Pals Bryon Bell, Jerry Chang, D.J. Hanlon knew of Tiger Woods' multiple trysts, but kept quiet 
 
 Risberg/AP Jerry Chang is Tiger Woods' former Stanford teammate. Calling Woods just "one of the guys" back in 1998, Chang was likely privy to all of his friend's trysts. 
 
 They're the loyal friends who kept Tiger's secrets, warned him to be more careful - and stood by him even after his reckless behavior was exposed. 
 
 For more than a decade, the golfer's social life has revolved around a handful of college chums, a childhood confidant, a fiercely protective agent and a smattering of sports figures. 
 
 Few had access to the inner sanctum. Those who did knew better than to gossip about Tiger Woods' less-exclusive club of sexy women. 
 
 Some of the buddies who knew about Woods' cheating told him he was flirting with disaster - but he didn't listen until it was too late. 
 
 "A lot of us who love him saw this coming," a friend who's known Tiger since he was 18 told the Daily News. 
 
 "We said, 'You've got to be careful. It's really getting too raggedy.' In his own mind, he may not have thought he was doing anything wrong," the friend said. 
 
 "He was under a lot of pressure. He thought he was just letting off steam. He thought of it as a perk." 
 
 Woods' wife, Elin Nordegren, reportedly knew nothing about his infidelities and was stunned by the breadth of his betrayal. 
 
 Still, the parade of busty blonds who emerged after a post-Thanksgiving car crash sparked questions about Woods' marriage that couldn't have been a surprise to his closest male pals. 
 
 High-school pal Bryon Bell, president of Tiger Woods Design, probably knew the most, reportedly helping with logistics for more than one affair, multiple sources said. 
 
 "He would coordinate my flight itineraries and make sure I was all set up to see Tiger," admitted mistress Jamie Jungers, 26, told The News. "He was a very nice guy." 
 
 Another source said Bell contacted Hollywood madam Michelle Braun to set up "introductions" between Tiger and her "models." 
 
 "He was definitely the middleman for Tiger," the source close to Braun said. 
 
 The roster of Tiger's celebrity friends includes retired basketball legends Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley - who was around when Jungers partied with Tiger, she claimed. 
 
 His nonfamous friends "are a bunch of nice guys, but their behavior has been a little sophomoric," said an insider who spoke on condition of anonymity. 
 
 He said that aside from Bell, Woods' closest friends are former Stanford teammate Jerry Chang and post-college pal D.J. Hanlon. 
 
 Chang roomed with Woods during competition travel in the mid-'90s and worked for Tiger's foundation before pursuing an MBA. 
 
 Notoriously media-shy, Chang did not returns calls. 
 
 "Tiger will always just be one of the guys to me," Chang told a newspaper in 1998. "He has a different life than most of us, that's for sure. But he's not bigger than life." 
 
 Woods spoke glowingly of Chang's "serious" demeanor when he chose him as a pro-am tournament partner in 2000. 
 
 "He won't get in the way. He won't be chit-chatting or talking," Woods said. 
 
 Hanlon is rarely mentioned in connection with Tiger, but they met in the late '90s when Hanlon's dad was president of the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas, a source said. 
 
 "It was through Butch Harmon, Tiger's coach," the source said, explaining Hanlon was working for his dad when Harmon opened a golf school at the Rio. Hanlon did not return calls. 
 
 As the scandal explodes, all three friends have maintained the code of silence that has long characterized their relationship with Tiger. 
 
 One Stanford-connected friend said that speaking out, even in the golfer's defense, would be friendship suicide. 
 
 "Jerry and all of us are dealing with the same thing," the friend said. "This is Tiger's thing. We can't comment." 
 
 ndillon@nydailynews.com 
 
 With Ellen Locker ||||| What’s striking instead is the exceptional, Enron-sized gap between this golfer’s public image as a paragon of businesslike discipline and focus and the maniacally reckless life we now know he led. What’s equally striking, if not shocking, is that the American establishment and news media — all of it, not just golf writers or celebrity tabloids — fell for the Woods myth as hard as any fan and actively helped sustain and enhance it. 
 
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 People wanted to believe what they wanted to believe. Tiger’s off-the-links elusiveness was no more questioned than Enron’s impenetrable balance sheets, with their “special-purpose entities” named after “Star Wars” characters. Fortune magazine named Enron as America’s “most innovative company” six years in a row. In the January issue of Golf Digest, still on the stands, some of the best and most hardheaded writers in America offer “tips Obama can take from Tiger,” who is typically characterized as so without human frailties that he “never does anything that would make him look ridiculous.” 
 
