During Woods’s exhibition, the younger members of the crowd weren’t thinking about statistics. What they really wanted to see was a trick they had watched him perform in a hugely popular Nike television commercial: They wanted to see him bounce a golf ball on the face of his wedge while passing the club from hand to hand and between his legs and behind his back, and then hit the ball right out of the air as easily as if it were teed up on the ground. (That commercial arose by accident, when Woods, feeling bored between takes on a shoot for another Nike commercial, began amusing himself with a stunt he had taught himself as a kid, and the director, entranced, asked him if he could do it again.)
“I heard a rumor that this thing I did on TV was all computerized,” Woods said, as he began bouncing the ball. “It’s kind of a vicious rumor.” He passed the club between his legs. “Now, I don’t know where that rumor started, whether it was the public or the press, but they obviously hadn’t seen me do this before.” He bounced the ball up high. “And catch it like this.” He stopped the ball, frozen, on the face of his club, let it sit there a moment, then began bouncing it again. “Or I can start out doing it left-handed, if you want me to.” Bounce, bounce, bounce. “Or go back to the right.” He bounced the ball up over his shoulder from behind, and caught it on the club face in front. “Now, I didn’t put this one in the commercial, because it’s the hardest one—it’s when you hit the ball off the butt end of the club.” He bounced the ball high again, twirled the club so that its shaft was perpendicular to the ground, bounced the ball straight up off the top of the rubber grip, twirled the club back to its former position, and resumed bouncing the ball on the face. “Let’s see—it took me four takes to do the Nike spot. Let’s see if I can do this out here.” He bounced the ball high, took his regular grip on the club, planted his feet, and, just before the ball fell back to earth, smacked it more than a third of the way down the range.
A few hours before Woods’s exhibition, I sat with the all-black congregation of the St. John Missionary Baptist Church (motto: “We Strive to Be ‘The Best Church This Side of Judgement’”) while Tiger’s father, Earl Woods, gave a guest sermon. His talk was preceded by hymns, prayers, and half a dozen full-immersion baptisms, which were conducted in a large tank that was visible through an opening in the wall above the altar. His subject was his only subject. “Tiger was not created to be a golfer,” he said. “Tiger was made to be a good person, and that was first and foremost in our family.” Earl is shorter and considerably wider than Tiger. He has a good preaching voice, which caught in his throat a couple of times, despite the fact that he had given essentially the same presentation dozens, if not hundreds, of times before. “Sometimes when I talk about my son, I get very emotional,” he explained. “So bear with me.”
Earl divides his life into two distinct phases, the first of which he now considers to have been a divinely directed training mission for the second. In the first phase, which began during the Great Depression, he grew up poor in eastern Kansas, lost both parents by the time he was thirteen, attended a mostly white high school, became the first black baseball player in what is today the Big Twelve, spent twenty years in the Army, served two widely separated tours of duty in Vietnam (the second as a Green Beret), and endured an increasingly loveless marriage for the sake of his three children, to whom he was a remote father at best. In the second phase, which began in the late sixties, he divorced his first wife, married a Thai receptionist named Kultida Punswad (whom he had met in Thailand during his second Southeast Asian tour), took up golf, and produced Tiger Woods—whose real first name is Eldrick, and whose nickname Earl had given first to a South Vietnamese lieutenant colonel named Vuong Dang Phong, who was his colleague, close friend, and protector during the war.
Earl was determined to be a better parent to the last of his four children than he had been to the first three, and after he retired from the Army, in 1974, he had more time to be attentive. His one significant distraction—other than his job, as a contract administrator and materials manager at McDonnell Douglas, in Huntington Beach, California—was golf, a game at which he had become remarkably proficient despite having taken it up just four years earlier, at the age of forty-two. He worked on his swing in the evenings, by hitting balls into a net in his garage, and he often placed his infant son in a high chair beside him so that the two of them could commune while he practiced. “It was a way of spending time together,” he told me recently. The baby, far from being bored, was captivated by the motion. One momentous day, when Tiger was still young enough not to have mastered all the finer points of walking, he astonished his father by climbing down from his high chair, picking up a club, and executing a passable imitation of Earl’s (quite good) golf swing. At that moment, his father realized he was the steward of an extraordinary talent.
