Woods, Tiger

Tiger Woods

1975-

American golfer

Tiger Woods may prove to be the best professional golfer in history. Although he is not yet thirty, he is already well on track to break Jack Nicklaus 's record of eighteen career victories in professional majors. In a sport where victory is often decided by only one or two strokes, Woods has had several double-digit wins. Because of his domination of the game, and perhaps also because he is a young minority in a sport that had previously featured mostly white, middle-aged stars, Woods has achieved a popularity that extends far beyond typical golf fans.

A Golfing Toddler

Woods has been playing golf since he could walk, and studying the game even longer. His father, Earl Woods, a retired Army officer, took up golf only a year before Woods was born, but he quickly fell in love with the sport. Earl set up a miniature driving range in his garage

with some carpet and a net, and while he practiced Woods would sit in his high chair and watch. Earl cut some clubs down to Woods's size for him to play with, and one day, when Woods was nine months old, he climbed out of his chair when Earl took a break and tried to imitate Earl's activity. He did so almost perfectly, and the ball flew expertly into the net. "I was flabbergasted," Earl told biographer John Strege. "I almost fell off my chair."

When Woods was eighteen months old, Earl took him to a real driving range for the first time and started letting him play the occasional hole on Earl's home course, the Navy Courses at Los Alamitos, California. When he was two Woods won his first competition there, playing against boys who were as old as ten. The same year Woods appeared on the Mike Douglas Show. He had an on-air putting contest with Bob Hope and won. When he was three, he shot a forty-eight over nine holes on one of the Navy Courses from the front tees, and then at five he appeared on national television again, on the show That's Incredible!

People across the country marveled when they heard about this tiny golfing protégé, but Woods didn't want to be just a curiosity. He wanted to be a winner. He started working with his first professional coach, an assistant club professional from Long Beach, California named Rudy Duran, when he was four, and throughout his elementary school years Woods dominated junior golf in his age bracket in southern California. Although Woods was patient during this time, honing his skills and slowly preparing himself for the next level, he always had his sights set on higher things. A chart of Nicklaus's records and milestones, going back to when Nicklaus was a child, hung on Woods's wall, and he was determined to surpass them all.

High School Years

When he was fifteen, Woods set out to become the youngest golfer ever to qualify for a PGA Tour event, the 1991 Los Angeles Open. He played excellently in the qualifying event but, with a bogey on the last hole, he had three strokes too many to make it to the Open. However, later that year Woods broke another record when he became the youngest person ever to win the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship.

Woods successfully defended his U.S. Junior Amateur championship in 1992, becoming the only person ever to be U.S. junior amateur champion more than once. He then won the event for an unheard of third time in 1993. Earl Woods later attributed his success to his training methods during that time. "Every year he would take the week before his major to mentally and physically fine-tune," Earl told Sports Illustrated reporter Jaime Diaz. "We'd drive to the site and play practice rounds, and after we got home, I'd find him lying on his bed with his eyes closed. He told me he was playing the shots he was going to need in his head."

Chronology

1975	Born December 30 in Cypress, CA, to Earl and Kultida Woods
1978	Appears on the Mike Douglas Show, where he wins a putting contest with Bob Hope
1978	Wins first golf competition, a ten-and-under
1980	Begins working with first coach, Rudy Duran
1981	Appears on That's Incredible!
1982	Plays a two-hole tournament with Sam Snead
1987	Undefeated in junior tournament competition
1994	Begins attending Stanford University
1995	Competes in his first Masters
1996	Turns professional and quits Stanford
1996	Makes a hole in one during his first professional event
1996	Starts Tiger Woods Foundation in December
2000	Becomes youngest golfer ever to complete career Grand Slam
2000	Appears on the cover of Time magazine
2001	Becomes first golfer ever to hold all four major titles at once
2002	Undergoes arthroscopic knee surgery December 12

Woods was invited back to the Los Angeles Open in 1992 on a sponsor's exemption. It was thought at the time that he was still the youngest person to play in a Tour event, but it was later discovered that a fifteen-year-old had played in the Canadian Open in 1957. Woods shot one over par on the first day and four over on the second, missing the cut by six strokes, but he still called the experience "the two best days of my life." Not until the spring of 1994, at the Johnnie Walker Asian Classic in Thailand, would Woods make the cut in a professional event.