 Perhaps the most conspicuous player in the Tiger hagiography business has been a company called Accenture, one of his lustrous stable of corporate sponsors. In a hilarious Times article, Brian Stelter described the extreme efforts this outfit is now making to erase its six-year association with its prized spokesman. Alas, the many billboards with slogans like “Go On. Be a Tiger” are not so easily dismantled, and collectors’ items like “Accenture Match Play Tiger Woods Caddy Bib” are a growth commodity on eBay. 
 
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 From what I can tell, Accenture is a solid company. But the Daily News columnist Mike Lupica raised a good point when I spoke with him last week: “If Tiger Woods was so important to Accenture, how come I didn’t know what Accenture did when they fired him?” According to its Web site, Accenture is “a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company,” but who cared about any fine print? It was Tiger, and Tiger was it, and no one was to worry about the details behind the mutually advantageous image-mongering. One would like to assume that Accenture’s failure to see or heed any warning signs about a man appearing in 83 percent of its advertising is an anomalous lapse. One would like to believe that business and government clients didn’t hire Accenture just because it had Tiger’s imprimatur. But in a culture where so many smart people have been taken so often, we can’t assume anything. 
 
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 As cons go, Woods’s fraudulent image as an immaculate exemplar of superhuman steeliness is benign. His fall will damage his family, closest friends, Accenture and the golf industry much more than the rest of us. But the syndrome it epitomizes is not harmless. We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over. A decade that began with the “reality” television craze exemplified by “American Idol” and “Survivor” — both blissfully devoid of any reality whatsoever — spiraled into a wholesale flight from truth. 
 
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 The most lethal example, of course, were the two illusions marketed to us on the way to Iraq — that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and some link to Al Qaeda. That history has since been rewritten by Bush alumni, Democratic politicians who supported the Iraq invasion and some of the news media that purveyed the White House fictions (especially the television press, which rarely owned up to its failure as print journalists have). It was exclusively “bad intelligence,” we’re now told, that pushed us into the fiasco. But contradictions to that “bad intelligence” were in plain sight during the run-up to the war — even sometimes in the press. Yet we wanted to suspend disbelief. Much of the country, regardless of party, didn’t want to question its leaders, no matter how obviously they were hyping any misleading shred of intelligence that could fit their predetermined march to war. It’s the same impulse that kept many from questioning how Mark McGwire’s and Barry Bonds’s outlandishly cartoonish physiques could possibly be steroid-free. 
 
 In the political realm, our bipartisan credulousness has also been on steroids in this decade, even by our national standards. Many Democrats didn’t want to see the snake-oil salesman in John Edwards, blatant as his “Two America” self-contradictions were if you cared merely to look at him on YouTube. Republicans incessantly fell for family values preacher politicians like David Vitter, John Ensign and Larry Craig. Fred Thompson was seen by many, in the press as well as his party, as the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Karl Rove was widely hailed as a mastermind who would assemble a permanent Republican majority. Bernie Kerik was considered a plausible secretary of homeland security. Eliot Spitzer was viewed as a crusader of uncompromising principle. 
 
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 But these scam artists are pikers next to the financial hucksters. I’m not just talking about Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay, but about those titans who legally created and sold the securities that gamed and then wrecked the system. You’d think after Enron’s collapse that financial leaders and government overseers would question the contents of “exotic” investments that could not be explained in plain English. But only a few years after Enron’s very public and extensively dissected crimes, the same bankers, federal regulatory agencies and securities-rating companies were giving toxic “assets” a pass. We were only too eager to go along for the lucrative ride until it crashed like Tiger’s Escalade. 
 
 After his “indefinite break” from golf, Woods will surely be back on the links once the next celebrity scandal drowns his out. But after a decade in which two true national catastrophes, a wasteful war and a near-ruinous financial collapse, were both in part byproducts of the ease with which our leaders bamboozled us, we can’t so easily move on. 
 
 This can be seen in the increasingly urgent political plight of Barack Obama. Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it). The truth may well be neither, but after a decade of being spun silly, Americans can’t be blamed for being cynical about any leader trying to sell anything. As we say goodbye to the year of Tiger Woods, it is the country, sad to say, that is left mired in a sand trap with no obvious way out.
– The small group of friends who make up Tiger Woods' inner circle warned the golfer his extramarital shenanigans were going to cause trouble, but he ignored them—and they've stuck with him through the explosive revelations that are threatening to sink his career. "We said, 'You've got to be careful. It's really getting too raggedy,'" a longtime friend tells the New York Daily News. "He was under a lot of pressure. He thought he was just letting off steam." Meanwhile, Frank Rich argues in the New York Times that Woods, not Ben Bernanke, is the person of the year. True, "Woods will surely be back on the links once the next celebrity scandal drowns his out." But Tiger is a symbol of Americans' "bipartisan credulousness," a quality that let fans fall into "the exceptional, Enron-sized gap between this golfer’s public image as a paragon of businesslike discipline and focus and the maniacally reckless life we now know he led."