may be done with golf....
But DJ seems perhaps the most interesting case. He has mostly kept his mouth shut, a very DJ move.... But his might have been the most important defection, coming at a time when Phil was radioactive and LIV looked dead in the water. Further, his treatment of long-term sponsors, notably RBC, was particularly egregious, playing in that first London event that conflicted with the RBC-sponsored Canadian Open, in which he was contractually-obligated to play.
The locker room is important, but the sponsors are another important constituency, although we just so happened to have discussed the Tour's dreadful treatment of them quite extensively.
I do agree with Eamon that they better be prepared with a logical treatment of the LIVsters on an individual basis, but I'm thinking there better be some significant penalties for their treason. Although I can't see this as much of a risk:
Eventually, whether under pressure from fans or top players — or simply to avert the possibility of another rival league taking shape with less amoral baggage — the PGA Tour will want to recycle LIV’s refugees.
Yeah, I think the Saudis have performed one invaluable service, they haver exposed our lad as bunch of entitled jerks in it only for the money. I suspect no ne else will be lined up to take on Phil and PReed....
That's it for this week. I'll probably wrap the Players in typical fashion on Monday, although Tuesday is my travel day, but it's also time to shut the condo down for the season. It is possible that time will become scarce, though I'll try to be here for you. Have a great weekend and enjoy the golf.
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