Slu had been a member of Team Feinstein and had become one of my favorite people on tour. He was smart, thoughtful, and funny, and an excellent storyteller. To this day we laugh about the fact that when I first asked him about being involved in the book, he said, “I’ll do it if you want, but I’m worried I might be too vanilla for you.”
Jeff’s anything but vanilla.
I was telling him about flying to Palm Beach with Nicklaus and my planned 4:30 a.m. wake-up on Saturday. As luck would have it, Nicklaus walked up at that moment. Slu offered condolences on his round.
“Not my week, I guess,” Nicklaus said. He wasn’t talking just about his golf. Earlier in the week he had been involved in a controversy over a comment he had made previously that month at the opening of a golf course in Vancouver. Someone had asked why there were so few African-Americans on tour. At that moment, with Lee Elder, Calvin Peete, Charlie Sifford, and Pete Brown on the Senior Tour, only Jim Thorpe—who was forty-five—was left from the first generation of outstanding African-American players. Tiger Woods was eighteen and not yet on the tour.
Nicklaus had talked about environment, city versus suburbs, and had then said something about white muscles and black muscles. He believed that he had said kids growing up in the city environment, many of them black, learned to use different muscles—to play football, basketball, baseball—than suburban kids. He’d been quoted as saying black and white muscles were different. Publicly, he had been no-commenting the whole thing all week, releasing a statement saying that was not what he had said and had left it at that.
Sluman and I both nodded sympathetically when he talked about having a tough week.
“So I hear you’re flying back to Palm Beach with us tomorrow,” Nicklaus said to me.
“Well, if you miss the cut, yes,” I said.
Nicklaus laughed. “What do you think, I’m going to shoot 79-59?” He put up a hand. “It’s nice of you to say though, I appreciate it.”
“Should I just find you after you sign your card tomorrow?” I asked.
“Yes. That should work.”
He was about to turn away when Slu said to me, “So what time do you have to get up Saturday to fly back here?”
“At four thirty,” I said.
Nicklaus turned back. “You have to come back here?” he said.
One should never underestimate the ability of an athlete to convince himself an event is over once he is no longer in it.
“Well, yeah, I have to come back for the last two days of the tournament.”
Nicklaus knitted his brows. “In that case, wouldn’t it be easier for you if we just did it here?”
“Um, yeah, it would be a lot easier.”
“Why don’t you just meet me at the house we’re renting in an hour,” he said. “It’s about a mile from here.”
“That would be perfect,” I said.
As soon as he turned away, I said to Sluman, “Bless you, my son.”
“You owe me big time,” he said.
He was right.
I SPENT THREE HOURS with Nicklaus that day. He was candid, talking very honestly about how crushed he felt by people implying he was a racist. “Look, there’s no tape of the press conference,” he said. “I can’t swear to you that I didn’t misspeak, but I certainly wasn’t saying what people are trying to say I was saying. I think my track record is pretty good.”
In fact, when Nicklaus had built and opened Muirfield Village—the club that hosts the Memorial—he had made a point of actually recruiting minorities to be members when the club opened: blacks, Jews, women. “Could we all do more?” he said. “Yes. Absolutely.”
I asked him about his nickname among the players: Carnac. It had come about because a lot of players thought of Nicklaus as a know-it-all (Tom Watson was Carnac Jr. in those days). Nicklaus thought it had started during a Ryder Cup match when he had started predicting what would happen before players hit shots. Maybe, but there was more to it than that.
At about seven o’clock, Jack’s wife, Barbara—known on tour as the nice Nicklaus—came in.
“Jack, the people we rented the house from are here,” she said. “You promised to take a picture with them, remember…”
“Oh yeah, I forgot,” Nicklaus said. “Give us a few more minutes.”
That’s the thing about Nicklaus. Pinning him down is just about impossible—he now has a PR guy who doesn’t return phone calls even to media members he knows unless you leave a reason why you’re calling him. So I never call him. But if you do get time with Nicklaus, he’s a great interview because he’s almost disarmingly honest. He was then; he is now.