On to College

Stanford University started recruiting Woods in 1989, and in the fall of 1994 he enrolled there and joined their golf team. The eighteen-year-old Woods was still the best amateur golfer in the country: that summer he became the youngest winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship in the event's ninety-four year history. Woods hoped that year to become only the third player to win both the U.S. Amateur and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Championships in the same year (the others were Phil Mickelson and Nicklaus), but he was suffering from several injuries and performed poorly.

Woods repeated his U.S. Amateur Championship victories in 1995 and 1996. By the summer of 1996, Woods had still failed to win an NCAA championship, but other than that he had achieved all of the goals that he had set for himself as an amateur. He had been playing in professional events, including the U.S. and British Opens and the Masters, for several years. He had not performed up to his expectations in any of them, but the amount of time that he was forced to spend studying in the spring cut into his practicing time and, he thought, left him ill-prepared for those competitions. Although he had promised his parents that he would finish college, in August of 1996 Woods withdrew from Stanford and turned professional.

Rookie Season

Woods got sponsor's exemptions to play in seven tournaments in 1996, between the time he turned professional in August and the end of the season. In order to be a member of the PGA tour in 1997, he needed to win enough in those seven tournaments to place him among the top 125 money winners on the tour for the year, or to win at least one event outright. He finished sixtieth in his first competition as a professional, the Greater Milwaukee Open, but from there his performances only improved. The next week he finished eleventh in the Canadian Open. The week after that, he was ahead by one stroke in the Quad City Classic going into Sunday. Golf reporters from across the country abandoned the more prestigious Presidents Cup, which was being held the same weekend, and flew to Illinois to cover what they expected to be a Woods win, but Woods had two bad holes on the last day and fell to fifth. In his next competition, the B.C. Open, he finished third, which placed him 128th on the money list with four more events to go.

Awards and Accomplishments

1991-93	U.S. Junior Amateur Championship
1994-96	U.S. Amateur Championship
1996	Las Vegas Invitational
1996	Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic
1996	Named PGA Tour Rookie of the Year
1996	Named Sports Illustrated 's Sportsman of the Year
1997	Asian Honda Classic
1997	Byron Nelson Classic
1997	Motorola Western Open
1997	Named Player of the Year by the Golf Writers Association of America
1997	Given Sports Star of the Year award
1997-2002	Named PGA Tour Player of the Year
1997, 1999-2000	Named PGA of America Player of the Year
1997, 2000	Mercedes Championship
1997, 2000	Named the Associated Press's Male Athlete of the Year
1997, 2001-02	Masters
1998	BellSouth Classic
1998, 2000	Johnnie Walter Classic
1999	Deutsche Bank Open
1999	Memorial Tournament
1999	National Car Rental Golf Classic
1999	The Tour Championship
1999	World Cup of Golf (with Mark O'Meara)
1999	Wins Vardon Trophy
1999	Buick Invitational
1999-2000	PGA Championship
1999-2000	Named Player of the Year by the Golf Writers Association of America
1999-2001	WGC-NEC Invitational
1999, 2002	WGC-American Express Championship
2000	AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am
2000	British Open
2000	Bell Canadian Open
2000	EMC World Cup (with David Duval)
2000	Named Sports Illustrated 's Sportsman of the Year
2000-01	Won Vardon Trophy
2000-01	Memorial Tournament
2000-02	Bay Hill Invitational
2000, 2002	U.S. Open
2001	Deutsche Bank-SAP Open
2001	Players Championship
2002	Buick Open

