It's a game of inches, sports fans. (That's Cliche # 11 in the sportswriter's playbook. You can look it up.) Still, it's a cliche for a simple reason--it's true. The fascinating story of the day, more fascinating than Tiger Woods reading his statement in Florida, is how the National Enquirer almost didn't break the Tiger Tail scandal story. 

ESPN's E:60's Ben Houser has the behind-the scenes tale courtesy of Barry Levine, the executive editor of the National Enquirer. The most interesting tidbits in this piece are that the Enquirer wasn't terribly interested in Woods originally, and didn't have the mistress story nailed down until it uncovered the incontrovertible evidence that hostess Rachel Uchitel's plane ticket to Australia was purchased by a friend of Tiger.

"Tiger Woods is a global celebrity," Levine said, "but he wasn't the type of individual we followed. He's not Brad and Angelina. He's not Oprah. He's not out like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan at the clubs. The fact is Tiger has always led a relatively squeaky-clean lifestyle … so when that first tip came in to us in September that he was involved in an extramarital affair, certainly it kind of caught us by surprise.

"The story blew up in Australia where we caught the woman [Rachel Uchitel] going up to Woods' hotel suite and visiting him there and that's when we first went to her for comment," Levine said. "When we finally confronted Rachel she denied going to Australia to meet Tiger Woods. She said she had met him once at a nightclub because she worked as a hostess, as an events planner at a nightclub and once or twice bumped into Tiger. In fact she told me on the telephone a few days later that she had lied. She was obviously trying to conduct damage control so we knew we had caught her wrapped up in a series of lies about her relationship with Tiger Woods."

Eventually the National Enquirer went to Woods for comment. His lawyers responded that he and Uchitel met in a nightclub, but there was no relationship. Woods' denial happened several weeks before Thanksgiving and the tabloid planned to go with the story a week before Thanksgiving while Tiger was at a tournament in Dubai.

"We held an editorial conference about the story," Levine said. "Our senior editors and our lawyers said, Let's give it another week. The irony is that had we published the story the week before, the infamous car accident might never have happened because Tiger would have been in Dubai and his wife might have challenged him on the story but it might have been done by phone.

"So there might not have been this explosive argument that occurred late on Thanksgiving night. If the car accident never happened the mainstream media might not have jumped on the story and the details of the scandal and all these women may not have surfaced."

By waiting a week, one of Levine's reporters learned that Uchitel's trip was paid for by one of Tiger's companies. "That was a bombshell because we had actual link that Tiger Woods had paid for her trip," Levine said.