by Glenn Stout
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.”
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 good-bye. “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 good-bye. It was just over.”
Tiger has cut off coaches and caddies and friends, rarely with a confrontation, just vanishing from their lives. It’s not out of spite really; he’s focused on where he’s supposed to be going. The Western High class of 1994 held its 20-year reunion and made sure Tiger got an invitation in the mail, but he didn’t show. Grohman understands. “He’s still trying to be Tiger Woods,” he says. “There’s a time and place for things. There will be a day when he wants to come back to where it all began.”
Even 10 years later, the loss of his father still exerts force and pull on his inner life. The anniversary of Earl’s death is a time when he can’t sleep, staying up all night with his memories. The wounds seem fresh. Tiger spent just 77 minutes on the ground in Kansas saying good-bye to Earl, before hurtling back into a destiny previously in progress. It’s nearly certain he hasn’t been back since. The sexton who runs the place says he’s never seen Woods visit, and staff at the small airport nearby say they haven’t seen him either. A book by a People magazine writer said Tiger visited once in 2007, around Mark Steinberg’s military intervention, but that report could not be confirmed. Maybe he sneaked in and out, but if not, one day perhaps he’ll walk across the field to the place where they left Earl’s ashes, between Maude and Miles, in the shade of a bush and near a big red rock. He’ll have to find the spot from memory because there is no headstone, even a decade after the funeral. Maybe he wants it private, or is simply unable to take such a final step, but whatever the reason, Tiger Woods never had one placed.
He buried his father in an unmarked grave.
The real work of his life—how to deal with having been Tiger Woods—will begin only once he accepts that his golfing career is finished. All driven people experience a reckoning at the end of their life’s work, but when that work feels incomplete, or somehow tainted, the regrets can fester with time. This reckoning is coming for Tiger, which worries his friend Michael Jordan, who knows more about the next 10 years of Tiger’s life than nearly anyone alive. It’s jarring to be dominant and then have it suddenly end. “I don’t know if he’s happy about that or sad about that,” Jordan says. “I think he’s tired. I think he really wishes he could retire, but he doesn’t know how to do it yet, and I don’t think he wants to leave it where it is right now. If he could win a major and walk away, he would, I think.”
A few months ago, sitting in his office in Charlotte, Jordan picked up his phone and dialed Tiger’s number. It rang a few times and went to voicemail: I’m sorry, but the person you called has a voicemail box that has not been set up yet. He tried twice more, the phone rang five or six times, and then he smiled.
“Playing video games,” he said.
They texted in November, the day after a big group went out to dinner at Tiger’s restaurant. Tiger got drunk and they all laughed and told stories, and Michael thought Tiger seemed relaxed, which made him hopeful. Tiger talked about his injuries a lot but not much about the future. “The thing is,” Jordan says, “I love him so much that I can’t tell him, ‘You’re not gonna be great again.’ ”
The day after that, Tiger wrote him and both men sounded like the stay-at-home dads they’ve become.
TW: Thank you and your beautiful wife for coming. Need to do that more often. Thank the good lord for ice packs. I’m in heaven now. Bring babies next time.
MJ: Haha. Any time my brother. Get some rest. We’ll bring the kids next time.
TW: I’m in. After school next week one day when the kids don’t have soccer practice.
Jordan talks carefully, with no bravado or swagger, trying to say something important and true and empathetic—maybe hoping his friend will read it?—without crowding Tiger or saying too much. Jordan struggled and flailed in the years after he quit basketball, feeling like he’d hardwired himself with all of these urges that now worked against any hope of future happiness. For years, he just tried to pretend like he wasn’t lost. Time stretched out in front of him endlessly, and this same emptiness awaits Tiger.
“What does he do every day?” Jordan asks.
He’s quiet and serious.
“I don’t know,” he says, answering his own question. “I haven’t the slightest idea. I do not know.”
He worries that Tiger is so haunted by his public shaming that he obsesses over it, perhaps sitting up in the middle of the night reading all the things people write and say about him.
“Rabbit Ears,” Michael calls him sometimes.
He hears everything. For Tiger, this dwelling on old mistakes is a path to madness. Nothing can take him back to 2006 and give him a second chance. “That bothers him more than anything,” Jordan says. “It looms. It’s in his mind. It’s a ship he can’t right and he’s never going to. What can you do? The thing is about T-Dub, he cannot erase. That’s what he really wants. He wants to erase the things that happened.”
