Tiger had ‘secret love child’ says documentary

As Tiger Woods goes out on the links for the first round of the US Open this Thursday at Pebble Beach, California, a Channel 4 TV documentary will claim that the golfer fathered a secret love child with one of his mistresses.

The New York magazine journalist Neal Boulton, a former editor of the US edition of Men's Fitness, will claim that he has helped Woods keep the child a secret since before revelations about the golfer's various extra-marital affairs started surfacing last November.

In the documentary, titled Tiger Woods: The Rise And Fall, Boulton (left) will say that he knows someone who has evidence of the child's existence, including DNA. "There is a lot more to come out," he says. "Tiger will eventually admit to fathering a child."

The claim comes as Tiger returns to the scene of his greatest triumph. It was at Pebble Beach at the 2000 US Open that he famously shot 12 under par to win by 15 shots, the biggest margin of victory in the history of major golfing championships.

However, some fellow journalists are wondering whether Channel 4 know who they're climbing into bed with on this allegation. Boulton has a reputation in magazine circles for self-aggrandising behaviour.

According to a recent New York Times article, Boulton is "shopping" a memoir of his life, including his battles with heroin and booze and details of his 'pansexual' open marriage with his wife. "I'm like a yuppie junkie, man," he told the paper. "I've been to rehab so many times, it's almost like checking into a hotel."

He is also trying to sell a reality-TV show about his family life,  according to the Times article, and has plans to spin off a book imprint from the sex advice website he's currently running, called BastardLife.com.

Boulton first came to prominence in 2007 when the New York Post suggested in a gossip item that Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine and one of the biggest names in the US magazine world, was cheating on his gay partner and had been "spotted around town with Neal Boulton, the editor-in-chief of Men's Fitness magazine. Boulton is married, to a woman, with kids."

As the media set about finding out who on earth Neal Boulton was, it was alleged that Boulton had fed the story to the Post himself.

In support of its argument that Boulton was a publicity-seeker, the website Gawker then dug up an article Boulton had written for the spring 05 edition of the Washington College alumni magazine.

"Secretly," Boulton wrote, "my favourite pastime is hitting the magazine racks - in grocery stores, airport newsstands, and tiny Manhattan sidewalk kiosks - and spotting all the magazines with my name in them."

Most intriguing, in the light of this week's C4 documentary, is Boulton's history with the Tiger Woods affair.

Last December, after the Woods scandal first broke, Boulton claimed in an interview with the New York Post that he had resigned from the editorship of Men's Fitness in 2007 in protest at a secret deal done by the magazine's publishers to protect Woods.

American Media publish a string of magazines, including Men's Fitness, as well as the supermarket tabloid famed for its celebrity revelations, the National Enguirer.

According to Boulton, the Enquirer had obtained information about a Tiger Woods affair and American Media had agreed to suppress this information in return for an exclusive interview with Woods in Men's Fitness. "That's when I high-tailed it out of there," Boulton was quoted as saying.

American Media's chief executive, David J Pecker, dismissed Boulton's story at the time, describing him as "a disgruntled former employee". ·