Another twenty minutes went by and Jack was still talking. I began to feel bad for the people waiting for him. “Jack, maybe you should go take this picture,” I said finally.
“Are you okay?” he said. “You have enough?”
“Plenty.”
“Now that I know you, anytime you need me, just call. It won’t be nearly as hard to get me in the future. I promise.”
We walked outside and Nicklaus said hello to about a dozen people who had come to meet him.
“Who here can break 79?” he said. “Maybe we can play tomorrow and you can give me shots.”
He shot 71 the next day, grinding all the way even with no chance to make the cut. The great ones do that.
Three years later, when I was beginning my research for The Majors, I went directly to Jack (as instructed) to ask him if we could sit down and talk at some point.
“John,” he said with a smile, “have I ever denied you anything?”
16
Tiger
THE VERY FIRST TIME I laid eyes on Tiger Woods was in March of 1994 at the Bay Hill Classic—or as it was called then, the Nestle Invitational. I was standing on the range on Wednesday afternoon—I remember it was Wednesday because the pro-am there is played on Tuesday and I’d spent most of the pro-am day chasing Greg Norman. I was talking to Peter Jacobsen, Davis Love, and Billy Andrade.
Billy pointed down the range at a skinny kid hitting balls. “You know who that is?” he said.
I had no idea, although the fact that he was African-American and clearly very young made him stand out.
“You should know,” Billy continued. “That’s Tiger Woods. He’s the Next One.”
I did know the name. I’d heard it a few times on tour—a phenom from California who was already unofficially under contract to IMG. In fact, his father, Earl, was on IMG’s payroll as a “junior talent scout.”
I hadn’t paid that much attention. My focus was on the players who were on the tour at that moment, and I tended to be skeptical about Next Ones. I could still remember Brent Musburger comparing Jeff Lebo to Jerry West when Lebo was a freshman at North Carolina. I had already seen what being the Next One had done to Jennifer Capriati, and I remembered reading a Rick Reilly piece in Sports Illustrated a couple of years earlier on how Love and Fred Couples were the Next Ones in golf.
“I thought you and Fred were the Next Ones,” I said to Love.
“Not like this kid,” Love said. “At least that’s what people are saying.”
I shrugged, still skeptical. A few minutes later, I walked off the range. As luck would have it, Woods was walking a few steps in front of me. As he headed—I presumed to the first tee to play a few holes—a small cadre of maybe fifteen to twenty kids standing behind the ropes pushed programs and pieces of paper in his direction for autographs. Some knew him by name, others didn’t. Woods put his head down, looked in neither direction, and walked right past them without slowing for a second.
Most players will stop when leaving the range on practice days. Walking to the first tee for an actual round is different. In that situation most guys will say “after the round” or “gotta go to work.” But this was a practice day, and this was before Woods had become such a big star that stopping to sign autographs could turn into an all-day affair.
Watching him put his head down and keep on going, I dis
tinctly remember thinking to myself, “Just who the hell does that kid think he is?”
Of course the answer, as it turned out, was simple: he thought he was Tiger Woods.
Woods won his first U.S. Amateur that summer and played in his first Masters the following April. That was the first time—in seven attempts—that he made a cut in a professional tournament, finishing tied for fifty-second. Even so, when he withdrew from the U.S. Open at Shinnecock that summer after hurting his wrist while making a swing in thick rough, I thought, “Oh yeah, Next One all right. He’s not yet twenty and he’s already getting hurt.”
Of course, by the time he turned pro in the summer of 1996 after winning the Amateur for a third straight time, Woods had become a phenomenon, in part because he was so good, in part because he was African-American, in part because IMG and Nike were marketing him before he hit his first tee shot as a pro in Milwaukee, which came soon after that third victory in the Amateur.