Earl also began to believe that the birth of his son had been—as he told the St. John congregation—“the plan of the man upstairs.” Looking back on his life, he detected a pattern of trials and tests and close escapes from tragedy, and he decided that God had been grooming him all along for something big. As the child grew, Earl was struck more and more by what he described in church that day as “the charismatic power that resides in my son Tiger”—a power that he had otherwise noticed only in Nelson Mandela.
Even to someone sitting in a church pew, this might sound sort of mystical and wacky—and yet the more you learn about Tiger Woods’s preternatural relationship to the game of golf the easier it becomes to understand why terrestrial interpretations seem inadequate to Earl. When Tiger was still a toddler, Earl says, the child was able to identify the swing flaws of adult players. (“‘Look, Daddy,’ Tiger would say, ‘that man has a reverse pivot!’”) Tiger putted with Bob Hope on the Mike Douglas Show at the age of two, broke 50 for nine holes at the age of three, hit golf balls on That’s Incredible! at the age of five, and received his first autograph request when he was still too young to have a signature. Before he had learned to count to ten, Earl says, Tiger could tell you, on any golf hole, where each member of a foursome stood in relation to par. While his grade school contemporaries drew pictures of racing cars and robots, Tiger sketched the trajectories of his irons. He came from behind to win the Junior World Championship, in San Diego, against an international field, when he was eight.
Tiger first beat his father in golf, by a single stroke, with a score of 71, when he was eleven. That same summer, he entered thirty-three junior tournaments, and won them all. (“That’s when I peaked. It’s been downhill since.”) At fifteen, he became the youngest player ever to win the United States Junior Amateur Championship—and then the only player in history to win it three years in a row. At eighteen, he became the youngest player ever to win the United States Amateur Championship—and then the only player in history to win it three years in a row.
When Tiger first began to attract national attention, people often assumed that the real force behind his game must be the oldest one in modern sports: a pushy father with frustrated athletic aspirations and a powerful yearning for unearned income. In early 1998, the sportswriter John Feinstein published a short, mean-spirited book called The First Coming, in which he compared Earl to the manipulative father of the tennis prodigy Jennifer Capriati, who burned out on the women’s tour at seventeen. (She has since returned.) But Feinstein was clearly wrong. It has gradually become apparent that Tiger’s drive has always been internal, and that while Earl and Kultida may have been its facilitators they were not its authors. When Tiger was still very small, for example, he memorized his father’s office telephone number so that he could call Earl each afternoon to ask if the two of them could practice at the golf course after work. Earl was a tireless (and innovative) practice companion and coach, but he believed that the initiative must always be taken by the boy.
Rather than pushing their son, the Woodses sometimes worried that his infatuation with golf was eclipsing other parts of his life. “In junior golf, I was all-out,” Tiger said in Oklahom
a. “My parents would say, ‘You can’t play, you’re playing too much.’ But I wanted to play every tournament, and play twice in one day.” Earl repeatedly urged him, with little success, to try other sports. Kultida used golf as an incentive—for example, by forbidding her son to hit practice balls until he had finished his homework. (“My wife was the disciplinarian in the family,” Earl told me, “and I was the friend.”) Earl once fretted that Tiger was so focused on winning that he had ceased to enjoy himself on the golf course. Tiger replied curtly, “That’s how I enjoy myself, by shooting low scores.” After that, Earl kept his opinions to himself.
Although Earl and Kultida did not force Tiger to become a golfer, they both made enormous sacrifices to help him realize his ambition. Earl estimates that the family’s annual travel expenses during Tiger’s junior golf years amounted to as much as thirty thousand dollars, a sum Earl couldn’t have covered without the help of a succession of home equity loans. Kultida was an infinitely patient chauffeur, rising long before dawn to drive Tiger to distant tournaments (and reminding him to bring his pillow so that he could go back to sleep in the car). Both parents believed that their son’s needs must always come before their own, and they were determined that the only impediment to his success—in golf or in whatever other field he might choose to pursue—would be the level of his own desire.
