That Golf Digest swing sequence was photographed two days before the start of the 1997 Western Open, which Woods went on to win. “When he saw the pictures later, he said, ‘No wonder I won,’” Schiffman told me. “He said his swing looked almost perfect.” It was quite a surprise, therefore, when Woods decided not long afterward that his game required a major overhaul. With the help of Butch Harmon, a former touring pro who has been Woods’s teacher since he was seventeen, Woods spent more than a year taking apart his “almost perfect” swing and putting it back together.
In paying his dues and becoming the best, Woods has changed almost everything there is to change about golf. The conventional wisdom among sportswriters used to be that the PGA Tour had become so deep in talent that no modern player could hope to dominate it the way Palmer or Nicklaus or Watson did in the sixties and seventies and eighties, or the way Snead or Nelson or Hogan did in the thirties and forties and fifties. Now, though, Woods becomes the favorite in any tournament simply by signing up, and professional golfers all over the world have begun lifting heavier weights, eating healthier food, and going to bed earlier, in the hope of becoming good enough to be considered second best. “He’s in their heads,” the sportswriter Tom Callahan told me. Callahan recalled the corrective eye surgery that Woods had last year. “The first thing he said afterward was ‘The hole looks bigger.’ Now, if you’re Davis Love, is that what you want to hear?” More than a few pros once viewed Woods as dangerously overhyped; nowadays, like most of the rest of his awestruck admirers, they tend to stop what they are doing and watch—perhaps thinking ahead to a day when they’ll be able to brag to their grandchildren that they once got personally whomped by the “Chosen One” (as the tour player Mark Calcavecchia called him at the British Open).
Woods has also changed golf’s public image, which has suffered for decades from the game’s suburban association with saddle shoes, cigars, and miniature electric cars. Twelve-year-olds who used to dream only of becoming professional basketball players now sometimes decide that they might like to give the PGA Tour a try, too, at least in the off-season. Tubby middle-aged hackers now stand a little taller at cocktail parties, because Woods, miracle of miracles, has made golf seem kind of cool. Woods has even taken the most shameful aspect of the game’s long history—its legacy as a decadent pastime for white people with too much time on their hands—and turned it inside out.
Between 1934 and 1961, the constitution of the Professional Golfers Association of America—the direct predecessor of the modern PGA Tour—explicitly limited that organization’s membership to “Professional golfers of the Caucasian race.” The Caucasian-only clause was not some esoteric historical artifact; the rule merely formalized a policy that had always been followed, and the PGA apparently bothered to put it on paper only after discovering that a light-skinned black man had managed to work as a club pro since 1928. The PGA methodically fought efforts by black players to overturn or circumvent the rule, and it didn’t amend its constitution until it was forced to do so by the attorney general of California, who threatened to ban tour events in that state and to encourage other attorneys general to do the same. The pressure for change did not come from the white pros of that era; the vast majority of those men were happy with their world the way it was.
Less than nine months before Woods’s birth, Lee Elder became the first black golfer to play in the Masters. Elder’s appearance at Augusta has been celebrated ever since as an early milestone in the drearily slow enlightenment of white Americans, but it did not herald a new generation of black golfers. Like most of the few other black tour players of that time, Elder was a veteran of the old United Golfers Association, golf’s equivalent of baseball’s Negro leagues, and his athletic prime was mostly behind him. (He was already forty-one.) A black player named Calvin Peete, who was born in 1943 and took up golf too late to have been involved with the UGA, became one of the truly dominant players on the PGA Tour in the eighties, a decade during which he won more tournaments (eleven) than any player except Tom Kite. But Peete was virtually the end of the line; Woods is the only black member of the PGA Tour, and he is the first in a very long time. In the past fifteen years, only one African American golfer has won a PGA Tour card by way of the tour’s qualifying “school” (actually, a notoriously arduous six-day tournament). That was a now forgotten player named Adrian Stills, who qualified in 1985. “We’re a dying breed,” Lee Elder told me last month.
