The Best American Sports Writing 2017

by Glenn Stout

  There’s always a layer of mystery between fathers and sons, even those as close as Tiger and Earl Woods. They lived such different lives. Earl joined the Green Berets because he saw them as the only place a black man could be treated fairly, and when he retired, he played golf day after day. (Before his son, Earl had the lowest handicap at the Navy golf course near their home, despite not picking up a club until he was 42.) There were things Tiger could never know about combat, just as Earl could never really understand the cost of his son’s fame.

  “I know exactly how you feel,” Earl said once.

  “No, Dad, you don’t,” Tiger replied.

  He grew up without siblings or many friends. Tiger and Earl did everything together, hitting balls into a net out in the garage, or spending hours at the golf course, and when they’d finish, Earl would order a rum and Diet Coke, and Tiger would get a Coke with cherries, and they’d sit and nurse their drinks like two old men. The golf pro at the Navy course, Joe Grohman, worried that Tiger didn’t have friends his own age until high school. His friends were Earl and Earl’s old military buddies. That’s who he played golf with, retired old soldiers and sailors and marines, with the occasional active-duty guy stationed near Los Angeles. Fighter jets took off and landed at the airstrip parallel to the 17th and 18th fairways. Tiger heard the stories and saw the deep love even strangers felt for each other. His entire childhood revolved around these men and their code.

  Tiger and Earl held strong opinions about how things should work and nursed deep stubborn streaks, so they often butted heads. The most serious rift between them, which festered for years, centered on Earl’s love for women. Tiger hated that his dad cheated on his mom and cried to his high school girlfriend about it. His parents never divorced but moved into their own houses, and the only reason they still needed to communicate at all was their son’s rising golf career; like many overachieving kids in a broken home, Tiger found early on that his talent could help create the family he wanted. He could mend the broken places inside all of them. It’s also clear that Tiger grew up first emulating his dad and then trying to be better than Earl. All sons, whether they love or hate their fathers, or some combination of both, want to cleanse themselves of any inherited weakness, shaking free from the past. This is certainly true for Tiger, whose father seems to evoke conflicting emotions: the best and worst things that have happened in his life happened because of Earl.

  As Tiger got famous, Earl traveled the world with him. The definitive book about Tiger and Earl, Tom Callahan’s His Father’s Son, details the women in Earl’s orbit. There was a “cook” at the 2001 Open Championship, and when Callahan said she must be a good cook, Earl grinned and said, “She sure knows how to keep that potato chip bowl filled up.” At another event in South Africa, a stream of escorts made their way to Earl’s room. Callahan reports that near the end of Earl’s life, Tiger and Earl stopped talking for a while. “Tiger’s mad at me,” he told the author, and implied that he’d gotten into some sort of woman trouble that his son paid to make go away. Ultimately, Callahan wrote, Tida is the one who persuaded Tiger to make peace, telling her son that he’d regret it if Earl died before he made things right.

  “He’s going to be gone and you’re going to be sorry,” she told him.

  They fixed the rift, perhaps because as Tiger’s circle of trust tightened to include virtually no one, he still knew he could talk to his dad about anything, even if he didn’t particularly like Earl at the time. Earl never judged. They were father and son, and teacher and student, best friends and running buddies and together, one complete person.

  Just after the 2004 Masters, Tiger and his dad took a trip together to Fort Bragg, where Earl had been stationed with the Green Berets. A group of Earl’s old military buddies came along, while Tiger got the VIP tour, running with the 82nd Airborne and tandem-jumping with the Golden Knights, the Army’s parachute team. The man assigned to take Tiger out of the plane was a soldier named Billy Van Soelen, who explained the difference between broad daylight at Fort Bragg and pitch-black combat situations. “Your dad was doing tactical jumps,” he said, nodding around at the controlled environment. “This is Hollywood.”

  Van Soelen strapped Tiger to himself and then the two flung themselves out into space, smooth with no bobble. Tiger grinned the whole way down.

  Earl was waiting in the drop zone, Van Soelen says, and he gave Tiger a big hug.