Earl and Kultida’s sacrifices took a toll on their marriage; they have lived apart for several years now, although they have not divorced. Their living arrangement inevitably comes to mind when Earl says, as he did in church in Oklahoma that day, “The family is the most important institution in the world.” But Earl doesn’t view his own domestic situation as conflicting with his beliefs. The family as Earl conceives it is mainly a relationship between parents and their children. He told me recently, “Tiger has a mother and a father who love him dearly, and who have always supported him and always will. He is the top priority in the family. There is no bitterness between his parents, and there is no animosity. The only thing is that we live in separate places. My wife likes a great, big-ass house, and I like a small house. That’s all.” Still awaiting Tiger is the challenge of raising a family of his own—an achievement, Earl says, from which Tiger must not allow himself to be distracted by his golf.
Tiger’s obsession was obviously indulged by his parents, but the child wasn’t spoiled. Almost from the beginning, he was made to take responsibility for his own aspirations. Starting when he was quite young, for example, he was put in charge of making the family’s tournament-related travel arrangements, including hotel reservations. When he was asked what he intended to study in school, he would say that he hoped to major in accounting because he wanted to know how to keep track of the people who would one day keep track of his earnings. He went by himself to check out the colleges that had recruited him, and he went by himself when it was time to enroll at Stanford, the college he ultimately chose. (Tiger’s best friends today include three former Stanford teammates: Notah Begay III, who is the first full-blooded American Indian to play on the PGA Tour; Casey Martin, who is physically disabled and won a court decision allowing him to use a motorized cart in PGA Tour events; and Jerry Chang, to whom Tiger quietly returned a favor by serving as his caddie during a thirty-six-hole qualifying tournament the week following his own victory in the U.S. Open.)
The real purpose of the Woods family’s lifestyle, both parents have said, was not to turn Tiger into a professional golfer but to strengthen his character. “Golf prepares children for life,” Earl told me recently, “because golf is a microcosm of life.” According to Earl, the truly important lessons he imparted on the golf course had to do with things like honesty, etiquette, patience, and discipline—virtues for which golf provided handy talking points. (Golf is the only competitive sport, for example, in which the players call penalties on themselves.) Earl also stressed to Tiger that his athletic gift, if he continued to pursue it, would always entail outsized public obligations—not least because of his racial background. Tiger lived in a mostly white neighborhood in Cypress, California, and he attended mostly white schools, and he was sometimes harassed by bigoted bullies—one of whom tied him to a tree one day when he was in elementary school—but both his parents taught him to rise above such incidents and to understand that racism is evidence of a defect in the racist, not in the racist’s victim. Kultida urged him to be remorseless in competition, but she also steeped him in the Buddhist tradition in which she herself had been raised.
It appears that Earl and Kultida provided their son with exactly what he turned out to need (competitive focus, immunity to intimidation, a cut-down one-iron) at every critical juncture in his development. But I sometimes wonder whether Tiger didn’t in some sense “create” his parents as much as they “created” him. From the moment he climbed down from that high chair, he seems to have been phenomenally well equipped—temperamentally, emotionally, intellectually—to exploit the physical gift that he was born with. Is it outlandish to wonder whether part of his genius didn’t lie in an ability to inspire his parents to conduct their lives in perfect harmony with his ambition?
I first saw Woods in person at the Augusta National Golf Club, in Augusta, Georgia, during the week of the 1997 Masters Tournament. He had turned pro just seven months earlier, after winning his third United States Amateur Championship, and he had dominated the tour almost from that moment. I was standing near Augusta National’s first tee late one afternoon early in the week when he emerged from the clubhouse to play a practice round. I didn’t see him at first, but I quickly guessed that he was near, because the crowd loitering between the clubhouse and the first tee suddenly convulsed. He was moving fast, and he was encircled by guards. “Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!” The ardor of those fans I can think to describe only as ferocious. Their supplications sounded almost angry. Woods’s face, meanwhile, floated expressionless among the grimaces of his protectors.
