Tiger Woods was alone when he drove north in the Rancho Palos Verdes area of Los Angeles in a Genesis GV80 SUV last Tuesday morning. He was alone as he entered a notorious stretch of the Hawthorne Boulevard and drove over the central median across two lanes of traffic before his car struck a tree, overturned and ended up at the bottom of an embankment.

The Washington Post reported on what the medics discovered: “Authorities from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles County Fire Department described a harrowing scene: Woods was found alone, conscious and pinned in the driver’s seat of his vehicle, which was severely damaged and had deployed its air bags. Sheriff’s Deputy Carlos Gonzalez, the first officer who arrived on the scene, said Woods was communicative when he first made contact.”

Online you can now find videos driving along the route Tiger Woods took on Hawthorne Boulevard before his SUV went off the road and put his career in the balance once again.

Tiger Woods was alone when, in May 2017, the police approached a Mercedes Benz in Jupiter, Florida and found a driver asleep at the wheel. The footage of what happened has been viewed several million times, as a disorientated and tranquilised Woods stumbles through the questions the police officer asked him. It was subsequently reported that the medication in Woods’s system were “Hydrocodone, an opioid pain medication, Hydromorphone, another type of painkiller, Alprazolam, an anxiety drug also under the brand name Xanax, Zolpidem, a sleep drug also under the brand name Ambien and Delta-9 carboxy THC, which is found in marijuana.”

Tiger Woods was alone when he crashed into a fire hydrant yards from his house in Florida in 2009, shortly after an argument with his then wife Elin Nordegren. The structure – or perhaps the unsustainable high wire act – that was his life collapsed shortly afterwards.

From the moment of this fall and his ill-judged public statement of remorse, Woods was subjected to a strange kind of public flagellation. He was asked to atone, not just for his behaviour which had led to the break up of his marriage, but for other elements of his personality where he had also apparently transgressed.

The sheer volume of this commentary and the weight of instruction directed towards Tiger hinted at something else. American golf, as might have been seen in its sanguine tolerance of Donald Trump until the final days of his presidency, has rarely been the place to go to fine tune your moral compass.

Following Tiger’s fall, it became routine to hear lectures on how Tiger Woods would have to become a better man. He would have to be more tolerant of the press and would have to be more conscious of PR and the need “to grow the game”, as if this man had not done more to grow the during any random Sunday afternoon in the 2000s than all other figure in the game put together.

In the absorbing HBO documentary about Tiger Woods, this self-righteousness peaks with the comments of Billy Payne, chairman of Augusta, who spoke about how Tiger had disappointed golf and “failed to live up to expectations”.

Some might wonder what these failed expectation Payne talked about were and how they related to Billy Payne. They might think that as far as Billy Payne was concerned, the only expectations that mattered was the revolution Tiger Woods led in golf and the staggering nature of his achievements.

Woods’s relationship with his father and the consequences of that relationship are the story of the documentary and every other study of the golfer.

Woods’s agent was dismissive of the documentary, describing it as “just another unauthorised and salacious outsider attempt to paint an incomplete portrait of one of the greatest athletes of all-time”.

And there was something in this too. Why should we look elsewhere for the man when the work is there and everything has been driven towards that work?

“A man of genius is what he is, he cannot be something else and remain a man of genius,” the great cricket writer CLR James wrote of Garfield Sobers.

It was this misunderstanding of Tiger Woods as a genius who could somehow become a paragon of suburban values that became wilful in the years that followed his public downfall and which seemed to insist on remorse for all aspects of his behaviour.

This was not to say that everything should be tolerated. But the areas of his life and career which had no bearing on anything but the hurt feelings of those who encountered him in golf had no consequence except their wounded feelings.

Woods was a solitary figure as he pursued the greatest prizes in sport and he was a sadly solitary figure even as he entered the darkest phase of his life.

The stories of how he sat alone in nightclubs or asked his confederates like Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley how he should talk to the women who approached him told of this isolation.

People mocked at the idea of Tiger Woods’ sex addiction, but his subsequent treatment for dependence on painkillers showed that he had been pursuing numbness, if not oblivion, and even in a crowded room, he would always be alone.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s book, Rodham, a reimagining of the life of Hillary Clinton, opens with Clinton about to give the graduation address at Wellesley when she was a student.

“The knowledge that I was about to pull off a feat most people thought, correctly or not, they couldn’t. And this knowledge contributed to the final aspect of the feeling, which was loneliness-the loneliness of being good at something.”

Tiger Woods has achieved more than most men can dream of but not as much as he desired. His father may have driven him to those achievements but he did so at a cost for those he hurt. The price Tiger Woods paid might have been worth it, but he alone knows what it was.