Tiger Woods ESPN Interview: ‘I Did Some Very Bad Things’

After a media scandal around his private life and how he cheated on wife Elin Nordegren, Tiger Woods is about to make his return to golf this April. Over the weekend, the star granted his first interview since the November crash to ESPN – and talked about anything and everything, from how he’d done some pretty bad things that ended up by hurting a lot of people, to how he believed he was now a better person, having learned a very valuable lesson, as People magazine can confirm.

As opposed to the public apology of a few weeks ago, Tiger would not go into specifics with the interviewer: after all, this was about him getting back to work and not digging up old happenings and bad memories. He did, however, say that he would never be done apologizing for what he’d done, because it hurt many of the people whom he loved more than anything in this life: his family. What happened on the night of the crash and for what he sought treatment are personal matters, the golfer also said.

“Tiger Woods granted his first interview since his November car crash – and subsequent scandal – admitting that he has ‘done some pretty bad things in [his] life’ and that he was ‘a little nervous’ about his upcoming return to professional golf in April. ‘I was living a life of a lie, I really was,’ a sober-sounding Woods told ESPN at Isleworth, a golf club near his Windermere, Fla., home. The five-minute interview aired Sunday night during SportsCenter. He also gave five minutes to the Golf Channel. ‘Stripping away denial and rationalization you start coming to the truth of who you really are and that can be very ugly,’ he said,” People writes of the interview.

“When you face it and you start conquering it and you start living up to it, the strength that I feel now, I’ve never felt that type of strength. I hurt [my family] the most. [Elin] was hurt. Very hurt. Shocked and angry – and she had every right to be. It was really tough to look at yourself in a light you never want to look at yourself. That’s pretty brutal,” Woods said. On the bright side, “I’m excited to get back and play, I’m excited to get to see the guys again. I really missed a lot of my friends out there. I miss competing. But still, I still have a lot more treatment to do, and just because I’m playing, doesn’t mean [I will] stop going to treatment,” the golfer added.

As we also reported on several occasions in the past, after his public apology, which was televised live to all corners of the world, Elin reportedly moved back in with Tiger and the two are working on saving their marriage. Below is the ESPN interview, for those of you who want to hear the above words straight from Tiger Woods.