Tiger Woods showed up in Italy on Monday to surprise his girlfriend Lindsey Vonn on the occasion of her record-setting World Cup performance. And while Woods sported a skull facemask for a fair portion of his time on the slopes, closeups revealed that Woods is apparently missing a tooth.

What the heck? Did Woods take a golf ball to the face? Is this an elaborate disguise? Or is this Tiger's country cousin Possum Woods?

None of the above, as it turns out. No, Woods was a victim of an overly aggressive media corps, at least according to his agent. Here, we'll let his agent Mark Steinberg explain:

"During a crush of photographers as the awards podium at the World Cup event in Italy, a media member with a shoulder-mounted video camera pushed and surged toward the stage, turned and hit Tiger Woods in the mouth," Steinberg said in a statement to the AP. "Woods' tooth was knocked out by the incident."

Ow. OW. Man, that sounds like it hurt. As if Woods didn't have enough reason to hate the media before, now this. We would assume that if there were other photographers around when this tooth-knocking happened, there might be video of said event, but we'll take Steinberg at his word for now.

Toothed or not, Woods is scheduled to tee it up at next week's Waste Management Open in Phoenix.

____

Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter.



Follow @jaybusbee

And keep up with Jay over on Facebook, too.