  “Now you understand my world,” he told his son.

  Earl needed an oxygen tank during that trip. He’d been dying slowly for years and regretted that he wouldn’t live to see the end of Tiger’s journey. His second heart attack happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during Tiger’s initial year on tour, and by the winter of 2005, a year and a half after Fort Bragg, it was clear to everyone that Earl didn’t have much time. Now consider Tiger Woods again, in this moment the best golfer in the world, taking his first break ever—24 days without touching a club, the most since he was a boy—watching his father die. He spent a lot of that break on Teakwood Street, struggling to sleep, three days passing before he finally drifted off on the floor. On December 25, his dad woke up and threw a shoe at a sleeping Tiger.

  When Tiger groggily looked up, Earl said, “Merry Christmas.”

  That vacation ended—they both knew Earl was dying and Tiger made his peace with it—and Woods planned to open his season at the 2006 Buick Invitational near San Diego. But three days before his first competitive round of the year, Tiger arranged for a VIP tour of the Coronado BUD/S compound (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training), where recruits are turned into SEALs. Most classes start with about 200 students, and if 30 graduate, that’s a great percentage. It’s the most difficult military training in the world.

  When he arrived, Tiger spoke to Class 259, there waiting for First Phase to begin, and told them something he’d never said in public: he wanted to be a SEAL when he was young. The class loved Tiger’s advice about mental preparation and focus, while the instructors rolled their eyes when Tiger said he would have been one of them were it not for golf. They’ve seen Olympic medalists and Division I football players quit, unable to stand the pain. A top-ranked triathlete washed out.

  The tour visited Special Boat Team-12 and SEAL Team 7. During one stop, a SEAL named Thom Shea helped conduct a weapons demonstration, with seven or eight guns spread out in front of him, from the Sig Sauer pistol through the entire sniper suite of weapons. Three years later, Shea would earn a Silver Star leading a team into battle in Afghanistan. Tiger stood on one side of the table, his arms crossed, a pair of Oakley sunglasses resting on the back of his knit cap. Shea says Tiger remained very quiet, taking in as much as he could, only turning on his famous smile when someone asked for a picture or an autograph. After the table show, Shea walked Tiger to another building for the next part of this tour. The two men talked on the way, and even a decade later, Shea remembers the conversation, because of everything that would happen later. Tiger wanted to know how SEALs kept their home life together despite the strain of constant travel and long separations. Shea told him that balance was the only thing that worked. He says Tiger asked how they kept this up, year after year of stress, the long slog always outlasting the romance of a job title. “It’s a life,” Shea remembers saying. “You just do it. You keep practicing.”

  The following Sunday, Tiger Woods won the Buick Invitational in a playoff.

  Three months later, Earl died and everything started to fall apart.

  Act II

  Twenty-five days after he buried his father and 15 before the 2006 U.S. Open, Tiger went back to visit the Navy SEALs, this time to a hidden mountain training facility east of San Diego. The place is known as La Posta, and it’s located on a barren stretch of winding road near the Mexican border. Everything is a shade of muted tan and green, like Afghanistan, with boulders the size of cars along the highway.

  This time, Tiger came to do more than watch.

  He tried the SR-25 sniper rifle and the SEALs’
pistol of choice, the Sig Sauer P226. One of the instructors was Petty Officer 1st Class John Brown, whose father also served as a Green Beret in Vietnam. Brown pulled Tiger aside. The sun was shining, a nice day, and the two men talked, standing on the northeast corner of a shooting facility.

  “Why are you here?” Brown remembers asking.

  “My dad,” Tiger said, explaining that Earl had told him he’d either end up being a golfer or a special operations soldier. “My dad told me I had two paths to choose from.”

  Brown says Tiger seemed to genuinely want to know about their way of life. Tiger asked questions about Brown’s family and they figured out that Brown’s wife and Tiger shared the same birthday. Tiger told him not to ever try to match Michael Jordan drink for drink. They talked about Earl, and Brown felt like Tiger wanted “safe harbor” from his grief, a way to purge some of it even, to prove something to himself, or maybe prove something to the spirit of Earl, whose special ops career never approached the daring of a SEAL team.

