Tiger Woods strips for photo shoot

BY ZOE SMITH

Last updated 15:10 05/01/2010

IN THE BUFF: Tiger Woods' Vanity Fair magazine cover.

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It's an image of Tiger Woods that has never been seen before - in public.

Semi-naked and posing aggressively, the disgraced golfer stares into the camera with a dumbbell in each hand on the cover of the February edition of Vanity Fair.

The magazine has not confirmed when the photograph shoot - taken by famed celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz - took place, though it does say the "raw, never before seen" photos were taken before the golfer's downfall.

In the accompanying story "Tiger in the Rough" - which has been published on the magazine's website - writer Buzz Bissinger charts golf's first billionaire's fall from grace after revelations of his infidelities.

He refers to Woods as a "sex addict" with a "harem" and a predilection for crude sexual jokes.

Bissinger also lists the allegations made by Woods' alleged mistresses, which he refers to as "sex, tons of it, in allegedly all different varieties".

"Threesomes in which he greatly enjoyed girl-on-girl, and mild S&M (featuring hair-pulling and spanking); $60,000 pay-for-sex escort dates; a quickie against the side of a car in a church parking lot; a preference for porn stars and nightclub waitresses, virtually all of them with lips almost as thick as their very full breasts; drug-bolstered encounters designed to make him even more of a conquistador (Ambien, of all things); immature sex-text messages ("Send me something naughty ... Go to the bathroom and take (a picture)," "I will wear you out ... When was the last time you got (laid)?"; soulful confessions that he got married only for image and was bored with his wife; regular payments of between $5,000 and $10,000 each month to keep his harem quiet."

Vanity Fair also details an extraordinarily candid interview the then 21-year-old Woods gave to GQ writer Charles Pierce in 1997.

In the interview, Woods reportedly quipped: "What I can't figure out is why so many good-looking women hang around baseball and basketball. Is it because, you know, people always say that, like, black guys have big -----?"

According to Vanity Fair, during a photo shoot with four women assisting Woods "rubbed the tips of his shoes together and then asked the women, 'What's this?' They were stumped. 'It's a black guy taking off his condom.'

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And he also made crude jokes about lesbians.

Bissinger writes: "For somebody who at the age of two had appeared on The Mike Douglas Show (where, with a perfect swing, he miraculously hit a stunning shot into the centre of a net), he seemed remarkably naive and remarkably stupid about the ways of the media."

- © Fairfax NZ News