How Tiger Woods having sex with an $8-an-hour waitress in a church park ended in a Men's Fitness cover

Courtesy of Mail On Sunday:

Today, Mindy Lawton, 34, knows that she was just one of many mistresses taken by the golfer. But, according to her family, throughout their 14-month affair she laboured under the delusion that what she had with Tiger was special and that they were in love.

Mindy’s sister, Orlando primary school teacher Lynn Lawton, said: ‘She is extremely, extremely naive, my sister. She is single, never married, never had children and still looking for a relationship. I have to hand it to him. It was brilliant to choose my sister to play his kind of game.’

The unworldly Mindy was easily dazzled and undemanding. She and Tiger met in summer 2006, when Mindy was working as an $8-an-hour  manager and waitress at Perkins, a diner only a short drive from Tiger’s home in the upmarket Orlando suburb of Windermere. Tiger and his wife Elin would regularly take breakfast there.

Lynn recalled: ‘My sister told me they came in regularly. Elin would read the paper while Tiger ogled my sister. She is very bubbly, very outgoing. You couldn’t help but notice her, even when she was in her waitress uniform.

‘Mindy said he and Elin seemed disconnected. There would not be much conversation. Tiger would just sit there, looking at Mindy. She said, “Oh my God, he is so cute!”

‘She doesn’t know much about golf, but she did know he was married because Elin was sitting there.’

One day, Lynn said, Mindy called in a state of excitement: ‘She said he had called her at Perkins and said, “This is Tige,” – that’s the pet name he always used for himself – “Will you meet me at the Blue Martini?”

‘She was very excited but nervous so she asked our next oldest sister, Bobbi, to go with her. She was like, “Oh, I’m going to hang out with Tiger!”‘

At first, according to Lynn, the bouncer wouldn’t let Mindy and her sister into the VIP room. ‘They stood there for a while and then all of a sudden, Tiger nods to the guy to let them in. Tiger didn’t get up. He just sat there.

‘He was with a group of Orlando and Los Angeles basketball players. Bobbi bought him a drink and had one of the bartenders take it over. She said Mindy started dancing with another girl. My sister is a real good dancer and Bobbi said Tiger couldn’t keep his eyes off her.’

Tiger and Mindy left the club separately. Mindy drove her sister home then met Tiger on his way to his house. She followed the golfer, driving at a discreet distance, and at the gated development was waved in by the guard.

Lynn said: ‘Mindy told me the next day, “We went to his house and had sex. He was extremely good.”‘

Lynn thinks Elin was out of the country that night. She said: ‘That was always the pattern. Mindy would drive her old Saturn car and follow Tiger in his luxurious Escalade.

‘My sister was just a little girl on an hourly wage at Perkins. We knew what he wanted her for. But she wouldn’t believe it.

‘Maybe Tiger thought the security guards would think she was his cleaning lady,’ Lynn conjectured. Or maybe they had just seen it all before and knew to turn a blind eye.

Once the affair between Tiger and Mindy started, it gathered momentum, with the couple meeting at his house for sex every two or three weeks. Incredibly, he continued to have breakfast at Perkins to the point where, Lynn said: ‘Everyone was talking about it because he would wait for Mindy in his Escalade and then she would follow him in her car. He was so brazen it was incredible.

‘Everyone in our family knew about it too. I remember one day we were all sitting on our back porch, my parents, my husband and Mindy, and we said, “Do you know he is married?” And she started crying and said yes.

‘My husband told her, “The way he is behaving with you, behind his wife’s back, I am sure he has a lady in every city.”

‘It got to the point where our neighbours and friends knew about it too. In a way it was quite clever, him being so open about it because we thought, “Maybe this is just how celebrities behave.”

‘I am sure Elin knew nothing about it, because she was never home when Mindy was there. But because Tiger was so complacent about it, it never would have occurred to anyone to tell her what was going on. He never said to my sister, “This has to be secret.”‘

Lynn said: ‘I saw the texts he sent her. One of them said he was dreaming of being inside of her. Another said, “Do you want to get laid?” It was crude. There was no mention of love. She said he didn’t talk about his wife.”He talked very little about anything. She said he never wore condoms. That really broke me up. I was so worried she might catch a disease, especially as we suspected he was promiscuous. But Mindy was in love with him. I think she thought he was faithful to her.’

And now to the church park sex story:

According to our investigation, when ‘Team Tiger’ discovered that a tabloid magazine not only had blurry pictures of him and Mindy in the car park but evidence of the consummation, they went into a panic. Then they went to work.

Neal Boulton, an editor in the tabloid magazine’s company at the time, revealed: ‘They said, “What do we have to do not to let this get out?”‘

The answer was press the magazine’s publisher to withhold the story in return for Tiger appearing on the August 2007 cover of its stablemate publication, Men’s Fitness (see picture below).

And so Tiger, who regularly declines interviews on the grounds that he is a ‘private’ person, struck beefcake-style poses and gave tips on diet, exercise and weightlifting.

The tabloid’s parent company insisted that the exclusive was not a quid pro quo. But it was enough for Boulton to resign in protest at the editorial interference which he perceived as an underhand ‘trade-off’.

According to Lynn, her sister had told her of ‘a strange car following her at night’. Around the same time, Lynn herself received a call from a reporter at the tabloid. But then nothing came of it – or so the Lawton family thought. And as far as Mindy knew, Tiger simply dropped out of her life.

Lynn said: ‘You’d have thought with all his money, he would have paid her off and all the other girls but I guess he thought he had them in the palm of his hand. He treated my sister like a piece of meat.’

Tiger ended his affair with Mindy as soon as his management informed him of the tabloid sting. He just stopped calling. For her, there was no explanation, for him there was no story – and that was what mattered.