AMERICA AT LARGE:The chain of events set in motion when Elin Nordegren Woods picked up her husband's mobile phone, hit the redial button and was connected to one of his mistresses was probably greeted with the popping of champagne corks in the offices of Simon and Schuster, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

MANY BROADWAY theatres had added a Friday matinee to their fare over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend; I was in attendance at one of them last November 27th when I stepped outside for a quick smoke following the first act and saw, across Times Square, a huge electronic billboard displaying a news bulletin: Tiger Woods had been hospitalised as the result of a car crash near his Florida home.

The salacious details of the episode that turned Tiger’s world upside down wouldn’t begin to trickle in for a couple of days, and, when they did, Robert Lusetich could be forgiven if his reaction was a bit different from yours and mine.

A bit more than a year earlier, Lusetich had returned from the Beijing Olympics to receive word that his own life had been immutably altered. For the better part of two decades he had held what most of his colleagues enviously considered the dream job. In theory the one-man Los Angeles bureau of The Australian, Lusetich could call his own tune. He was free to roam the US, and sometimes the globe, charting his course and covering whichever sporting events suited his fancy.

But in September 2008 that existence appeared to have collapsed with The Australian's decision to eliminate his position. After some deliberation, and cushioned by a generous buy-out, he decided his next step would be to write a book. About Tiger Woods.

The literature on Woods had already reached something like six dozen volumes; Lusetich, and his publishers, could only hope there was room for another. The hook would be that, having secured an assignment writing columns for FoxSportsNet.com, Lusetich would cover every event Woods played in 2009, offering an insider’s chronology of Tiger’s attempt to bounce back from reconstructive knee surgery to reclaim his once-unchallenged position as the world’s number one golfer.

Whether that conceit would have sufficed to set Unplayableapart from its predecessors, such as Tiger Woods: Lion on the Linksand Think Like Tiger, remains unlearned. Suffice it to say, the chain of events set in motion when Elin Nordegen Woods picked up her husband's mobile phone, hit the redial button and was connected to one of his mistresses was probably greeted with the popping of champagne corks in the offices of Simon and Schuster.

Timing can be everything in the publishing world. Woods’ inelegant, free-fall descent from the world’s most recognisable (and marketable) sportsman to a widely-ridiculed butt of jokes would inevitably lead to a spate of new books, but Lusetich and his publishers had a unique advantage: they were sitting on one that was nearly finished, its research already complete. All that remained was for it to be embellished with the trappings of a scandalous denouement that had just been served up on a platter.

Even as Tiger was putting in his 45 days at the Mississippi clinic where he was treated for sex addiction, Lusetich was applying the finishing touches which would transform his original concept into what its subtitle promised would be "an inside account of Tiger's most tumultuous season", ready to do battle with its more hastily composed competitors like The Tiger Woods Syndrome: Why Men Prowland How to Not Become the Prey and Tiger: The Real Story.

Even in the absence of the tawdry unravelling of his personal life, humanising Tiger Woods was never going to be an easy task. Few public figures have been as insistently private. Even his most intimate associates speak of Woods at their peril.

The trail is littered with the carcasses of those who, over the years, like caddie Fluff Cowen, swing gurus Butch Harmon and, now, Hank Haney, and agent Hughes Norton, were perceived to have violated confidence by telling tales out of school.

Exactly how private was Woods’ personal life is something evidently even his closest confidants found startling. At least in Lusetich’s telling, not even caddie Steve Williams nor the golfer’s controlling agent, Mark Steinberg, were aware of the double life Tiger had been leading until it spiralled off the sports pages and into the realm of tabloid television and gossip sheets last November.

Lusetich’s depiction of Williams’ innocence may be somewhat disingenuous. Personally, like many of my sportswriting brethren, I wouldn’t trust Steve Williams to make change for a nickel. Lusetich not only gets on with Tiger’s caddie, but frequently cites him as a primary source, which creates the sneaking suspicion that a devil’s bargain may have been at work here – a condition of which may have been keeping the caddie’s fingerprints off any bimbo revelations.

It seems, at the very least, highly unlikely that the man who drove him home from the course each evening and picked him up the next morning for the following round never had a clue about how his boss might have entertained himself in between.

In Unplayable– Lusetich's title is taken from the code word Tiger's inner circle used to warn one another of his interludes of ill-humour – Williams' presumption of innocence appears to match that of Pádraig Harrington: "I used to think he would go back to his hotel room very early and leave the golf course early. I just assumed he was playing video games! I thought his life was quite boring." (That particular Harrington quote, actually uttered to Ryan Tubridy on RTÉ last December, is offered up, sans attribution, in Unplayable.)

Tiger is and was a creature of habit. As part of his tournament routine, for 11 years now he has eaten the same peanut butter and banana sandwiches prepared by Williams during every competitive round. He not only warms up on the range with the same balls he plays in competition, they even have the same number (one).

Oblivious to the more usual calls of nature, Tiger makes arrangement to pee after he has played exactly six holes – no more, and no fewer.

And Woods not only performed but existed for the most part in a carefully regulated environment. His choice of clothing, at least five days a week, was pre-determined by marketers of Nike apparel. Steinberg and Glenn Greenspan, the former Augusta National press officer turned spin-doctor, not only decided when and where Tiger would meet the press, but determined who got to ask what question and whether Tiger would deign to answer it. Photo ops were similarly screened, always with an eye toward protecting the image.

(How could the product of such intense control come to spin so wildly out of control? That, and related questions, would no doubt fascinate students of the human psyche who have never picked up a golf club, but, one suspects here, those are not the same readers who would be riveted by the detailed analysis of torque, clubhead speed and the physics of the golf swing with which Lusetich illuminates his readers.)

Its Freudian aspects are endemic to any deconstruction of the Tiger mystique. Lusetich provides a recitation of the influence of Tiger’s late father, Earl Woods, the former green beret who, having programmed his son from an early age and widely predicted that his ultimate influence would be akin to that of Gandhi and Jesus Christ, in almost the same breath boasted (accurately, one suspects) that he had raised a son who “could slit your throat and then sit down to eat his dinner”.

But Lusetich notes that Tiger’s mother asserted an influence of her own. After her son frittered away a four-shot lead at the midpoint to lose the 2009 PGA to the immortal YE Yang at Haseltine, Tida Woods demanded an accounting of the names of every writer who had described Tiger as “a choker”. Exactly what Mrs Woods proposed to do with her hit-list remains unrevealed.

Lusetich describes at great length Tiger’s almost obsessive dislike of rival Phil Mickelson, and devotes far more space revisiting what became known on the blogosphere as “Fartgate” than might be warranted in an otherwise serious tome.

At the 2009 Buick Open in Flint, Michigan, the irrepressible broadcaster David Feherty, having steeled himself for the occasion, surprised Tiger and his caddie on the final hole at Warwick Hills with a bit of boyish horseplay.

“While Woods bent over to stretch,” writes Lusetich, “Feherty launched a sick-sounding fart from nearby, so long and so loud that both Woods and Williams immediately looked over and began laughing.”

Trouble was, Feherty had neglected to turn off his microphone. The episode was not only broadcast live on CBS, but, until it was removed at the network’s behest, became the most popular fixture on YouTube – where Tiger was often assumed to have been the perpetrator. Lusetich appears to consider the episode to have been a cautionary tale from which his subject might have learned.

“David Feherty passes gas,” Lusetich began his FoxSportsNet column that week, “and Tiger Woods gets the blame.”