The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

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  While he made friends with some of the SEALs, many of their fellow operators didn’t know why Tiger wanted to play soldier. It rubbed them the wrong way. Guys saw him doing the fun stuff, shooting guns and jumping out of airplanes, but never the brutal, awful parts of being a SEAL, soaking for hours in hypothermic waters, so covered in sand and grit that the skin simply grinds away. One year during hell week, a BUD/S candidate collapsed, his body temperature below 90 degrees; the man, a former wrestler, would rather have frozen to death than quit.

  Was Tiger willing to do that?

  “Tiger Woods never got wet and sandy,” says former SEAL and current Montana congressman Ryan Zinke, who ran the training facility during the years Tiger came around. The BUD/S instructors didn’t like the way Tiger talked about how he’d have been a SEAL if he didn’t choose golf. “I just reached out to the guys I know who jumped with him and interacted with him,” says a retired SEAL. “Not a single one wants to have any involvement, or have their name mentioned in the press anywhere near his. His interactions with the guys were not always the most stellar, and most were very underwhelmed with him as a man.”

  Then there’s the story of the lunch, which spread throughout the Naval Special Warfare community. Guys still tell it, almost a decade later. Tiger and a group of five or six went to a diner in La Posta. The waitress brought the check and the table went silent, according to two people there that day. Nobody said anything, and neither did Tiger, and the other guys sort of looked at one another.

  Finally one of the SEALs said, “Separate checks, please.”

  The waitress walked away.

  “We are all baffled,” says one SEAL, a veteran of numerous combat deployments. “We are sitting there with Tiger fucking Woods, who probably makes more than all of us combined in a day. He’s shooting our ammo, taking our time. He’s a weird fucking guy. That’s weird shit. Something’s wrong with you.”

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  They’re not wrong, not exactly, but the SEALs are also viewing Tiger through their own preexisting idea of how a superstar should act, so his behavior processes as arrogant and selfish. That reaction has colored Tiger’s relationships his entire life: People who meet him for 30 seconds love him, and people who spend several hours with him think he’s aloof and weird, while people who hang around long enough to know him end up both loving him and being oddly protective. His truest self is shy, awkward, and basically well-intentioned, as unsuited for life in public as he is suited for hitting a ball.

  “Frankly, the real Tiger Woods isn’t that marketable,” a friend says. “There isn’t a lot of money to be made off a guy who just wants to be left alone to read a book. Or left alone to play fetch with his dog. Or left alone to play with his kids. Or left alone to lift weights. Or left alone to play a video game. Do you see a trend? Tiger was a natural introvert, and the financial interest for him to be extroverted really drove a wedge in his personality. Being a celebrity changed him, and he struggled with that—and he struggled with the fact that he struggled with that.”

  Tiger uses well-rehearsed set pieces as standard icebreakers—things that get trotted out again and again. Famously, in front of a GQ reporter in 1997, he told a joke that ended on a punch line about a black guy taking off a condom. He told the same joke in 2006 to a SEAL at a Navy shooting range and to a woman at Butter, a New York nightclub. Talk to enough people who’ve met him, and it starts to seem like he’s doing an impersonation of what he thinks a superstar athlete is supposed to be. Once he bought a Porsche Carrera GT, similar to the one driven by many celebrities, but one of the first times he got behind the wheel, the powerful car got away from him, spinning off into the grass near his house. He took it back to the dealership.

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  Tiger bought a pair of combat boots. They were black, made by the tactical outfitter Blackhawk, popular with ex–special ops guys who become contractors and mercenaries. The boots were inevitable, in hindsight. You can’t insert something as intense as the SEAL culture into the mind of someone like Tiger Woods and not have him chase it down a deep, dark hole. He started doing the timed 4-mile run in combat boots, required by everyone who wants to graduate from BUD/S. A friend named Corey Carroll, who refused to comment and whose parents lived near Tiger, did the workouts with him. They’d leave from Carroll’s parents’ home, heading north, out onto the golf course. The rare sighting was almost too strange to process: Tiger Woods in combat boots, wearing Nike workout pants or long combat-style trousers, depending on the weather, pounding out 8½-minute miles, within striking distance of the time needed for BUD/S.

  Tiger knew the SEAL physical requirements by heart, easily knocking out the push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups. When he couldn’t sleep, he’d end up at a nearby Gold’s Gym at 3 a.m., grinding. One of his favorite workouts was the ladder, or PT pyramid, a popular Navy SEAL exercise: one pull-up, two push-ups, three sit-ups, then two, four, six, up to 10, 20, 30 and back down again.

  Soon, the training at La Posta didn’t cut it. He found something more intense with Duane Dieter, a man allowed by the navy to train SEALs in a specialized form of martial arts that he invented. Dieter is a divisive figure in the special operations world, working out of his own training compound on the Maryland shore. His method is called Close Quarters Defense, or CQD, and some students look at him as an almost spiritual guide, like a modern samurai. Others think he’s overrated. For Dieter, few things were more important than ancient warrior principles like light and dark energy.