Why did the black presence on tour shrink to the vanishing point between the midseventies and the midnineties, just when one would have expected the opposite? Pete McDaniel—who is the author of Uneven Lies, a cultural history of black golf in America, which will be published this fall—recently told me, “It was the golf cart. The rise of the motorized golf cart marked the beginning of the end of minority golf, especially among African Americans, because golf clubs that had carts didn’t need caddies, and most of the black professional players had come from the caddie ranks.” Golf carts, in addition to being a typically American response to the threat of mild physical exercise, eliminated what to golf clubs had been the unappealing necessity of maintaining on their premises large pools of mostly young, mostly disadvantaged workers. As carts displaced caddies, kids whose families were excluded from private clubs lost their principal avenue of access to the game.
Of course, a world in which a handful of black men managed to claw their way into mostly marginal professional careers as a result of having lugged the weekend baggage of wealthy whites was hardly a utopia. The real problem with golf in America, as far as race is concerned, is not that caddying declined as an occupation but that the game, over the course of more than a century, has only grudgingly made room for more than a privileged few. Given the inexorability of the cultural forces at work, it seems almost unbelievable that Tiger Woods emerged as a golfer at all, much less as a golfer who has a decent chance of one day being remembered as the greatest of all time. As Earl says, his son is the first “naturally born and bred black professional golfer”—the first whose initial exposure to the game did not come through the service entrance. For Woods simply to have earned a tour card and kept it for a couple of years would have made him a pioneer. Doing what he has actually done moves him into the category of myth.
Woods’s own views about race are attractively complicated. He dislikes being referred to as “African American,” because he regards that term as an insult to his mother—and so does his mother—who, after all, is Asian. Earl’s ancestors were black, white, American Indian, and Asian, and Tiger once referred to his own ethnicity as “Caublinasian,” a word he made up in an effort to suggest the diversity of his genealogy. He often seems inclined to concentrate on golf and let American race relations look after themselves, but he has invested a great deal of his increasingly scarce and valuable time in reaching out to disadvantaged children through his clinics.
Woods has been conducting clinics for young golfers since he was in high school, when he and Earl set up exhibitions in cities where Woods was playing in tournaments. The clinics ended when Woods was at Stanford, because the National Collegiate Athletic Association held that they were in violation of a rule concerning individual college athletes and public exhibitions. (Earl and Tiger had several running battles with the NCAA during Tiger’s two years in college, and Earl says those battles contributed to Tiger’s decision to turn pro shortly after the beginning of what would have been his junior year.) After Woods left the aegis of the NCAA, late in 1996, he and Earl established the Tiger Woods Foundation to continue their mission.
The foundation has been accused by some of creating unrealistic expectations among children who have limited opportunities for becoming even recreational golfers, and virtually no chance at all of becoming touring pros. (“You wonder if it’s false hope,” a skeptical sportswriter said to me recently.) What good does it do—the critics have asked—to introduce an inner-city kid to a game that, for all practical purposes, can’t be played in an inner
city? And, indeed, if the goal is to turn more members of ethnic minorities into golfers, a simpler approach might be to concentrate directly on transforming ghetto youngsters into middle-aged Republicans—the kind of people who seem to take up the game as a matter of course. There’s a public-service commercial on television which shows a black child using a hammer to drive a tee into the pavement on a dark urban street, so that he can tee off in his neighborhood. Well, exactly.
Although it’s true that playing on tour is an unreasonable ambition for almost everyone—the PGA Tour has only 125 fully exempt playing spots, and many of those are locked up by golfers whose careers will ultimately be measured in decades rather than in years—earning a different kind of living in the world of golf is within reach for many. Unlike most other spectator sports, golf is played by millions of nonprofessionals, whose needs are served by a large industry that comprises equipment manufacturers, clothing retailers, agronomists, golf-course maintenance workers, traveling salespeople, teaching professionals, scuba-diving golfball recyclers, and others—even journalists. Within that industry, there is now a widespread conviction that if golf is to grow significantly as an economic enterprise it needs to extend its reach far beyond white suburban males. Woods’s foundation, in connection with its clinics and exhibitions, conducts seminars for children and parents in which such job opportunities are described and explained. Woods himself has estimated that as many as 5 percent of the children who pass through his foundation’s programs will one day end up in jobs that are somehow connected with golf. That seems like a lot, but who knows?