The 1997 Masters provided Woods’s formal introduction not only to many golf fans but also to some of the best golfers from outside the United States. In the third round, which he began with a three-stroke lead, Woods was paired with Colin Montgomerie, who had played well enough the day before to have shared the lead himself for a short time. He was now tied for second. Montgomerie, who is Scottish, was (and still is) the best player on the European PGA Tour, and he had been a star of the European Ryder Cup team. He had never won a tournament in the United States, but he had come close several times, and he was especially optimistic about his chances that week in Augusta.
Playing side by side with Woods, however, was a transforming experience for Montgomerie. He shot 74—a score that ordinarily wouldn’t have been disastrous at that stage in a major tournament, except that Woods shot 65, and thereby increased his lead over the field to nine strokes, and his lead over Montgomerie to twelve. When their round was over, Montgomerie was taken to the press building for a postmortem, as the top players always are. He looked frazzled and discouraged as he stepped onto the stage, and he didn’t wait for anyone to ask a question.
“All I have to say is one brief comment today,” he began. “There is no chance. We’re all human beings here, but there’s no chance humanly possible that Tiger is going to lose this tournament. No way.”
“What makes you say that?” a reporter asked.
Montgomerie looked at the reporter with palpable incredulity. “Have you just come in?” he said. “Or have you been away? Have you been on holiday or something?”
Montgomerie was clearly shaken by what he had witnessed at close quarters. In his encounter with Tiger Woods, he had crossed from the first stage to the second stage in the process described by Emily Dickinson as “First Chill—then Stupor—then the Letting Go.” In the fourth and final round, he shot 81, a dismal score, which left him in a tie for thirtieth place. When he finished, he looked as though his body had been drained of blood.
Weekend golfers who attend professional tournaments for the first time are almost always
struck by the breathtaking quality of the pros’ shots, and they end up realizing sadly that professional golf and weekend golf, despite superficial similarities, are very different games. I had been to tournaments before the 1997 Masters, and I had even played golf with a couple of touring pros, so I had no remaining illusions about my own abilities. But some of Woods’s golf shots during that tournament seemed almost as different from an average pro’s shots as an average pro’s shots would seem from mine. They belonged in a category of their own. David Feherty, a former tour player from Ireland, who now works mainly as a television commentator, told me recently, “I’ve played with just about everybody, and I think I can say now that Tiger has hit virtually every truly great shot I’ve ever seen. As we speak, he is deleting some of my greatest memories and replacing them with his. He simply does things other golfers can’t do. He’s like the Heineken in the commercial: He refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.”
Woods’s swing is so powerful that it is difficult to capture on film. For many years, Golf Digest has published detailed photographic sequences that anatomize the swings of the game’s best players—sequences that are descended in spirit from the studies of running athletes and galloping horses that were made in the late nineteenth century by the photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge. Since 1973, the magazine’s photographers have shot their swing sequences with a high-speed camera called a Hulcher, which was originally developed, at the request of a government agency, to take stop-action photographs of missiles. The camera can shoot hundreds of high-quality images at a rate of sixty-five frames a second—plenty fast enough to break a golf swing into its constituent parts.
Woods performed for the Hulcher a few months after his Masters victory. The camera recorded fifteen driver swings from five different angles. When the prints came back from the lab, the magazine’s editors discovered that only five frames among the hundreds taken during the shoot had captured Woods’s swing at the approximate moment his club head came into contact with the ball—a problem they had never encountered before. “With other tour players, we almost always get a picture of impact with every swing,” Roger Schiffman, the executive editor, told me. When Woods makes his normal swing, the head of his driver moves at about 120 miles an hour—a good fifteen miles an hour faster than the club head of a typical touring pro, and about thirty miles an hour faster than the club head of an average amateur. Between one Hulcher frame and the next, Woods’s driver traveled through roughly 200 degrees of arc, which means that a ball sitting unthreatened on the tee in one frame would be long gone by the next.
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