The sexiest part of an affair is where it begins. You know what the middle looks like, hotel-sheeted and ultimately routine, and you know the way it will end, but where and how it began is always a little surprising. Historically, powerful men with slavering appetites have mainly acquired their girlfriends the way a pair of pants gathers lintβrather incidentally. Bill Clinton and his intern. JFK and his secretaries, his stewardess. Collecting a mistress in this way seems, as everything does in the past, more innocent.
At the other end of the infidelity spectrum, there is the escort, the call girl. From Charlie Sheen to Eliot Spitzer, famous men since the dawn of arousal have valued the sex professional. She is discreet and it is a transaction and there is the added benefit of selection. Both methods of slaking the hunger have their pros and cons. Men like to hunt, and there is no need to hunt a prostitute. But Woods found a way to enjoy the best of both worlds in one type of woman, a Venn diagram of sexual satisfaction.
Most of his mistresses lived in a nebulous in-between world. Not prostitutes, no, but just about halfway there. As surely as he has changed the game of golf, so too has Woods exposed the grazing ground of the halfway-hooker, and her natural habitat, the nightclub. He met at least nine of the fifteen women in or around nightclubs: Kalika Moquin was a marketing manager at the Bank in Las Vegas, which is also where he met onetime cocktail waitress and full-time clubgoer Jamie Jungers.
He met Julie Postle when she was a cocktail waitress in Orlando. Cori Rist at a nightclub in Manhattan. Holly Sampson met him through a mutual friend who is also a club promoter.
These are not cases of eyes locking across a crowded dance floor. Instead, special introductions are made. Girls are brought into his orbit by nightclub managers and directors of marketing and promoters and waitresses and owners. They are selected and then delivered. Her job was born out of the culture of bottle service. The concept of paying for a whole bottle of alcohol and sitting at a table originated in Europe and grew a tail in the States in the early nineties, at New York clubs Life and Chaos.