Even for kids who have no interest in golf-related careers, the game as a pastime has virtues that its more grotesque attributes have often obscured. Golf has a work ethic (the driving range and the practice green), a dress code (no jeans or T-shirts), and a tradition of etiquette based on personal responsibility and consideration for others (replace your divots). Spectator behavior that is tolerated and even encouraged in other sports—the frantic waving of plastic-foam tubes in an effort to fluster free-throw shooters in basketball games, for example—would be considered grounds for arrest at golf tournaments, where fans are expected to keep even their shadows under control. Aspiring golfers who set out to be just like Tiger Woods may never make it to the tour, but they will inevitably end up learning something about what it takes to find and keep a job more demanding than that of filling orders at a drive-through window. “The first thing they learn is to play by the rules,” Earl told me, “and we have a lot of knuckleheads in prison today who never learned to play by the rules.”
White golfers also tend to underestimate the emotional impact that Woods’s racial background has had on non-Caucasians. For upper-middle-class white fans, a big part of Woods’s appeal is that he seems to negate racial issues altogether—he’s just Tiger, the best golfer in the world. I’ve seen sixty-year-old white chief executive officers with their own personal jets who were as excited as a ten-year-old kid would be about having a chance to see Woods in person. Their excitement was genuine, and, to the extent that such a thing is possible, it was color-blind. When white golfers do think about Woods’s racial background, it’s often with a sense of relief: His dominance feels like an act of forgiveness, as though in a single spectacular career he could make up for the game’s ugly past all by himself.
For many of the young players I saw in Oklahoma, though, Woods’s appeal had everything to do with race: The color of his skin was the bridge they were crossing into the game. Dennis Burns, who works for the Tiger Woods Foundation and is one of a handful of black American golf professionals (the kind who give lessons and work at golf clubs rather than play on tour), told me, “Kids walk away from Tiger’s clinics with a sense that here’s a guy who looks like me and has done it. It’s a feeling of confidence—and it doesn’t just have to do with golf.” Children generally admire great athletes for most of the same reasons they admire cartoon superheroes: The constraints of the adult-ruled world don’t seem to apply. But, for teenagers who are outside America’s cultural mainstream, Woods has meant incalculably more. He is the fearless conqueror of a world that has never wanted anything to do with them.
A lesson in fearlessness may be what professional golfers need as well. Woods has upended their universe. Ernie Els has finished second to him five times now, twice in major tournaments. Els is one of the very nicest people on any golf tour—and he has made nothing but generous, flabbergasted remarks about Woods—but surely it must have occurred to him that if Woods had spent four years at Stanford and then gone to graduate school, he himself might today be considered the best player in the world. He and the other young golfers who used to contend for that position, including Phil Mickelson and David Duval (who briefly supplanted Woods at the top of the world rankings around the time that Woods was making his big swing change), have to wonder if their moment in golf history passed before it arrived.
Superb athletes fascinate in part because they seem like proxies for ourselves in a metaphorical battle with the eternal: broken records are death-negating acts. Even Woods’s most lopsided victories have been thrilling to watch, because his efforts have seemed so effortless—as though he had found a way to win the game that can’t be won. But will we feel the same way five years from now if no player has stepped forward to challenge him? Nicklaus had the considerable advantage during his career of being chased and, not infrequently, elbowed aside by other great players, among them Arnold Palmer, Billy Casper, Gary Player, Lee Trevino, and Tom Watson. Woods’s principal rival, so far, has been the record book. If that doesn’t change, then those of us who can only watch—sports fans, television commentators, sports reporters—may someday come to view his triumphs with the same dispassion that he seems to feel toward us, until the passage of time erodes his powers and makes it all seem like a contest again.
2000
LEGEND OF A SPORT
ALVA JOHNSTON
Wilson Mizner had been devoted to prizefighting for many years before he became manager of the middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel in 1910. He gave convincing evidence of his love of the game in 1906 when, after marrying “the forty-million-dollar widow,” Mrs. Charles T. Yerkes, he turned one wing of the Yerkes mansion, on Fifth Avenue, into a training camp for prizefighters. Mizner was proud of his big brown home, with its Italian garden and two fine art galleries. He was highly pleased at being the successor of the late Yerkes, who had constructed the Chicago “L” and part of the London Tube. In one moment of enthusiasm, he exclaimed, “I own everything that runs on wheels in Chicago,” and in another he said, “I’m the only man who was ever accused of stealing a subway.” It had taken Yerkes a lifetime of industry and rascality to build up his estate; Wilson sang himself into it in a few weeks. He had good looks and a wonderful line of conversation, but it was his singing of sad old ballads that made him irresistible to the widow.