Slowly, year by year, Tiger’s name will not be spoken in the same way and with the same frequency. Without a new passion, Tiger just might sit down there in his enormous, empty mansion and slowly go insane. Jordan’s post-retirement salvation came because he and his longtime girlfriend, Yvette Prieto, got married. Now they have twins, and he’s created a life for himself, something to occupy his time and his thoughts. They are happy together, and more than once Jordan has told Tiger he needs to allow someone new into his circle, to build a new life with a new person and, along the way, find some new perspective about the journey that brought him here.
“He has . . .” Jordan says, and he pauses, searching for the right word, “. . . no companion. He has to find that happiness within his life, that’s the thing that worries me. I don’t know if he can find that type of happiness. He’s gonna have to trust somebody.”
Tiger is not totally alone, kept company by memories of the life he once
knew and those moments when he is happiest: the time he spends with his daughter, Sam, eight, and his son, Charlie, seven. The best of Earl lives in the actions of his son; in fatherhood, Tiger has equaled and even surpassed his own dad. He is utterly devoted to his children. Every single person interviewed for this story says so. Sam and Charlie never met their grandfather and they don’t remember Tiger as a dominant golfer, but they will grow up knowing that their father cares more about them than anything he does on the course.
In the Bahamas, USA Today golf writer Steve DiMeglio saw them riding in a golf cart with Tiger and asked if they’d rather be their dad or soccer star Leo Messi.
“Messi!” Sam said without missing a beat.
“He’s playing,” Charlie explained.
Tiger laughed and dramatically dropped his head.
Then he joked, “Well, he’s right.”
He and Elin have a better relationship now, and Tiger wishes he’d have worked to create this bond while they were still together. His friends talk of how much he regrets losing his marriage, especially in those moments when he and Elin are with the kids and he glimpses little flashes of the life he threw away. Now he shares custody, and when the children go back to their mom’s place and his big house falls quiet, he’s surrounded by people who work for him and trophies he won as a younger, more powerful man.
There’s a clear view out the windows past the two swimming pools and hot tub, toward the four greens he had built, a practice facility for a game he’s almost finished playing. He’s got endless stretches of time now to stare and think. His old house near Orlando, the last place they all lived, stood in a cluster of trees across from the Isleworth driving range. He loved sunsets there, all of them together, his golf having finally created the family he craved as a boy. Elin and Charlie would sit in a cart and watch. Yogi, a labradoodle, would roll in the grass, sniffing around. Sam would hand him golf balls, and he’d hit punch shots for his border collie, Taz, to chase.
The sun would set and they’d all walk together in the shadows toward home.
TERRENCE McCOY
Today, Her Whole Life Is a Free Skate
from the washington post
RICHLANDS, VA.—Debi Thomas, the best African American figure skater in the history of the sport, couldn’t find her figure skates. She looked around the darkened trailer, perched along a river in a town so broke even the bars have closed, and sighed. The mobile home where she lives with her fiancé and his two young boys was cluttered with dishes, stacks of documents, a Christmas tree still standing weeks past the holiday.
“They’re around here somewhere,” she murmured three times. “I know I have a pair,” she continued, before trailing off. “Because—what did I skate in?—something. They’re really tight, though, because your feet grow after you don’t wear them for a long time.” Her medals—from the World Figure Skating Championships, from the Olympics—were equally elusive: “They’re in some bag somewhere.”
Uncertainty is not a feeling Debi Thomas has often experienced in her 48 years. She was once so confident in her abilities that she simultaneously studied at Stanford University and trained for the Olympics, against the advice of her coach. She was once so lauded for the lithe beauty she expressed on the ice that Time magazine put her on its cover and ABC’s Wide World of Sports named her Athlete of the Year in 1986. She wasn’t just the nation’s best figure skater. She was smart—able to win a competition, stay up all night cramming, then ace a test the next morning.
She wanted it all. And for a time, she had it. After Stanford came medical school at Northwestern University, then marriage to a handsome lawyer who gave her a son—who in turn became one of the country’s best high school football players. Higher and higher she went.
Now, she’s here. Thomas, a former orthopedic surgeon who doesn’t have health insurance, declared bankruptcy in 2014 and hasn’t brought in a steady paycheck in years. She’s twice divorced, and her medical license, which she was in danger of losing anyhow, expired around the time she went broke. She hasn’t seen her family in years. She instead inveighs against shadowy authorities in the nomenclature of conspiracy theorists—“the powers that be”; “corporate media”; “brainwashing”—and composes opinion pieces for the local newspaper that carry headlines such as “Pain, No Gain” and “Driven to Insanity.” She thinks that hoarding gold will insulate us from a looming financial meltdown, and recruits people to sell bits of gold bullion called “Karatbars.”
