Tiger earns best win of season off the golf course

ORLANDO, Fla. -- OK, so we might need to work on the headline.

But it works, has a utilitarian flair and certainly is apt enough, considering the drubbing he administered on Tuesday. It's just not all that pithy, punchy or original.

Here goes: Tiger Woods wins again!

Yeah, shocking, right? Woods' page on the Official World Golf Ranking website indicates that the game's No. 1 won a total of seven times worldwide this season, by margins great and small, but they are truly selling him short. His victory on Tuesday was a veritable skunking.

Had the press conference called by the Florida Highway Patrol not been broadcast live on CNN, the Golf Channel and a few other outlets, I would have laughed out loud when the legal punch-line was rendered. The agency announced that it had completed its probe into his car crash, and that Woods would face a traffic citation for careless driving, which carries a fine of $164, or roughly what his nanny spends on diapers each month.

A few moments earlier, a reporter from ESPN was talking on his phone to somebody in Bristol, who wanted to know when the FHP press conference would start.

"Well, they sort of run themselves like a military organization, so I suspect it will be right at 3 o'clock," he said.

Like with Grenada, it was over by 3:05.

Well, technically, anyway. It was really over when Woods cagily dodged the cops for three straight days, lawyered up on Sunday and then declined to say a darned thing. As far as we can tell, nobody from FHP, because of bad timing and the way the legal process played out, ever laid eyes on the guy during the whole investigation.

As expected, at straight-up 3 p.m., two FHP officials, including Major Cindy Williams, hustled into the room at FHP headquarters at a double-time clip. They had their flat-billed trooper hats on and their jaws were seriously set. Williams is the commander of the six-county Central Florida district known as Troop D.

A media wise guy seated next to me quipped, "Did he say F Troop?"

No offense, but FHP was so far behind in the quest for evidentiary material that Corporal Agarn would have had a better chance of getting to the bottom of the Isleworth mishap than the troopers handling the case.

And remind me again, which one was Cindy Williams? Laverne or Shirley?

With deep gravitas, Williams announced that Woods would be issued a citation and face the possible loss of four points on his driving record. What she didn't say is that if Woods has a clean record behind the wheel, the Florida court will likely "withhold adjudication," which means the infraction will never be placed on his record at all. No points, no insurance ramifications. Legally, it's like it never happened.

It brought back memories of his play a million years ago, back in our mutual SoCal days, when Woods had just won the Southern California Golf Association title. Future PGA Tour peer Charlie Wi walked over to the teenage winner and said, "Well played, Eldrick."

Deftly done, dude. This was such a one-sided blowout that I thought it was being contested not on a cop's notepad or over a lawyer's cell phone, but at nearby Bay Hill, where Woods has won six times.

Williams and Sgt. Kim Montes breezed hastily through the press conference, reading from a prepared script and refusing to answer questions, then bolted from the room. Had the FHP moved this fast with the initial response to the Woods accident scene, its patrol car might have arrived before Woods was hauled off to the hospital. As it was, pretty much any semblance of probable cause for anything beyond a careless-driving charge was wheeled off with him.

Its probative hands tied, the FHP was whipped, 9&8. Even after speaking with state attorney Lawson Lamar, it was agreed that there was no legal reason to seek Woods' medical records. The FHP still doesn't know if any blood was drawn when Woods went to the hospital. He was never given a DUI exam. Lamar must have winced when his name was dropped by Williams during the drive-by press conference -- he's up for re-election soon.

Finishing off his lopsided win, Woods not only dodged the cops, he gave the general public a straight-arm worthy of the guy on the Heisman Trophy. Rather than play this week at his charity event in Thousand Oaks, Calif., where every camera on the property would have been photographing his facial lacerations, Woods withdrew, claiming he was too bloodied and bruised by the accident to play. He won the U.S. Open with a blown ACL and multiple leg fractures, but he couldn't compete with a fat lip. Hey, it's plausible deniability, right?

So, then, based on his traditional playing pattern, we won't see him again until the final week of January after the wounds have healed and memories have grown fuzzy. The tournament is set for Torrey Pines. You remember that place, right?

He's won seven times there, too. He rarely loses anything meaningful.

Given the public's attenuated attention span and the fact that the FHP probe has wrapped, the Escalade escapade should blow over quickly enough. On that other annoying front of the moment, Woods isn't likely to dignify the allegations of the various women who have recently accused him of adultery, either. Again, he believes it's the smartest play, and with his batting average these days, we can hardly argue the point.

By late January, in light of how badly as the U.S. sporting public suffers from ADD, the Cadillac crash will have been washed away ... before they get ... to the end of this ... sentence.

On Tuesday throughout Florida, Woods had already been supplanted as the talk of the town, what with Florida State coaching legend Bobby Bowden considering his retirement a few miles up the road in Tallahassee. By Friday, an NFL ne'er-do-well will have run over somebody in a crosswalk or some MLB pitcher will get arrested at the border with a suitcase full of supplements, making Woods' duck-hooked drive into the trees ancient news.

By the time Woods wins the Masters in April? All might not be forgiven, but it'll largely be forgotten.