The Nike Golf Ball Juggling Commercial

Woods's skills were clearly demonstrated, even to those who couldn't tell a birdie from a bogey, in a famous Nike commercial from 1999. The original plan for the commercial was for Woods and several other people on a driving range all to be swinging in unison, but the director was having trouble getting everything to come together. The commercial was being filmed at the Orange County National Golf Club in Orange County, California, in the middle of the summer, and it was deathly hot. Woods, trying to lighten the mood, started to juggle a ball on the face of one of his clubs during a break. The director saw this and decided that it would make a better commercial than the original idea.

It only took four takes to shoot the final thirty-second commercial, which featured Woods dancing the ball on his sixty-degree sand wedge forty-nine times. He bounced the ball behind his back, between his legs, and even caught and balanced the ball on the club face's grooves. Then Woods bounced the ball into the air, wound up, and hit it like a baseball, 120 yards out on the driving range. No camera tricks were used, and the footage was not digitally altered. "It's really not as hard as you might think if you grew up playing baseball," Woods told the media after the commercial aired. "Hand-to-eye coordination—same principle."

Woods caused a major controversy the next week when he withdrew from the Buick Open and skipped a dinner that had been planned to honor him there. Woods said that he was exhausted from his rough schedule—even before turning professional, Woods had played in several challenging amateur events that summer. When he realized how many people his decision had inconvenienced, Woods apologized profusely, but many people still criticized his decision. However, when Woods came back from his week off he silenced many of his critics by winning the Las Vegas Open in a playoff against David Love III. Amazingly, Woods won another event that season as well, the Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic. With a third place finish in San Antonio the week between Las Vegas and Walt Disney World, Woods became the first player to finish in the top five in five straight tournaments since 1982.

Establishing a Legacy

Golf fans expected great things out of Woods in the 1997 season, and he did not disappoint them. Woods won four tournaments that year. His most prestigious win, the Masters, was also his strongest: he finished twelve strokes ahead of his closest competitor, setting a new scoring record on the Augusta National course of eighteen under par. However, in 1998 Woods slumped. Despite his successes in the previous two years, Woods knew that there were still aspects of his game that needed improvement. Although he has always been one of the longest drivers in golf, prior to 1998 he had difficulty controlling those long drives. Sometimes he overshot his mark, and even when he didn't he was often left or right of where he wanted to be. Throughout the 1998 season Woods worked on correcting this, as well as on improving his putting consistency. He only won one event on the PGA Tour that season, but in the coming years his hard work would pay off.

Woods's 1999 season was legendary. It might have been remembered as one of the best seasons in golf history, had Woods not surpassed himself in 2000. In 1999 he won seven events on the PGA Tour. In 2000 he won nine, including a victory in the U.S. Open by a record breaking fifteen strokes, and another in the British Open by eight. That year Woods also became the youngest person ever to complete the career Grand Slam, by winning the U.S. and British Opens and the PGA Championship all in one season. Only Ben Hogan had ever won three majors in one year, and only four other people, including Nicklaus and Hogan, had ever completed the Grand Slam. Then, when Woods notched his second Masters win in 2001, he became the only golfer in history ever to hold all four major championship titles at once.

That Masters victory was one of only five wins for Woods in 2001. He was still the best player on the tour, winning two more events than his closest competitor, raking in well over $5 million in winnings, and winning the Vardon Trophy for the lowest stroke average on the tour, but he was not as dominant as he had been in the previous two years. After Woods won the first two majors, the Masters and the U.S. Open, in 2002 many people expected him to win the single-season Grand Slam, but he was foiled by foul weather at the British Open. He shot an eighty-one in thirty mile-per-hour winds and

a pouring rain on Saturday at that event, which put him out of contention.