  “I definitely think he was searching for something,” Brown says. “Most people have to live with their regrets. But he got to experience a taste of what might have been.”

  The instructors gave Tiger camo pants and a brown T-shirt. He carried an M4 assault rifle and strapped a pistol to his right leg. On a strip of white tape above his right hip pocket, someone wrote “TIGER.” SEAL Ben Marshall (his name has been changed for this story because he remains on active duty) took Tiger to the Kill House, the high-stress combat simulator where SEALs practice clearing rooms and rescuing hostages. Marshall is a veteran of many combat deployments and was with Tiger making sure he didn’t get too hurt. The instructors ran the golfer through the house over and over, lighting him up with Simunition, high-powered paint rounds that leave big, painful bruises. “It was so much fun to hit him,” Marshall says. “He looked like a deer in the headlights. I was spraying him up like it was nothing.”

  The instructors set up targets, some of terrorists holding weapons and others of innocent civilians. Under fire and stress, Tiger needed to decide who should die and who should live. During one trip through the Kill House, the guys switched out a target of someone with a gun for one of a photographer, and when Tiger came through the door, he killed the person with the camera, according to two witnesses. The SEALs asked why he’d shot a civilian.

  First Tiger apologized for his mistake.

  Then he made a joke about hating photographers.

  Eventually, Woods learned how to clear a room, working corners and figuring out lanes of fire, doing something only a handful of civilians are ever allowed to do: run through mock gun battles with actual Navy SEALs. “He can move through the house,” says Ed Hiner, a retired SEAL who helped oversee training during the time and wrote a book called First, Fast, Fearless. “He’s not freaking out. You escalate it. You start shooting and then you start blowing s— up. A lot of people freak out. It’s too loud, it’s too crazy. He did well.”

  At one point, Marshall put him through a combat stress shooting course, making him carry a 30-pound ammunition box, do overhead presses with it, do push-ups and run up a hill, with shooting mixed in. Tiger struggled with slowing his heart rate down enough to hit the targets, but he attacked the course.

  “He went all out,” Marshall said. “He just f—ing went all out.”

  Marshall got his golf clubs at one point and asked Tiger to sign his TaylorMade bag. Tiger refused, sheepishly, saying he couldn’t sign a competing brand. So Marshall challenged him to a driving contest for the signature. Both Marshall and Brown confirmed what happened next: Tiger grinned and agreed. Some other guys gathered around a raised area overlooking the shooting range. Marshall went first and hit a solid drive, around 260 or 270 yards. Tiger looked at him and teed up a ball, gripping the TaylorMade driver.

  Then he got down on his knees.

  He swung the club like a baseball bat and crushed one out past Marshall’s drive. Tiger started laughing, and then all the SEALs started laughing, and eventually Marshall was laughing too.

  “Well, I can just shoot you now and you can die,” Marshall joked, “or you can run and die tired.”

  The military men and their bravado sent Tiger back in time to the Navy golf course with Earl and those salty retired soldiers and sailors. He missed his dad, of course, but he also missed the idea of Earl, which was as important as the man himself. Sometimes his dad traveled to tournaments and never visited the course, staying put at a hotel or rented house in case Tiger needed him. They could talk about anything, from the big questions of life, like Tiger’s completely earnest belief in ghosts, to simple things a man should know, like how to order spacers of water between beers to keep from getting so drunk. (That last bit came about after a bad night at a Stanford fraternity party.) Without Earl, Tiger felt adrift and lonely. He threw himself back into his circus of a life, moving from place to place. And in the months after the funeral, the extramarital affairs either began or intensified. That summer of 2006, he met at least two of the mistresses who’d eventually hit the tabloids.

  To be clear, he’d always talked a good game about women, long before he married Elin Nordegren in 2004. In 1999, in the quiet Oregon woods near the Deschutes River with Mark O’Meara and one of the best steelhead guides in the world, Tiger held court about the perks of being a professional athlete. “I’m walking down the trail with him and he’s bragging about his sexual conquests,” says guide Amy Hazel. “And this is when everybody thought he was the golden boy.”

