I don’t know what happened to Tiger Woods last weekend when he ran his Cadillac Escalade into his neighbor’s yard at 2:30 in the morning.  But I do know, from a public relations perspective, the world’s greatest golfer has handled this incident with the grace and professionalism of a weekend duffer shanking his ball down the fairway.

It’s ugly.

First, Woods committed one of the greatest sins in crisis communications: he was silent. Days passed after the initial news reports and Woods said nothing.  When he finally did make an announcement, it was the blandest type of non-information imaginable.  He appears to be non-cooperative with the authorities, hiding behind a legal point that he doesn’t have to talk to them.  That might help in a court of law, but in the court of public opinion it says guilty.

The results speak for themselves. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the media abhors a vacuum even more than nature does, which is why the airwaves and Internet have been filled with wild speculation about marital strife, possible spousal abuse, and infidelity.

Maybe the speculation is true.  Maybe the truth is something completely innocent and this is all a big misunderstanding.  The point is, Woods and his handlers were caught unprepared and Woods—who up until this point has managed to create a carefully crafted public persona as a genuine Nice Guy—looks terrible. 

At a minimum, Woods should have released a statement that same morning after the incident, acknowledging that something unusual and embarrassing had happened, promising to cooperate with authorities and to provide answers to his many fans. If he and his wife had been fighting, how about just admitting it and asking for some privacy? He certainly wouldn’t be the first husband with a wife who wanted to bean him with a nine-iron.

In business, as in life, it’s best to behave in a manner that is above reproach.  If you can’t do that, you better have your communications prepared to deal with the consequences of your behavior.  And if you can’t do that, then you deserve the PR lashing that is sure to come.