If Tiger Woods loses at Tavistock Cup, will Federal Reserve bail him out?

Tiger Woods won his fifth consecutive PGA Tour event on Sunday, sinking a dramatic putt on the final hole to take home the title at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and keeping alive the possibility of an undefeated 2008. Immediately after the event, however, the question arose: If Tiger or his Isleworth team lose at the upcoming Tavistock Cup, would that mean his streak is over?

The Tavistock Cup - this year co-sponsored by the U.S. Federal Reserve - is a unique, PGA Tour - sanctioned event, where golf’s elite players get together to hobnob with the obscenely rich before and after putting on a dog-and-pony show on the golf course for said rich folk. This year, the Tavistock Cup showed it was hip with the times by inviting two LPGA Tour players, Annika Sorenstam and Paula Creamer - to go along for the ride.

The Tavistock Cup features team and individual titles, so - as someone who predicted an undefeated season for Tiger in 2008 - I say that unless his team wins, and he wins the individual tourney against players like Ernie Els, J.B. Holmes and Justin Rose, his undefeated season is over.

There is a loophole, here, however. The Tavistock Cup will be held with a strong aura of corporate welfare wafting about the air of the so-exclusive-I’m-probably-not-allowed-to-even-write-about-it Isleworth course in Florida. In fact, the Secretive Billionaire Joe Lewis ("Secretive Billionaire is part of his name now) recently lost nearly a cool $1 billion when his investment in Bear Stearns turned bad. Luckily, a buyout of Bear Stearns by J.P Morgan and enhanced by a $30 billion non-recourse Fed facility (read: a loan they don’t really have to pay back), means Lewis will likely recoup any of his losses, and maintain his reputation as a business genius.

“And what about the $30 billion non-recourse Fed facility? It seems that this is a case of JP Morgan getting all of the upside (it’s buying the equity at a price-to-book ratio of 2.4%, and a price-to-extra-future-earnings ratio of 0.24) while the Fed takes most of the downside,” wrote Felix Salmon for Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com.

While one wonders if Woods will continue to take business advice from Lewis, the bigger question is this: If Tiger Woods loses during the Tavistock Cup, will the United States bail him out? Certainly, it seems illogical, if not impossible. But these are trying times for the super-rich of the U.S. and the Fed has shown it will do anything to ease their pain. Tiger Woods ascent to billionaire status seems assured, so he’s just the type of entity the Federal Reserve could help. Because if Tiger’s streak ends, it could mean loss of revenue to Woods, the PGA, The Golf Channel, individual golf courses, etc. It is the trickle-down theory of lost economic opportunity.

So while I’d consider a Woods’ loss at the Tavistock Cup to be an end to his undefeated 2008 season, I could be overridden by a higher power - the U.S. Federal reserve. Because if we’ve learned one thing during this subprime mortgage scandal, it’s this - only people like Tiger Woods should expect to get bailed out by the U.S.

–WKW