GARY CAMERON / Reuters

Tiger Woods needs give Elin Nordegren whatever she wants in divorce and stop living a lie, writes Mike Celizic.

Mike Celizic

Word is that Elin Nordegren's Christmas present to her philandering husband is going to be a divorce petition. When it arrives, with or without gift wrapping, Tomcat Woods should do everything in his power to speed the process along.

Don’t oppose the divorce. Don’t try to finagle the finances. If she wants a quarter billion dollars, give it to her and offer $50 million more if she’ll just sign off on everything forever and go away to enjoy the rest of her life with someone less famous and more faithful. Get liberal visitation rights and do the right thing by the kids. But just end the marriage by any means necessary, no matter how expensive. Now is not the time to be stingy.

And then he needs to get his butt back on the golf course. It’s the only place Woods has ever been totally at peace, the only place where he can do what he was born to do. And once he’s there, he needs to win a major and then another so that the story is about chasing Nicklaus instead of cocktail waitresses.

If Tiger does that, all will be forgotten and forgiven.

Woods had initially expressed a desire to keep his marriage together. He even said he was giving up golf to work on patching things up with his bride and two young children. That was before the one woman he was linked to grew into more than a dozen and Elin apparently realized that her husband wasn’t a guy who’d made a mistake, he was a serial cheater who is no more capable of cleaning up his act than Paul Holmgren is of winning “Dancing with the Stars.”

Woods has since taken to the mattresses, so to speak, hiding away somewhere to lick his wounds and mourn the end of his marriage. With any luck, he’ll soon realize that this isn’t a disaster. Instead, it’s the best thing that could possibly have happened to him.

If he has any doubts, he can give Alex Rodriguez a call. Back in May 2007, a New York Post photographer caught A-Rod canoodling with a cutie in Canada. The blonde was not his wife.

In short order A-Rod’s wife moved out and filed for divorce. He again failed to get the Yankees to the World Series. The next year, the team missed the playoffs altogether and some wondered why the Yankees were bothering to keep him around. Then word leaked that he had tested positive for steroids.

That was before last season began, and at the time, some experts were solemnly declaring that A-Rod was finished and would never be anything more than a self-absorbed jerk who had cheated on his wife and the game.

I might have been among those who signed on for that scenario.

So A-Rod came back to have arguably the most effective season of his career. He was the consummate clutch player during the regular season and turned into Reggie Jackson in October. After coming through time and time again with big hits in the playoffs, he led the victory celebration, was cheered as a superhero by Yankee fans and enters next year totally rehabilitated. The marital problems are no longer relevant, and the steroid stuff utterly forgotten.

That’s what declaring marital free agency and winning does for a guy. If you’re not married, you can’t get called out for cheating. Then when you win, it’s all that matters.

Slideshow   Apologies accepted? Famous mea culpas by athletes and sports figures through the years. NBCSports.com

This is the one thing Tiger really needs to learn. He’s spent his professional life trying to control how he’s viewed by the public. When the going’s gotten rough, this tough guy has always fled the scene, hiding behind his sycophantic squads of spokesmen who get paid to cover up for his mistakes.

He’s run away from the microphones after bad rounds in tournaments large and small. And now he’s hiding from the fallout of his cheating. Even when he does say something, it’s never live. Instead, he posts some simpering statement on his website.

But now he has an opportunity. He can either continue to hide and whimper or he can do what most others who screw up their lives do, which is to get back to work and get on with life.

If they’re paying attention, such people learn that it’s not what you do to get into a mess like this that ultimately matters. It’s what you do to get out of it. Hiding doesn’t get it done. Doing the right thing by his soon-to-be former wife and getting back to chasing Nicklaus does.

And it starts by ending a marriage that didn’t work.

The sooner, the better.