  Tiger got introduced by the navy and learned CQD in Coronado. Hooked, he wanted to go further and ended up making trips to Dieter’s compound in Maryland. He’d fly in and either stay at the facility or at the nearby fancy resort, Inn at Perry Cabin by Belmond, according to a source who saw Tiger with Dieter. He’d park outside a nearby Target, sending someone else inside for cheap throwaway clothes that they could ruin with the Simunition. The practice rounds left huge bruises. He did all sorts of weapons training and fighting there, including this drill invented by Dieter: He would stand in a room, hands by his side, wearing a helmet with a protective face shield. A hood would be lowered over the helmet, and loud white noise would play. It sounded like an approaching train, the speakers turning on and off at random intervals, lasting 30 seconds, or maybe just five. Then the hood would fly up and there would be a scenario. Maybe two people were talking. Or maybe one was a hostile and the other a hostage. If the people posed no threat, the correct response was to check corners and not draw your weapon. Then the hood would go back down, and there’d be more music, and when it came up, the scenario had changed. Sometimes a guy threw punches, to the body and head, and Tiger would need to free himself and draw his weapon. At first, the instructors went easy, not hitting him as hard as they’d hit a SEAL. Tiger put a stop to that, and soon they jumped him as aggressively as everyone else. When the drill finally ended, the room smelled like gunpowder.

  An idea began to take hold, a dream, really, one that could destroy the disconnect Tiger felt in his life, completely killing off the character he played in public. Maybe he could just disappear into the shadow world of special operations. He mentioned his plans to people around him, one by one. He pulled over a car at a tournament once and told Steve Williams he wanted to join the navy. He told Haney he thought it would be cool to go through training. Once, Carroll had to talk him down via text message, according to someone present for the exchange, because Tiger wanted to quit golf and join the navy. There’s only one reason to run 4 miles in pants and combat boots. This wasn’t some proto-training to develop a new gear of mental toughness. “The goal was to make it through BUD/S,” says a former friend who knew about the training. “It had nothing to do with golf.”

  To many people inside Tiger’s circle, Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors wasn’t as important to Tiger as it was to the golfing media and fans.
He never mentioned it. Multiple people who’ve spent significant amounts of time with him say that. When Tiger did talk about it, someone else usually brought it up and he merely responded. The record instead became something to break so he could chase something that truly mattered. He loved the anonymity of wearing a uniform and being part of a team. “It was very, very serious,” the friend says. “If he had had a hot two years and broken the record, he would have hung up his clubs and enlisted. No doubt.”

  Tiger talked about some of these military trips with his friends, including describing skydiving to Michael Jordan, who saw a pattern repeating from his own past. Years before, he’d lost his father, and in his grief, he sought solace doing something his dad loved, quitting the Bulls and riding minor league buses for the Birmingham Barons. “It could be his way of playing baseball,” Jordan would say years later. “Soothing his father’s interest.”

  Jordan looked sad as he said this, perhaps feeling the heaviness of it all or even the luck involved. He somehow got through his grief and reclaimed his greatness, while Tiger has tried and failed over and over again.

  “Ah, boy,” Jordan sighed.

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  The point of no return came on July 31, 2007, a date that means nothing to the millions of fans who follow Tiger Woods but was the last real shot he had to avoid the coming storm. From the outside, he was closing in, inevitably, on Nicklaus. But inside his world, a year after his dad died, things were falling apart.

  On June 18, Tiger became a father. In July, he flew a porn star to Washington, D.C., according to a tabloid, to meet him during his tournament, the AT&T National. He’d already met many of the mistresses who would come forward two years later. According to The Wall Street Journal, the summer of 2007 is when the National Enquirer contacted his camp to say it had caught him in an affair with a Perkins waitress. Negotiations allegedly began that would kill the tabloid story if Tiger agreed to sit for an interview and cover shoot with Men’s Fitness, owned by the same parent company as the Enquirer. He did. The magazine hit newsstands on June 29.

  On July 22, he finished tied for 12th at the Open Championship, and then came home. In the weeks afterward, he’d announce that he’d ruptured his left ACL while jogging in Isleworth. His news release did not mention whether he’d been running in sneakers or combat boots. At the time, he chose to skip surgery and keep playing. Tiger’s account might be true, as might the scenario laid out in Haney’s book: that he tore the ACL in the Kill House with SEALs. Most likely, they’re both right. The knee suffered repeated stresses and injuries, from military drills and elite-level sports training and high-weight, low-rep lifting. A man who saw him doing CQD training says, “It’s kind of funny, when you have an injury it almost seems like a magnet for trauma. He almost never had something hit his right knee. It was always his left knee that got kicked, or hit, or shot, or landed on. Always the left knee.”

  Whatever happened, he didn’t take a break. Two days before the tournament in Akron, he was in Ohio. That night, July 31, his agent, Mark Steinberg, had people over to his home near Cleveland, including Tiger. According to both Haney’s and Williams’s books, Steinberg said the time had come for an intervention over Tiger’s military adventures. While Steinberg has a reputation as a bully in the golf world, he cares a great deal about his client and friend. This all must have seemed insane to someone who just wanted to manage a great athlete: secret trips to military facilities, running around a golf course in combat boots, shooting guns, taking punches.