  He told just filthy stories that Hazel wouldn’t repeat, but even with the boasts and dirty jokes, she saw him as more of a big kid than a playboy. “Nerdy and socially awkward” are her words, and he seemed happiest standing in the river riffing lines from the Dalai Lama scene in Caddyshack.

  The sexual bravado hid his awkwardness around women. One night he went to a club in New York with Derek Jeter and Michael Jordan. Jeter and Jordan circulated, talking with ease to one beautiful woman after another. (Both declined to comment about the episode.) At one point, Tiger walked up to them and asked the question that lives in the heart of every junior high boy and nearly every grown man too.

  “What do you do to talk to girls?”

  Jeter and Jordan looked at each other, then back at Tiger, sort of stunned.

  Go tell ’em you’re Tiger Woods, they said.

  If Tiger was looking for something, it was seemingly lots of different things, finding pieces in a rotating cast of people. He and Rachel Uchitel bonded over their mutual grief. His fresh wounds from losing Earl helped him understand her scars from her father’s cocaine overdose when she was 15, and her fiancé’s death in the World Trade Center on September 11. The broken parts of themselves fit together, according to her best friend, Tim Bitici. Sometimes Rachel stayed with Tiger for days, Bitici says. Nobody ever seemed to ask Tiger where he was or what he was doing. Bitici went with Rachel down to Orlando to visit Tiger, who put them up in a condo near his house. When he came over, he walked in and closed all the blinds. Then he sat between Tim and Rachel on the couch and they all watched Chelsea Lately.

  “This makes me so happy,” Tiger said, according to Bitici.

  Many of these relationships had that odd domestic quality, which got mostly ignored in favor of the tabloid splash of threesomes. Tiger once met Jaimee Grubbs in a hotel room, she told a magazine, and instead of getting right down to business, they watched a Tom Hanks movie and cuddled. Cori Rist remembered breakfast in bed. “It was very normal and traditional in a sense,” she says. “He was trying to push that whole image and lifestyle away just to have something real. Even if it’s just for a night.”

  Many times, he couldn’t sleep.

  Insomnia plagued him, and he’d end up awake for days. Bitici says that Tiger asked Rachel to meet him when he’d gone too long without sleep. Only after she arrived could he nod off. Bitici thinks Tiger just wanted a witness to his life. Not the famous life people saw from outside but the real one, where he ke
pt the few things that belonged only to him. This wasn’t a series of one-night stands but something more complex and strange. He called women constantly, war-dialing until they picked up, sometimes just to narrate simple everyday activities. When they didn’t answer, he called their friends. Sometimes he talked to them about Earl and his childhood.

  We never see the past coming up behind because shaping the future takes so much effort. That’s one of those lessons everyone must learn for themselves, including Tiger Woods. He juggled a harem of women at once, looking for something he couldn’t find, while he made more and more time for his obsession with the military, and he either ignored or did not notice the repeating patterns from Earl’s life. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, we grow up like our daddy after all,” says Paul Fregia, first director of the Tiger Woods Foundation. “In some respects, he became what he loathed about his father.”

  The military trips continued through 2006 into 2007, kept almost completely a secret. At home, Tiger read books on SEALs and watched the documentary about BUD/S Class 234 over and over. He played Call of Duty for hours straight, so into the fantasy that his friends joked that after Tiger got shot in the game they might find him dead on the couch. When he could, he spent time with real-life operators. Tiger shot guns, learned combat tactics and did free-fall skydiving with active-duty SEALs. During one trip to La Posta, he remembered things they’d told him about their families, asking about wives, things he didn’t do in the golf world; Mark O’Meara said Tiger never asks about his kids.

  “If Tiger was around other professional athletes, storytelling would always have a nature of one-upmanship,” a friend says. “If Tiger was around some sort of active or retired military personnel, he was all ears. He was genuinely interested in what they had to say. Anytime he told a military-related story that he had heard or talked about a tactic he had learned, he had a smile on his face. I can’t say that about anything else.”