Smart move?

There's no doubt that Tiger Woods is well within his legal rights in declining to talk with police about the car accident outside his mansion late last week, but one wonders whether he's doing himself any favors by not being upfront about what went down. At this point, the facts appear to be as follows: In the wee hours of Saturday morning, Woods reportedly mowed down a fire hyrdrant and hit a tree with his Cadillac Escalade while leaving his driveway. When emergency personnel arrived, they found him bleeding from the mouth and going in and out of consciousness. His wife reportedly used a golf club to bash out the back windows of the Caddy and help him from the vehicle. Woods initially gave indications that he would talk to police about the wreck, but after putting them off for a couple of days, he sent his attorney out to give officers his driver's license, registration and proof of insurance. Legally, that's all he has to do. But from a public relations standpoint, his refusal to address the details of the wreck publicly are leading to the very kind of speculation he'd be better off without. "This is a private matter, and I want to keep it that way," Woods said in a statement. He may very well wish that it were a private matter, but Woods happens to be the most famous athlete in the world, who puts himself front and center with multimillion-dollar endorsement deals, and when he starts slamming into fire hydrants and trees with his luxury vehicle, it's big news. Especially since it follows by mere days a National Enquirer report that Woods had been seeing a nightclub hostess and that they were together in Australia when Woods played in a golf tournament there. No one has suggested that Woods was drunk when the wreck occurred, but some certainly are left to wonder whether he was speeding away from his house after a go-round with the missus. Others have suggested that the mouth injuries the golfer suffered might have been inflicted by an angry spouse, not the steering wheel of an Escalade. Still others question how Woods could have had a wreck such as he reported being involved in and not have the airbags of the Caddy deploy. And is it remotely possible that Tiger’s bride bashed out the windows of the SUV before the wreck, perhaps as her hubby was hightailing it out of the driveway? As the AP asks in a story today, if Woods just made a driving blunder, why wouldn't he simply talk to the police and tell them that? Hmmmmmm.