Could Tiger have had his accuser arrested?

You'll recall that a few months ago, a man dropped into David Letterman's car a pitch for a movie for Letterman's Worldwide Pants production company to make about a talk show host who sleeps with his female staff. Letterman had the man arrested for blackmail, just as Bill Cosby had had his alleged daughter sent to prison for blackmail.

In 2007, in contrast, Tiger Woods consented to surprisingly revealing interviews with himself and his personal trainer in Men's Fitness, violating his exclusivity agreement with Golf Digest. In return, according to the Wall Street Journal, the National Enquirer, a periodical owned by the same company as Men's Fitness, American Media, agreed to squelch a story set to run in National Enquirer with pictures of the golfer and a waitress in a car in a parking lot.

That Men's Fitness article, featuring Tiger's trainer's out-of-control boasting about how much weight Tiger lifts, might prove more harmful in the long run than the two years of silence it bought was worth to Mr. Woods, now that his Canadian doctor's employee has admitted to acting as a Human Growth Hormone mule.

Tiger's subsequent troubles began on Thanksgiving Day 2009 with another National Enquirer story about Tiger and some other broad. That calls to mind Kipling's poem:

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

Rather than pay the National Enquirer's Dane-geld, wouldn't it have been simpler, all in all, to have the editor of the National Enquirer arrested? (That's assuming that giving up his cheatin' ways was never on the table.) After all, the government seems to be in the business of arresting people who make life unpleasant for celebrities like Letterman and Cosby.

Or does the law against blackmail only apply to people who neglect to lawyer-up, like Bill Cosby's purported kid? Laws are written by lawyers, so they tend to be harsh on people who fail to purchase legal counsel.

By the way, have you noticed that Tiger's big mistake was getting sentimental about his some of his skanks and whores, leaving lots of sappy text messages for them to go to the press with? I imagine that his mentor Michael Jordan must be shaking his head in dismay. How could all his lessons have been so misunderstood?

Charles Barkley, though, is here to say what's on his mind. From the NY Post:

"Elin took his cellphone away [after the fight], so he had to call [me] from his land line at home," the woman said. "He hasn't called in at least a week, though."

Woods' pal, former NBA star Charles Barkley, said, "I've been trying to reach him and can't get him. It's very frustrating." He said he just wants to tell Woods, "Hey, man, We love you," and, "You should reach out to your celebrity friends when things go bad. They're the only people who understand."

Indeed.

Director Spike Lee said on Barkley's upcoming, taped show "With All Due Respect" that he's worried about Woods, too. "He's insulated. If Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan can't get to him, and those are his boys, then people are making bad moves," Lee said.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer