Admittedly, I've been following this Tiger Woods crash/affair rumor/circus since Wednesday evening when I had read about the National Enquirer's out-of-nowhere claim that Woods was having an affair with Rachel Uchitel.

I thought, "Tiger has the highest blandness quotient* of every celebrity alive.  Why would the Enquirer print such a thing?"

*For those of you that don't know the term that I just made up, "blandness quotient" is a simple function of how famous someone is on a scale of 1 to 100, divided by how boring they are or try to be publicly on an descending 10 scale (1 being opera boring).   The closer you get to 100 on the blandness quotient, the more bland you are.  For example, Tiger is about a 100.  Kim Kardashian is about a 5 - 50/10.

I kind of left the story alone and went about my merry way.  Nothing posted here about the rumor, though I was getting phone calls and text messages and Tweets and the other three ways you can get a hold of me asking me if I knew anything.  No, I didn't. 

Then through the other two ways - the Batphone and carrier pigeon - that people could find me, I started being told cryptic rumors and supposed details behind the story.  Again, all speculation.  Some of it was wild.  Like John Stamos-Rebecca Romijn swinger party wild.

On Friday, I'm driving around western Pennsylvania, showing off where my wedding reception will be in six months, when I get more messages (including a few smoke signals) that Tiger had been "seriously" hurt in a crash.  We all know where that has led since, but my initial intrigue was wondering if Tiger was physically ok.  And then it was about the rumor.  I guess being at my wedding reception site kind of made me fire those synapses a little more quickly.

It was a long day on Friday.  People calling me.  Me calling people trying to get facts and statements.  I talked to Rachel Uchitel, who seems like a perfectly nice lady who is really distressed right now.  Unbeknownst to her, she went from New York City social diva to a purported party girl, coke fiend, and homewrecker overnight.

Over the weekend, Tiger's image was also transformed in the minds of many from a 100 on the blandness quotient to a 7.5 or so.  (People just love Kim Kardashian!)  His wife was vilified.  He was lambasted for his silence.  Even when he did say something, he was criticized for saying next to nothing.

Like Joe Posnanski - a writer that I am a huge fanboy of - I became more interested in how this whole thing was handled.  Not just by Tiger, but by my media brethren (can I say that?), the Florida Highway Patrol, and Tiger's management team.

This was a comedy of errors.

The traditional media - you know, the one with standards - didn't react fast enough to break news.  They were left waiting to report conflicting facts to the public.  Who knows what is right.  I still haven't even seen the police report to have a baseline of what the police were told happened.

Everyone was hush-hush about the most powerful man in our sport, except them-there nasty bloggers that were trying to add two and two together.  Like an Orwellian pawn, many in the traditional media just kept allowing the players in this situation to tell them that the answer should be five.

For their part, the Florida Highway Patrol just cannot seem to spell Tiger's last name right.  He is not Tiger Wood.  He is Tiger Woods.  And they had been dealing with the guy all weekend and still can't spell his name right.  Possessive of Woods is Woods' or Woods's.  Not Wood's.  Really makes you wonder about things if that minor details - the subject's name - can't be handled.  And I'm pretty sure it isn't an innocent mistake because they're all fans of European Tour Rookie of the Year Chris Wood down there in Orlando.

Meanwhile, TMZ.com claims to have buddies everywhere!  The police department must be as porous as an offensive line protecting David Carr because supposedly the FHP told TMZ that Elin changed her story, and she's a violent psychopath, and she bashed in the car before the accident.  Also, apparently TMZ has buddies that are friends of Tiger's, too, talking about how his wife went "ghetto" and he needs a "Kobe special."  For a guy that is so loaded and influential as Woods is, I find it hard to believe that his friends would be so desperate to talk to a gossip site.  But, again, I don't know!

The thing about TMZ and the Enquirer, though, is that they're like the Terminator.  They don't go away.  They just keep coming.  Hell, I think sometimes they make up stories on a hunch that turn out to be at least partially true just to keep the story going.  They focus on the unknown now - a moment so fast that truthiness can pass for information.  And they're really good at it.

This was their first foray into golf, though, that I can remember.  They didn't really care about Arjun Atwal's highway drag race that led to an unfortunate fatality.  Tripp Isenhour killing a rare bird with a golf ball?  Who?  The ole rumors about Phil Mickelson don't even make it to their doorstep because a gambling problem is common, and Charles Barkley already has that market cornered.

So, when gossip sites care about golf, they must think that they have something, right?  They're not going away though most everyone else will respect Woods' website apology/plea for privacy.  

(Why apologize for hitting a hydrant?  I crushed into the back of a car in high school because I saw my girlfriend driving down the other side of the road and was too dumb to go from 40 to 0.  I only got to about 32.  And all of my high school friends drove by the accident, cheering me on.  Now that's embarrassing.)

Bottom line is that when the AP is even asking questions in a column that are based on hearsay and incomplete info related to a minor traffic incident, the situation requires some serious PR work.

IMG tried to do that by telling us Tiger was in a minor accident and left the hospital in good condition.  Later, we find out that he was unconscious for six minutes.  Ok, fine.

Then, Tiger's agent at IMG, Mark Steinberg, was the second person to tell the police that Tiger wasn't talking to them about what they termed a minor car accident.  I still tell the above story of my accident because it's funny, even if my insurance premiums weren't for a couple of years.

And finally, Tiger's freshly-hired defense attorney Mark NeJame gave the police what was legally required.  Tiger asked us all to move on, probably knowing full well that not everyone will hear that message.

So, where do we go from here?  Well, seems like the public is split in half on whether they want to keep this thing afloat.  TMZ is going to because they're saying that the Florida Highway Patrol may try to get a hold of any blood sampling done at the hospital as part of their investigation in which they say charges are still pending.  I guess the FHP was upset about getting blown off not once, not twice, but thrice.  Gloria Allred - Rachel Uchitel's new attorney - isn't going to let this go.  I assume the Enquirer is prepared to be served with papers soon.

And then there's the golf world, which seemingly has no other story to go on right now.  (Yes, there are other ones.  The Molinari brothers, golf rounds being down 16% in October year over year, and Japanese pro golf would all do nicely.)  But, the only real game in town in the Yankee golf scene is Tiger's Chevron World Challenge.  Does he show up and play?  Does he show up at all?  The tournament doesn't even know and he's supposed to have a press conference tomorrow. 

If he does come and have the presser, will the media even try to ask him anything related to it?  Did the Enquirer and TMZ enable the traditional press with a sense of false bravado like YE Yang instilled in some of Tiger's on-course foes after Hazeltine?  Like Yang, probably not.

But the intrigue here no longer is really about what happened.  It's about how what happened is handled.