It’s not the newest joke in the world, but worth a quick rerun right now after the latest in a stream of near-fatal road accidents. What’s the difference between a Range Rover and a golf ball? Tiger Woods can drive a golf ball straight for 300 yards. The extraordinary story of Woods’s decline is written in his face: how the lean, mean athlete of the 1990s has developed into a puffy-faced drug user and sometime drunk is something we once associated with former footballers and boxers. Woods is evidence that no one, not even the prodigiously rich and talented, is immune to the destructive power of addiction.

Even during his titanic years of greatness when he transformed golf, spectacularly yanking up prize money and pulling in TV viewers by the million, nobody would ever claim he was a nice guy. He had only one focus: the hole. He seemed unable to relate to anyone or anything outside of that single-minded goal, which made relationships tricky. Apart (we discovered after his first big road accident in 2009) from the bevy of........

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