Tiger Woods: From golfing god to mere mortal and all the scandals in between

It's called the "halo effect". With this generalised grandeur, extended to Tiger Woods as the youngest ever at 21 and first black winner of the Masters in 1997, we put him on a pedestal – not just as a professional golfer but in every aspect of his mortal life.

So when he was exposed as human – and more than that, a serial cheater – in November 2009, worlds came crashing down. Our hero had fallen.

But his rise, and subsequent fall, started long before that. He picked up his first golf club at the age of three months. At school, when he was just a boy, his teachers would ask about the time he spent practising other sports, to which Earl Woods, his father and biggest fan, would say, the boy needed to concentrate on his golf game.