Tiger Woods is the Prince Harry of sport.

So says his biographer, global sensation James Patterson, who believes the greatest golfer in history was trapped by his fame… and courted disaster when he tried to escape the gilded cage.

‘There’s a little parallel with the Royal Family,’ Patterson tells me in an interview about his new best-seller, ‘Tiger, Tiger’.

‘They’re not allowed to be real people, to be out in the world,’ he adds. ‘I think that’s probably a little bit [of the problem] with Harry. [He’s] just got to go out there and be a real person, you know?’

Tiger and Harry share another huge parallel: both men have, at times, been used to not doing things for themselves.

Tiger and Harry share a huge parallel: both men have, at times, been used to not doing things for themselves. 

James Patterson, who believes Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer in history, was trapped by his fame… and courted disaster when he tried to escape the gilded cage.

Certainly, that’s how Woods’s former wife Elin Nordegren sees it.

When fellow Swede and golf-pro Jesper Parnevik first introduced the pair in 2001, Elin was working as an au pair for Parnevik’s family.

The blue-eyed 21-year-old had ambitions to train as a paediatric psychologist, was a keen amateur kickboxer and even a part-time swimsuit model.

Woods, then 25, was smitten.

But, instead of approaching her for a first date himself, Woods rather awkwardly sent a member of his back-up team to do the asking.

‘That’s the way he’s lived his life,’ says Patterson. ‘Whatever Woods needed, whether it was room service or a wife, his first instinct was to say: “Let’s get a manager to do that”.’

According to one of Patterson’s sources, Elin was deeply unimpressed to have been approached via proxy, describing the move as ‘weird and pathetic’.

She already had a boyfriend back home in Sweden and it was months before she consented to go on a date with Woods.

They tied the knot in 2004 – only for the marriage to collapse within six years in one of the messiest break-ups in sporting history, littered with sordid tales of addiction and infidelity.

Patterson, 77, has sold more than 425 million books – more than Stephen King or Dean Koontz – has written over 100 thrillers and published biographies of Jeffrey Epstein and John Lennon.

Now he has turned his attention to a sporting legend who won his first major tournament aged 21 by a record-breaking margin and remained the world No.1 for more than a decade.

Certainly, that’s how Woods’s former wife Elin Nordegren (pictured) sees it. When golf-pro Jesper Parnevik introduced the pair in 2001, Elin was working as an au pair.

The blue-eyed 21-year-old had ambitions to train as a paediatric psychologist, was a keen amateur kickboxer and even a part-time swimsuit model.

To tell the story of the disastrous night in 2009 when Woods’s marriage imploded, Patterson has uncovered live news broadcasts, the transcript of a 911 call and the initial statement by a Florida highway patrol officer.

Dramatic stuff. But for readers hoping to delve into every sordid detail of what went wrong in the golfer’s life, Patterson admits that this is not the book for them.

‘I don’t think you need to bring it up every time you talk about the guy,’ he told me.

Nonetheless, Patterson’s account is compelling: just after 2am on Friday, November 27, 2009, the night after Thanksgiving, two police officers answering an emergency call found Woods on the ground in front of his vehicle, a black Cadillac Escalade, close to his home in the little town of Windermere, Florida.

James Patterson has sold more than 425 million books.

The car had hit a fire hydrant at speed and then a tree. Hearing the crash, Elin had run from their house. She shattered at least one car window with a golf club and dragged her husband out of the wreckage.

By then, she already knew what the world would soon discover.

As Patterson tells it, Elin had never seen cause to doubt her husband’s fidelity during five years of marriage. She ignored salacious stories in the media.

‘A lot of things they wrote are fabrications,’ Woods had claimed. ‘Sensationalism sells.’

But when she learned a tabloid magazine planned to expose a relationship between Woods and a 34-year-old Las Vegas hostess named Rachel Uchitel, Elin demanded to know the truth.

Woods admitted knowing Uchitel, denied any suggestion of an affair and arranged for the women to talk over the phone.

Elin, who has two children with Woods, seemed to be placated. But, when her husband took an Ambien sleeping pill and fell asleep following their Thanksgiving dinner, she went through his mobile phone log for the first time. A lot of calls to Uchitel showed up.

Elin’s response was to phone the mistress and tell her: ‘I know everything.’

There were more messages on the log, including from a 24-year-old Los Angeles cocktail waitress called Jaimee Grubbs.

But when she learned a magazine planned to expose a relationship between Woods and a 34-year-old Las Vegas hostess named Rachel Uchitel (pictured), Elin demanded to know the truth.

There were more messages on the log, including from a 24-year-old Los Angeles cocktail waitress called Jaimee Grubbs (pictured).

Elin phoned her too, according to Patterson, yelling: ‘You know who this is, because you’re f***ing my husband!’

After she woke Woods and confronted him, he briefly locked himself in the bathroom, then fled the house and climbed into his Cadillac. He crashed within 150 yards.