There’s a conventional narrative of how Thomas went from where she was to where she is—that of a talented figure undone by internal struggles and left penniless. That was how reality TV told it, when the Oprah Winfrey Network’s Fix My Life and Inside Edition did pieces on her.
But nothing is ever that simple with Thomas. She has always bucked convention. She was a black athlete who entered a sport that had exceedingly few. She was the first champion in a generation to combine college and figure skating. She proclaimed unimaginable ambitions—such as becoming an astronaut after securing her medical degree—and dared you to doubt her.
“She’s got all these degrees,” fiancé Jamie Looney said as he watched television with Thomas inside the trailer. “She’s a doctor. She’s a surgeon. And she’s here. I’ve got one year of community college. I know why I’m here. I look at her, wondering, ‘Why are you not working somewhere else?’ ”
Such comments upset Thomas. “People are all like, ‘Get a job,’ ” she said. “And I’m like, ‘You people are fools.’ I’m trying to change the world.”
Richlands, populated by coal miners with few mines to plunder, would seem to be an odd place to launch such an effort. The per-capita income is less than $20,000, and the few industries left booming in the wake of mining layoffs include cash-express shops and pain-management clinics. Thomas, riding shotgun as Looney steers a silver SUV on a recent afternoon, passes several such establishments before arriving at a country market.
She greets the store’s owners—“I just signed them up for Karatbars, which will help them a lot,” she later says—and settles into a booth. Her hair is frazzled. She wears a big, poofy red coat. On her wrists are two bracelets. One is inscribed with BELIEVE. The other, REIMAGINE.
It quickly becomes apparent that Thomas, for all of her talents, is not a good storyteller.
When explaining what brought her to Richlands, she communicates in a rush of thoughts, linked neither by chronology nor association, and exudes frustration when listeners can’t keep up. “I’m a visionary and have an ability to put very complex things together,” Thomas says. “And most people don’t get that.”
She says she wants to help a community she frequently describes as having “socioeconomic struggles.” In 2014, she launched a GoFundMe.com campaign to finance a YouTube.com “show about reality”—not to be confused with a “reality TV show”—that would expose life’s hardships and star Thomas. She says she also wants to enlist Richlands’ neediest as affiliates of Karatbar—which would pay her a recruitment commission—so they could earn “passive income” if they recruit others to sell the tiny bullion.
Her fiancé, a gregarious unemployed coal miner, sits at her side. He hasn’t said much, but looks exasperated. “I want a normal relationship,” Looney says.
“I don’t want to be normal,” she replies. “Normal is not quite right. Normal is not excelling. That’s why they call it normal.”
She pauses. “I’m very misunderstood because I look at the world differently,” she continues. “You can call it the Olympian mentality.”
Excelling has always been very important in Thomas’s family. Her grandfather, Daniel Skelton, received a doctorate in veterinary medicine at Cornell University in 1939, the only African American in his class. Her mom, who split from Thomas’s dad when Thomas was nine, was a computer engineer when the field had few women and fewer blacks. Her brother, Richard Taylor, earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California at Berkeley, then a maste
r’s in business at Stanford University.
“I guess I’m somewhat underachieving,” Taylor said.
Anyone would be when compared with Debi Thomas. Growing up in San Jose, Taylor said his sister always talked about becoming a doctor and loved mechanics. “One Halloween, she made herself into a calculator,” Taylor said. “You would push the buttons . . . and she would give the answer. Even as a kid, she had an engineer’s mind.”
But she also had the body of an athlete. And after her mom took her to an ice show, Thomas thought she would give it a try. When that lark transformed into something much more serious, when her coach realized he had a prodigy on his hands, when she got deeper into the byzantine and fiercely political world of figure skating, there came a choice. Skating—or school?
“Eighth grade came along, and she comes in second in the nation and her coach wanted her to quit school,” her mother, Janice Thomas, said. Instead, she enrolled in high school near an ice rink in Redwood City, California, and for four years her mom drove 150 miles per day—school, then practice, then home. When she dispatched her college application to Stanford, the word she used to describe herself: “invincible.”
“Some people are told, ‘You can’t do that,’ and it crushes them,” her mother said. “Other people say, ‘I’ll show you.’ ”