  That night after dinner, Steinberg took Tiger into his downstairs office, a room in his finished basement. What they talked about remains private. But this was the moment when Tiger could have connected the dots and seen how out of control things had become. Everyone felt good about the talk. Afterward, Haney wrote, Tiger was different and the military trips became less of a distraction.

  That’s what they thought.

  Consider Tiger Woods once more, tabloids snapping grainy long-distance photos, his marriage suddenly in danger and with it the normalcy he lacked everywhere else, his body taking a terrible beating from SEAL training and aggressive weight lifting, a year after losing his father, adrift and yet still dominating all the other golfers in the world. They never were his greatest opponent, which was and always will be a combination of himself and all those expectations he never could control. Tiger won Akron, then won his 13th career major the following week at the PGA Championship in Tulsa, and then, 15 hours after getting home from the tournament, he packed up and flew off again to do CQD training with Dieter. Steinberg’s warning was just 13 days old.

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  Everything else might as well have been chiseled in stone on the day he was born. The two knee surgeries in Park City, Utah, a year later. The three back surgeries. The Thanksgiving night he took an Ambien and forgot to erase his text messages and how that enormous storm started small, with Elin calling numbers in his phone, confronting the people on the other end, including Uchitel’s friend Tim Bitici, who was in Vermont with his family when his phone rang. The horrors big and small that followed. The butcher paper taped up over the windows to block the paparazzi. The sheet his crew hung over the name of his yacht. The Internet comments he read while driving to Augusta National before the 2010 Masters, obsessed over what people thought. The questions from his kids about why Mommy and Daddy don’t live together, and the things he won’t be able to protect them from when their classmates discover the Internet. The tournament where he shot a 42 on the front nine and withdrew, blaming knee and Achilles injuries.

  That day, Steve Williams saw a friend in the parking lot.

  “What happened?” his friend asked, incredulous.

  “I think he’s got the yips, mate,” Williams replied.

  In the 1,303 days between his father’s death and the fire hydrant, Tiger set in motion all those things, and when he can finally go back and make a full accounting of his life, he’ll realize that winning the 2008 U.S. Open a year before the scandal, with a broken leg and torn ACL, was the closest he ever got to BUD/S. He could barely walk, and he still beat everyone in the world. He won and has never been the same. The loneliness and pain tore apart his family, and the injuries destroyed his chance to beat Nicklaus and to leave fame behind and join the navy. He lost his dad, and then his focus, and then his way, and everything else came falling down too.

  But first, he got one final major.

  “I’m winning this tournament,” he told his team.

  “Is it really worth it, Tiger?” Steve Williams asked.

  “Fuck you,” Tiger said.

  III.

  He’s been stuck ever since, in limbo, somewhere between a professional golfer and a retired celebrity. Right now, in early December, he hangs out on the edge of a putting green in the Bahamas, unable to play but still handling his duties as host. That means posing with a motorcycle and the CEO of the company that made it. While the camera crews get ready, Tiger walks onto the green. Zach Johnson and Justin Rose, both friends, knock around some balls and shoot the breeze. The guys talk about putters, about finishes and how that impacts the roll. Tiger knows the questions to ask, having developed a deep reservoir of knowledge that serves no purpose to someone whose body won’t cooperate.

  As he starts to pose with the motorcycle, Tiger glances back at his friends.

  On his wrist, he wears a thin red string, a Buddhist reminder to show compassion and to mind the tongue. Like many things, Tiger keeps his faith to himself—though he has said he was raised a Buddhist—so it’s hard to know how much he practices or if he ever goes to temple. It’s interesting to consider. Buddhists don’t believe in heaven or hell, or at least not in the same way as Christians. According to Essential Buddhism, by Diane Morgan, either place can exist on earth, and there are 11 ways for believers to feel pain: lust, hatred, illusion, sickness, decay, death, worry, lamentation
, physical and mental anguish, melancholy, and grief. Since losing his father, Woods has burned with every single one of these, and in the years since he rammed his car into a fire hydrant, he’s suffered nearly all of them all the time. He says he’ll be back, and if he is lying to himself, maybe he can be forgiven that delusion, because according to the basic tenets of his religion, he has literally been living through hell.

  While the media take photographs of the motorcycle, someone asks him about a golf course in California where Tiger played a tournament many years ago.

  “First trophy,” Tiger says.

  “How old were you?”

  “Four.”

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  He talks a lot about the past now, which is new for someone who moved so fast through his first 40 years that he left people and places behind once they’d served their purpose in his life. Earl often spoke with friends about the strangeness and suddenness of Tiger’s exit from their lives and how when Tiger left Teakwood Street for college, he abandoned his computer and Nintendo, his toys and posters on the wall, and even stray cash. This amazed Earl and made him strangely proud and also melancholy. Tiger had become something like a butterfly; Earl believed that his son had flown away unencumbered. When his tax lawyers advised Tiger to leave California after turning pro and set up his life near Orlando, he just vanished, not even stopping by the old Navy course to say goodbye. “He didn’t tell me he was moving to Florida,” says the pro, Joe Grohman, “and it broke my heart. I thought I was really close to the family. I didn’t get to tell him goodbye. It was just over.”