It was after the tournament in Milwaukee that I first ran afoul of Team Tiger. I had been asked by Newsweek to do a story on Tiger mania. I wrote pretty much the same story as everyone else, talking about his vast potential, about how important it was for golf to finally have an African-American star, and about how the marketing machine was in motion already, playing on his status as a minority—remember his first line in his first press conference as a pro? “Hello, world. Are you ready for me?”
I also mentioned that Earl Woods had already developed a reputation in golf as a pushy father and that his avid pursuit of publicity for himself and every dollar possible reminded some (me) of Stefano Capriati. That wasn’t a compliment. Earl Woods knew it and so did his son. The Newsweek people got several angry phone calls from Hughes Norton, who was then Tiger’s agent. How dare he compare Earl Woods to Stefano Capriati.
Looking back, maybe I was unfair—to Stefano.
HAVING GOTTEN OFF TO a bad start with Team Tiger, I proceeded to make things worse in the fall of 1996. After finishing tied for sixtieth in Milwaukee, Tiger took off. He had a chance to win his third time out, in Moline, but got off to a bad start Sunday and finished tied for fifth. The winner that week was Ed Fiori, a roly-poly tour lifer who was known for years as the only man to ever catch Woods from behind on a Sunday. “I should write a book called How to Beat Tiger on Sunday,” he said once. “Probably sell a million copies.”
At least.
Woods followed that performance with a tie for third at the B.C. Open. His goal when he turned pro was to earn enough money in seven tournaments—the maximum number a non-tour member could play in one year on sponsor exemptions—to avoid going to Q School in the fall. After the fifth and the third he had all but wrapped that up. And so, even though he had a sponsor’s exemption to play the next week in the Southern Open, he decided to go home and get some rest.
Which sounds fine. Except it wasn’t. To begin with, when you accept a sponsor’s exemption, you are expected to show up and play unless you are deathly ill or something catastrophic prevents you from appearing. When you are the game’s Next One and you know your presence in a tournament has been promoted you really should show up. And when the sponsors of a major college golf award have scheduled their awards dinner to suit you at a time and place where you have told them you will be, you don’t blow off the dinner and go home.
That’s what Tiger did. The dinner, scheduled around his schedule, was held without him. So was the golf tournament. A week later in Las Vegas, Woods won his first tournament, which Hughes Norton deemed proof he had done the right thing. I didn’t agree and said so. Then, two weeks later, Woods won again—at Disney. The finish was controversial because Tiger actually tied with a guy named Taylor Smith and should have been in a playoff. But it turned out Smith was playing with an illegal putter (unknowingly, but that didn’t matter) and he was disqualified. If winning that way bothered Tiger, he never said so in his press conference and, in fact, ducked questions about it when asked.
Press conference over, he headed back to the locker room. As frequently happens at the end of a tournament, several reporters followed the champion back, hoping to get a few more quotes that weren’t quite as banal as what they’d just heard in the press conference. Players understand this and, especially right after a win, are more than willing to talk while they clean out their locker.
Not Tiger. As he walked in, he told the security guards he didn’t want any media in the locker room, so the guys trying to get in were told the locker room was closed. Except it wasn’t—not under PGA Tour rules, just under Tiger’s rules. I was actually sitting in the media room—I was writing about guys trying to keep their playing privileges for the following year at the last full field event of the fall, so I wasn’t that interested in Tiger—when someone came in to say the locker room had been closed, apparently by Tiger.
Wes Seeley was in charge of PR for the tour on site. He walked straight to the locker room (I followed, curious to see how all this would unfold) and told the security guards the locker room was open to the media. “The tour makes the rules, not this kid,” Wes said. “Regardless of what he and his people may think, he’s not the fifth Beatle.”
Wes is a good friend who now works for a company that publishes books on the performing arts. Every now and then I remind him of that day. “Turns out you were right,” I say. “The kid wasn’t the fifth Beatle. He’s John Lennon.”
Of course, Wes was right to do what he did, and if more people in golf had stood up to Tiger and his people early, maybe things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did. Or maybe they would have anyway. We’ll never know.
