Tiger Woods Addresses His Missing Tooth and Dishes About His Super Bowl Plans!

A photographer had accidentally hit him with a shoulder camera

It's not easy to hide a missing tooth that usually sits front and center in your mouth, so when Tiger Woods wore a skull bandana over his mouth while watching girlfriend Lindsey Vonn race, we knew something had to be up.

It turned out that a photographer had accidentally nailed the pro golfer in the mouth with his shoulder camera by accident while he was in Italy, which ultimately knocked out Tiger's tooth!

GAH!

It's definitely not his best look, but Tiger seemed to be handling it fine. Now Tiger has opened up about the tooth mystery in a press conference, explaining what exactly happened to his mouth and how it "didn't feel very good."

"Dude with one of the video cameras was kneeling right in front of me, stood up, turned and caught me square in the mouth," he said. "He chipped that one, cracked the other one.

"And so then, you know, I'm trying to keep this thing on so the blood's not all over the place, and luckily he hit the one that I had the root canal on. That's the one that chipped, but the other one had to be fixed as well because it had cracks all through it."

Yikes! Somehow it managed to get worse from there. With a mouth full of busted teeth, Tiger had to travel back to Florida from Italy before he could seek dental help. The flight home, he said, "was a joke."

"I couldn't eat, couldn't drink until [the dentist] fixed them, put the temporaries on," he added. "I couldn't have anything touch it. Even breathing hurt, because any kind of air over the nerve, the tooth that was still alive, was cracked."

Despite rumors that Tiger's tooth-excuse is a made-up story, the golfer insisted that his explanation is nothing but the truth.

"It is just what it is," he said.

Now that his teeth are OK and he's back in full swing (pun totally intended), Vonn's boyfriend plans on traveling to Arizona this week to go to the Super Bowl! Apparently, nothing will get in the way of an athlete and his sports. But he still has some qualms with who will be playing this weekend.

"I just wish that my [Oakland] Raiders were there," he said while laughing. "But they're not."