Chapter 48

Players Championship

TPC Sawgrass

Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida

March 18–24, 2002

The main attraction at the 2002 Players Championship is not its defending champ.

“Is that her?” a trio of young men ask, gazing at a tall blond woman.

“I think that is her.”

“She looks Swedish to me. That’s definitively her.”

The three guys are on the prowl. “We’re not here to see Tiger Woods,” they explain. “We’re here to see Tiger’s girlfriend.”

The girlfriend in question is twenty-two-year-old Elin Nordegren, a smart, athletic, blue-eyed blonde from Sweden—a psychology student who enjoys kickboxing and diving and who’s done some swimsuit modeling with famed Swedish photographer Bingo Rimér. It’s those racy bikini-model photos, recently published in a London tabloid, that have ignited the public’s interest.

Who is this woman, and what’s the story with her and golf’s number one phenom?

Fellow Swede and pro golfer Jesper Parnevik, who introduced the pair at last year’s British Open, tells Golf World, “They’re very compatible and madly in love with each other.”

For Tiger, it was apparently love at first sight.

Elin, however, needed some convincing. She’s unimpressed when Tiger first asks her out via a third party, a tactic she deems “weird and pathetic.” Besides, the then twenty-one-year-old has a boyfriend back in Sweden, “a normal, decent guy, driving a forklift in a warehouse,” says People writer Steve Helling. And frankly, Tiger “simply wasn’t her type.”

The gorgeous blonde and her identical twin sister, Josefin, have spent the last year in Jupiter Island, Florida, working as au pairs for Mia and Jesper Parnevik’s young children: their daughters—Peg, Penny, and Philippa—and their infant son, Phoenix (named in honor of Parnevik’s first PGA Tour win, at the 1998 Phoenix Open).

Elin comes from an intellectual family—her mother, Barbro Holmberg, is a political adviser; her father, Thomas Nordegren, is a radio journalist; her older brother, Axel, works in banking; and her sister, Josefin, plans a career in law. “It is flattering to be called a model, but I hardly think a few shoots in my teenage years make me a model,” Elin says. She’s taking a gap year from school but plans on going into “psychology with a focus on children who have had a hard time.”

“She’s very mature for her age” is Parnevik’s opinion. “And she’s not like many American girls who want Tiger for his money.”

“She had her opinions about celebrities and they were not high,” adds Elin’s friend Sandra Sobieraj Westfall. “And she’s very shy, so the idea of joining that world was not appealing to her.”

Photographer Bingo Rimér confirms it: “She told me a million times, ‘I feel so stressed out about the whole celebrity thing, the media focus.’”

Tiger’s smitten, and he continues trying his luck with Elin for months. When Elin ends her long-distance relationship, she finally relents. To her surprise, a night out with Tiger is fun. He wins her over with his normalcy, not his money or celebrity. And maybe he is her type after all: when asked what she finds sexy, Elin lists “charisma, humor and self-confidence”—all traits that Tiger has in abundance.

The two start quietly spending more time together. By January of 2002—while competing at the New Zealand Open on caddie Steve Williams’s hometown course, Paraparaumu Beach—Tiger’s calling and messaging Elin several times a day.

“Elin is exactly what Tiger needs to get stability in life,” Parnevik tells a Scandinavian tabloid. “The personal chemistry really works. They complement each other.”

The downside for the Parneviks: they need to hire a new nanny, since Elin quits her job to follow Tiger.

On March 18, Elin’s first spotted cheering Tiger on and winking at him from the sidelines at Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Invitational, his first win of 2002. It is also his record-setting third consecutive win at Bay Hill.

PGA Tour members note that Tiger seems totally infatuated, unable to keep his eyes off Elin.

“It’s anybody’s guess whether this will last. But the feeling is that Tiger doesn’t fall in love easily, and that he is 100 percent committed to Elin,” one of Tiger’s friends says.

Tiger himself puts it plainly. “Yeah, I’m happy!”