Mizner was proud of his neighbors. He was close enough to the Astors to run over with a plate of soup in case of illness. Thomas Fortune Ryan lived next door. Andy Carnegie was a few blocks up the Avenue. Mizner was now as close to the Fricks and Garys, Vanderbilts, Goelets, and Whitneys as he had been in the Klondike to Diamond Tooth Gertie, the Scurvy Kid, Nellie the Pig, Two-Toothed Mike, Deep-Hole Johnson, and Jerkline Sam. Yerkes had fixed the house up very much to the taste of Wilson Mizner. He had spent several million dollars building the stately four-story edifice on the south corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street. He had poured out additional millions on carving, painting, gilding, and inlaying the interior and had stocked it with art treasures selected with considerable judgment. Prizefighters have seldom worked off their surplus fat in more elegant surroundings.
Mizner said later that he had the shock and scare of his life when he was running his palace as a training camp. Waking late one morning with a hangover, he had walked to the great Roman pool of gold-mounted green onyx that served him as a bathtub. He was halfway down the marble stairs to the water when he was petrifi
ed by the sight of the symbol of the Black Hand on a tapestry. After his marriage, Mizner had received sacks of begging letters, which were followed by sacks of threatening letters. He had scoffed at Black Hand letters, but in 1906 no man could scoff at the dread emblem in his own bathroom. The Black Hand was then a busy organization, and bombs and infernal machines were popping all over town. Mizner’s first thought was that some of his battalion of servants must be Black Handers. Suddenly, however, to his immense relief, the explanation occurred to him. On the preceding day, one of the footmen had, with some misgivings, ushered in a fighter named Kid Broad, and Mizner had told the Kid to take a bath. As the Kid was cautiously tiptoeing into the water, he steadied himself by putting his hand on the tapestry.
The mansion was a marvelous playhouse for Mizner and his sporting pals. Yerkes, who belonged to the old school of miscellaneous collectors, had picked up a vast variety of antique hand bells, enameled and jewelled with saints, heroes, and landscapes, and Mizner could ring for his servants with any one of a hundred little instruments of exquisite workmanship. Yerkes had also been a collector of antique timepieces, and Mizner, a perpetual adolescent, lost his mind over the Clock Room. The clocks were silent when he became master of the mansion, and one of his first directions to his servants was to wind them all up and to bring in experts to deal with the recalcitrant ones. Every hour on the hour, the Clock Room was a pandemonium. A whole aviary of stuffed birds began to whistle and sing. Muscular men in cast metal stepped out of hidden doors and smote gongs with sledge hammers. A full orchestra of tiny musicians swung out on a turntable, slowly raised their bows, and then frantically sawed away at violin strings. Nineteenth-century railroad clocks clanged and whistled as locomotives emerged from one tunnel with a train of passenger coaches and disappeared into another. Steamships came out screeching, paddled under bridges, and cruised back into their cases. Peasants came forth and called their cows with melodious horns. Clocks pealed, tolled, and jingled, and rendered minuets from hidden music boxes. Roy L. McCardell, writer and inventor of a thousand advertising slogans, was a friend of Mizner’s and a visitor at the mansion. He estimated the number of clocks at two thousand. The cream of the fun for Mizner was showing the room to friends with hangovers and seeing their nervous systems murdered when all the clocks let go at once. Mizner told McCardell that his first serious domestic strife arose over the clock situation. He came home sober one morning, went to bed a little after 3 A.M., and was roused at four by the shrieking of a cuckoo clock in his own room. He had ordered his servants to make every clock run, and they had taken him literally. He got up, cursing, and found the clock, high up on the wall and out of reach. He went to the Yerkes arsenal, on the fourth floor, returned to his room, and went to bed again. When the cuckoo screamed at 5 A.M., he lit the lights and gave it both barrels of one of the Yerkes shotguns. That, according to McCardell, started the bride wondering whether her new consort had the true Fifth Avenue spirit.
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