Tiger Woods cheated on his wife for years. Then she found a text message on his phone.

For years, Tiger Woods was one of the world’s most prolific golfers.

Woods, his wife Elin Nordegren, and their kids Sam and Charlie, painted a picture of the perfect family.

But things weren’t exactly what they seemed.

In 2009, the family’s facade came crashing down when it was revealed Woods had repeatedly cheated on Nordegren with numerous women.

Now, 10 years later, a book called Tiger Woods written by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian, looks into how it all went wrong for the international golf star.

According to the book, the tabloids began circling Woods in 2009, looking for any evidence they could use to expose his double life.

When one of his mistresses, Rachel Uchitel, met him at Crown Towers in Melbourne during the Australian Masters, it looked like they might finally have what they needed for publication.

Woods and his team of high profile lawyers knew they wouldn’t be able to stop them from publishing, so Woods told Nordegren there would be a story coming out about him which wasn’t true.

He then arranged a phone call between Nordegren and Uchitel, in which Uchitel backed up his story.

The family then gathered together for Thanksgiving, presenting an image to the world that everything was fine.

Nordegren, however, still had her own suspicions. When Woods "fell into an Ambien-induced sleep" on Thanksgiving night, she looked through his phone.

There she found a text message that read, "You are the only one I’ve ever loved".

Knowing he had not sent that message to her, Nordegren decided to contact the person. According to Tiger Woods, she fired off the following text message, "I miss you. When are we seeing each other again?”.

When a reply came back she called the phone and immediately recognised Uchitel's voice.

“I knew it,” Nordegren shouted. “I knew it!”

“Oh, f***,” Uchitel said.

Nordegren woke her husband up and confronted him. Later, Woods would speed out of his driveway in his SUV, clip the hedge, and swerve into his neighbour's front yard.

When the police arrived on scene they found the back windows on both sides on the vehicle had been smashed out with a golf club. A golf club that had been swung by Nordegren.

Hearing a commotion outside, Woods' neighbour, Jarius Adams, wandered outside to see what was happening.

"Woods was lying flat on his back on the pavement. He was shoeless, unconscious, and bleeding from the mouth. There was broken glass on the driveway and a bent golf club beside the vehicle," Benedict and Keteyian write in their book.

Nordegren was hunched over her husband whispering, "Tiger, are you okay?".

Within hours the whole world knew about Wood's double life and the secrets he had been hiding from his wife of five years.

After the couple divorced in 2010, Nordegren used part of her reported $100 million dollar divorce settlement from Woods to build a mansion in Florida, where she lives with the couple's children: Sam, 11, and Charlie, 10. Woods lives no more than half an hour away.