A man known the world over for his supreme athletic talent, his fierce glare and his unyielding stride is seen wobbling on the side of a roadway in the middle of the night, unable to move in a straight line. Tiger Woods appears unaware of his surroundings on a police dash cam from early Monday morning, baffled in the presence of an officer holding a flashlight. The legendary golfer is shown how to walk in a straight line, one foot precisely in front of the other, and he couldn’t do it.
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| Tiger Woods is seen in a police booking photo after his arrest on suspicion of driving under an influence |
This sad and stunning scene is the latest fallout from a Memorial Day incident here, in which the legendary golfer was found asleep at the wheel of his Mercedes roughly 15 minutes from his Jupiter Island mansion. The roadside police stop lasted around 30 minutes, with Woods subjected to a series of sobriety tests. He struggled to walk in a straight line, had difficulty following police instructions and slurred when asked to recite the alphabet. Twenty-seven minutes into the video, police asked Woods to put his hands behind his back and placed handcuffs on him.
Initial media reports stating there was alcohol on his breath were wrong, yet it’s clear now that he was under the heavy influence of something. A Woods statement late Monday insisted he reacted poorly to a mix of prescription medications, but it’s still unknown what he was doing out at 2 a.m., and where he was going.
“It’s certainly possible to have a mixture of medications result in decreased level of arousal and sleepiness,” says David Fiellin, a professor of medicine at Yale. “Medications that are commonly prescribed for pain, sleep and other types of disorders can have those types of side effects.”
That seems to make sense, but little else does at this early stage.
Television trucks were parked all day in front of the Jupiter Police Department, which is a short drive from where Woods was found early Monday morning parked on the side of the road, his car pointed south – the opposite direction of his home. That intersection, along Military Trail and Indian Creek, is near a middle school and a Publix shopping center in the Abacoa neighborhood on Jupiter’s outskirts. Interstate 95 lies several long blocks south, stretching toward Boca Raton; the beach is to the east; and the palatial homes of Hobe Sound, where Woods resides, sit about 15 minutes north.
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| Tiger Woods is shown handcuffed in police dash cam video released Wednesday. (Jupiter PD) |
Up the road and over a bridge from the police station is the golfer’s high-end restaurant, The Woods Jupiter. It’s out of season now, but it was still unusually quiet during a Wednesday happy hour. An older couple took a couple of seats at the bar for dinner, and they immediately noticed something different: the TVs. They had always been tuned to the Golf Channel before. On this day it was NBA TV, soccer and racing – programming unlikely to break away to reports of the dash cam video showing the restaurant’s owner stumbling his way through a DUI test.
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