While there was plenty to question in Woods’s behavior, there was nothing to question in his golf. Paul Goydos played in a group directly behind Tiger the first three days that week at Disney. Walking into the locker room one day, he spotted me and said, “You know how you guys [the media] are always trying to figure out who the best player in the world is who hasn’t won a major yet? I’m telling you right now it’s Tiger Woods. You want to know why? Because he’s the best player in the world—period.”
He wasn’t yet twenty-one. Tiger was such a phenom that Sports Illustrated named him Sportsman of the Year before he’d won a major. “First time they’ve ever given that award out on spec,” said Mike Lupica, the New York Daily News columnist and my (then) colleague on The Sports Reporters.
Woods was so good that when he won the Masters the following April—the first major he had played in as a pro—no one was that shocked. The twelve stroke margin—twelve strokes!—was a shock, but the fact that he won shocked few people. The real surprise was when he didn’t seriously contend at any of the remaining three majors that year.
It was at that Masters that I had my first face-to-face confrontation with Tiger’s people. After I had written a column in Golf Magazine about Tiger’s blowoff of the Southern Open and the college dinner, and about the scene at Disney, George Peper, the editor of the magazine, had gotten a call from Hughes Norton demanding a meeting with me. I had no problem meeting with Norton and his deputy, a guy named Clarke Jones. (Jones was furious when I referred to him later as “someone named Clarke Jones” because he thought he was a really important person in golf. Sorry, Clarke.)
And so Peper, Mike Purkey—who was my editor at the magazine—and I met with Norton and Jones over breakfast at the Masters. There were two highlights to what turned out to be a short meeting. The first was when Jones, apparently the designated bad cop, demanded to know who my sources were on several things I had written. I looked at him and said, “Clarke, if I wanted you to know that, I’d have used their names in the magazine.”
“Well, I want to know, right now!”
“Can’t have everything you want in life, Clarke.”
Norton, the designated good cop, jumped in to say in what he no doubt thought was a soothing voice that he really didn’t want to see Tiger’s anger at me result in him deciding not to sign a contract with Golf as a “playing editor.” At that moment, bo
th Golf and Golf Digest were trying to get Tiger under contract. In fact, Golf had no chance because Golf Digest had a bigger circulation and it had Pete McDaniel—who wrote Earl Woods’s first book. But Norton was using Golf to up the ante in his negotiations with Golf Digest.
I knew from talking to Peper that he was holding out hope they could somehow get Tiger, and I also knew it would be a big deal for Golf.
As soon as Norton started into his “I’d hate to see Tiger being upset with John affect our negotiations with Golf” speech, I stood up.
“Is that what this meeting is about?” I said. “So you can blackmail George?”
I turned to Peper. “Listen, if you need to fire me to get this deal done with Tiger, go ahead. My guess is Digest will hire me tomorrow. So it’s fine, although I don’t think for a second they’re going to sign with you. In fact, I’ll bet the deal’s already done. But you do what you have to do.
“Meanwhile, I have things to take care of. If you want to stay and eat with these two assholes, go ahead. But I have better things to do than listen to this crap.”
I stalked out. The month after the Masters, Golf Digest proudly announced it had signed a long-term deal to make Tiger Woods a playing editor. My guess is the deal was already in place when we met that morning.
Norton and I did talk again before the week was over. We bumped into each other under the famous tree outside the clubhouse where about half the business that is done at the Masters takes place. I apologized for calling him an asshole. He apologized for his tactics.
“How about if you and I just make a deal,” he said. “Tiger does something you think is wrong, you call me. I’ll tell you his side of it.”
“How about if you get Tiger to tell me his side of it?” I said.
“Can’t promise that. But I can promise some kind of answer every time you call.”
“Done.”
A week later I was on the phone to Norton. After winning the Masters, Woods had been invited by President Clinton to participate with him and Rachel Robinson in a ceremony in New York commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color line.
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