Patrick Reusse: In 13 minutes, Tiger gets public back on his side

Sports reporters on occasion run head long into the astonishing. That was the case for media assigned to cover the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach.

The grounds were firm and the rough was tangled. Then, the seaside winds started blowing Friday and made the USGA's favorite West Coast test dang near impossible.

There was an exception to this. Tiger Woods played the 72 holes in 12 under par. The best score of the remaining 62 players to make the cut were 3-over totals for Miguel Angel Jimenez and Ernie Els.

You want the total number of strokes to separate the top two players in the 10 previous (1990-99) U.S. Opens after 72 holes? Ten.

That made the math easy: Tiger had buried the field by 15 strokes in a tournament where the average margin from first to second in the previous decade was one.

David Duval, the No. 2-ranked player in the world at the time, saw Woods obliterate the field and said, "You're really doing Tiger a disservice by comparing me to him."

Rocco Mediate said of Woods: "I'm definitely mortal. I think we all are. He's not."

We were wrong.

Eldrick Woods, now 34 and thinning of hair, put on a one-act play Friday that required more adroitness than anything he faced on Pebble Beach's treacherous links a decade ago.

In a remarkably short period, he had been revealed as a philandering fraud and his popularity had gone from off the charts to off the cliff. The response of the world's most famous athlete was to stay out of public view for 80 days and maintain silence.

Finally, he surfaced Friday and offered a 13-minute apology that included the finest affectations of sincerity that you could expect from a person not trained in method acting. It was pure genius -- the same instinct for timing that had made him a convincing pitchman for so many products.

The effectiveness with the public was predictable: According to a rapid study conducted by HCD Research, 31 percent of viewers indicated their perception of Woods changed in a positive way. And 64 percent indicated that this apology was a sufficient public response to the scandal for Woods.

Beautiful, Tiger. Throwing in a few sentences of media bashing is a tried-and-true method for gaining points in public opinion.

Of course, if it wasn't for the media -- and, specifically, the redoubtable National Enquirer -- Woods still would be putting together threesomes with hostesses and porn stars, still would be messing around with the neighbor lady and the nearby waitress, still would be sneaking around on the missus as before.

The Enquirer was ready with the story on Woods and Mistress No. 1, Rachel Uchitel, and their liaison in Australia, and that's when Tiger wound up driving barefoot into sturdy objects at the end of his driveway on Thanksgiving.

Woods wasn't driven into sex treatment by a grand revelation that he wanted to be a better person. This was not a man waking up far from home one morning in a pile of pulchritude and saying, "I'm going to take the jet to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and sign up for fidelity training."

The Enquirer had the goods, and then the mainstream media had the police call to allow it to jump into the story, and Tiger was trapped. He lost sponsors. He lost much of his standing with the public. He needed an out, and it wound up being Hattiesburg.

He was going to control every situation. Nobody was ever going to dictate to him what to do, including the person charged with mentioning "love, honor and obey" at the wedding ceremony.

Friday, he still managed to control the situation and maintain his defiance, even as he put the majority of the public back in his corner in a mere 13 minutes.

I was at Pebble Beach. This performance was more amazing.