A media frenzy hit Windermere.

‘Two hundred paparazzi,’ bemoaned the mayor, Gary Bruhn. ‘Paparazzi hanging from the trees. They wanted to know what golf club Elin used [to break the Cadillac’s windows].’

Details of the other medications Woods might have been on, other than Ambien and the powerful pain-reliever Vicodin, are thin. And police later said that alcohol was not a factor in the crash.

For his part, Woods released a bland statement: ‘After much soul searching, I have decided to take an indefinite break from professional golf. I need to focus my attention on being a better husband, father and person.’

But the dam had broken and, as Patterson notes, ‘an onslaught of porn stars, strippers, escorts and party girls’ would come forward to claim they’d had sex with Woods, leaving Elin ’embarrassed for having been so deceived’.

Woods bought her a $3 million yacht – because she loved scuba diving – but she’d made up her mind.

They divorced in August 2010, with Elin bagging a reported $100m settlement – and shared custody of their children.

She’d wanted more – after all, Woods was worth at least six times that figure – but she settled.

‘Money doesn’t make you happy, but I have to be honest: It is making some things easier,’ she told People magazine.

But for Patterson’s account, the scandal ends there. Instead, his book chronicles in unrivalled detail how Woods rose to dominate the golfing world.

His first pro teacher, Rudy Duran, told Golf Digest magazine when Woods was just six: ‘The kid’s not exceptional. He’s way beyond that.’

At 21, Woods became the youngest golfer to win the Masters. He chalked up the lowest 72-hole score ever, winning by 12 shots – the biggest margin ever seen.

In his prime, everything Woods did seemed superhuman… even fishing. He used a speargun, holding his breath for up to four minutes as he swam underwater.

Today, Woods languishes at No. 874 in the world – harmed irreparably by a string of personal setbacks, all by now well-told:

Today, he languishes at No. 874 in the world golf rankings – harmed irreparably by a string of personal setbacks, all by now well-told:

There was Michelle Braun, the Las Vegas madam who claimed she organised wild sex parties for Woods.

According to her, the golf legend liked to jet into the desert town on what were dubbed ‘f***-and-run’ trips.

‘Every couple of months, he requested to have multiple girls,’ Braun alleged in 2021. ‘It could be up to ten girls at a time. He had a particular type. He liked young college cutie-girl-next-door types, preferably blonde.’

Meanwhile, a former escort, Loredana Jolie, said Woods liked to wear a suit and role-play during sex, with the girls acting as his ‘little puppets’.

‘Tiger, Tiger: His life as it’s never been told before’ by James Patterson is published by Little Brown.

Others have suggested that his mistress Rachel Uchitel also acted as a fixer for private orgies.

A Vegas hotel concierge known as ‘Serge’ said that Uchitel supplied whatever was wanted ‘from dinner, to nightclubs, to drugs, to girls’.

He claimed Uchitel was paid a retainer by Woods, probably somewhere between $10,000 to $15,000 a month plus tips, for her services.

Another woman who emerged from the woodwork in 2010 was porn star Veronica Siwik-Daniels, then 33 and known on screen as Joslyn James.

‘Tiger pursued me and over time I fell in love with him,’ she said. ‘He told me he loved me too.’

She became pregnant by him twice, she said – once suffering a miscarriage and later having an abortion.

And then there were the golf star’s more recent confrontations with the police – and his ongoing problems with prescription pills.

In May 2017, a dishevelled Woods was discovered asleep at the wheel of his Mercedes outside Palm Beach, in a bike lane, with the engine still running.

A breathalyser test found no alcohol in his body, but he admitted to being under the influence of medication, which he blamed on back pain and a sleep disorder. In October of that year, Woods pleaded guilty to reckless driving.

In January 2021, he was involved in yet another crash, in which he suffered a broken leg.

In January 2021, he was involved in yet another crash in Los Angeles (pictured), in which he suffered a broken leg.

Driving 40mph over the limit, Woods’s car rolled off a suburban Los Angeles road and into a verge. The first officer on the scene discovered him trying to stuff the airbag back into the steering wheel, as if trying in his confusion to hide evidence of the accident.

An empty and unlabelled pills bottle was recovered from the vehicle.

‘[Woods] has had so many operations [to fix golfing injuries], and I think he’s had so much pain, and you know how that works,’ Patterson tells me. ‘All of a sudden, you get – I don’t want to say “addicted”, but he certainly used [pills] more than he needed to.’

Patterson, an avid golfer himself, says he remains optimistic about Tiger’s sporting future.

‘It’s not gonna shock me if he wins another tournament,’ he says. ‘You know, simple-minded fool that I am, I want people to have a good life. Why not?’

And even if Woods doesn’t regain his peak, his 15-year-old son Charlie entered his first tournament on the PGA circuit this year, while his daughter Sam, 17, has caddied for her father.

The name Woods could still dominate golf again.