This cub needed a boost! Golf champion Tiger Woods once asked fellow superstar athletes Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter how to pick up women at a bar, as revealed in a new piece published by ESPN on Thursday, April 21.
In the story, author Wright Thompson writes about Woods, now 40, soliciting advice at the time.
“One night he went to a club in New York with Derek Jeter and Michael Jordan,” Thompson writes. “Jeter and Jordan circulated, talking with ease to one beautiful woman after another. (Both declined to comment about the episode.) At one point, Tiger walked up to them and asked the question that lives in the heart of every junior high boy and nearly every grown man too.
‘What do you do to talk to girls?’
Jeter and Jordan looked at each other, then back at Tiger, sort of stunned.
‘Go tell ’em you’re Tiger Woods,’ they said.”
Though he declined to address that particular incident, Jordan opened up to ESPN about his close friendship with Woods. The basketball legend has been friends with Woods through some of his most trying times, including his father’s death in 2006. In 2009, Woods’ sex scandal erupted, and the public shame he endured still lingers.
“That bothers him more than anything,” Jordan told ESPN. “It looms. It’s in his mind. It’s a ship he can’t right and he’s never going to. What can you do? The thing is about T-Dub, he cannot erase. That’s what he really wants. He wants to erase the things that happened.”
Woods and his now ex-wife, Elin Nordegren, tried to make their marriage work after he admitted his numerous affairs, but ultimately divorced in August 2010. (Woods told Time last December in a no-holds-barred story that the situation was “too tough” but they remain “best friends” as they coparent their kids, Sam and Charlie.) He subsequently dated Lindsey Vonn for three years, but the two split in 2015.
Meanwhile, Jordan has repeatedly told Woods to make new friends and perhaps build a life with a new person. “He has [pauses] no companion,” Jordan told ESPN in its new piece. “He has to find that happiness within his life, that’s the thing that worries me. I don’t know if he can find that type of happiness. He’s gonna have to trust somebody.”
While Jordan enjoyed his days as a bachelor, he eventually retired and settled down with his longtime love, Yvette Prieto. The two are now the proud parents of twins.
Their other bar buddy from that night out, Jeter, has also found love after retiring from Major League Baseball in 2015. He proposed to his girlfriend, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover girl Hannah Davis, last November.