The Best Golfer, Period

In the complicated world of American race relations, Woods has often been frustrated by others' attempts to pigeonhole him neatly into one racial category, African-American. Woods is in fact more Asian than anything else: his mother is half Thai, one quarter Chinese, and one-quarter white, and his father is half black, one-quarter Chinese, and one-quarter Native American. Woods identifies strongly with his mother's Thai heritage, and is offended that others insist on overlooking it. He is also annoyed that some people believe that, by virtue of his background, he owes anything to any particular ethnic group. Early in Woods's career, when interviewers would ask him questions about whether he saw himself as a role model for young black or minority golfers, he would reply that, no, he saw himself as a role model for all young golfers. For Woods, racial politics are nothing but a sideshow to what he really has to offer the world: his skill as a golfer. As a teenager, when many in the media dubbed him the "Great Black Hope" of the golf world, he often declared, "I don't want to be the best black golfer. I want to be the best golfer, period."

Now that Woods has achieved his goal of being the best golfer in the world, his immense popularity is bringing a diverse crowd of new fans to a sport that was previously perceived as being only for well-off white men. Although Woods does not want social issues to overwhelm his athletic achievements in the public mind, he is happy to see the love of golf extend to more segments of the American public. This is the goal of the Tiger Woods Foundation, to introduce to golf children who might otherwise never have tried the game. As Woods explained at a press conference in 2000, "America is the melting pot of the world. We have all the different ethnic races, religious choices. I just want to make golf look like that. If that's one thing I can have, that's one thing I really want to have happen."

CONTACT INFORMATION

Online: www.tigerwoods.com. Online: www.twfound.org (Tiger Woods Foundation).

FURTHER INFORMATION

Books

Rosaforte, Tim. Raising the Bar: The Championship Years of Tiger Woods. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2000.

Strege, John. Tiger: A Biography of Tiger Woods. New York: Broadway Books, 1997.

Periodicals

"All About Winning." Maclean's (June 10, 2002): 50.

Bamberger, Michael. "Not So Fast." Sports Illustrated (July 29, 2002): G48.

"Black America and Tiger's Dilemma: National Leaders Praise Golfer's Accomplishments and Debate Controversial 'Mixed Race' Issue." Ebony (July, 1997): 28-32.

Brown, Joseph H. "What Tiger Does Best Is Golf." Tampa Tribune (November 24, 2002).

"Changing Stripes." Time (August 14, 2000): 62.

Crothers, Tim. "Golf Cub." Sports Illustrated (March 25, 1991): 56.

Diaz, Jaime. "Masters Plan." Sports Illustrated (April 13, 1998): 62-67.

Diaz, Jaime. "Why Tiger Is So Bland." Golf World (August 16, 2002): 40.

Garrity, John. "Spoiled by Success." Sports Illustrated (November 26, 2001): G4.

Hawkins, John. "Survivor." Golf World (August 25, 2000): 18.

Jenkins, Dan. "Broken Record: Tiger Woods Does It Again for a Career Grand Slam at 24.#x201D; Golf Digest (September, 2000): 103.

Jenkins, Dan. "Grand Slam, Anyone? It's Tiger's to Take." Golf Digest (August, 2002): 57.

McCleery, Peter. "The 'Tiger Effect's' Downside." Golf World (September 22, 2000): 40.

Morfit, Cameron. "Head to Head." Sports Illustrated (July 15, 2002): G21.

Morfit, Cameron. "The One and Only." Sports Illustrated (November 11, 2002): G28.

Nordlinger, Jay. "Hunting Tiger: Everyone Wants a Piece of Him." National Review (September 16, 2002).

Rosaforte, Tim, and John Hawkins. "A Star Is Worn." Golf World (November 10, 2000): 28.

Russell, Geoff. "History Maker: How Nike Deal Makes Woods Highest Paid Athlete of All Time." Golf World (September 22, 2000): 2.

Sirak, Ron. "Breaking Away?." Golf World (November 17, 2000): 20.

Smith, Gary. "The Chosen One." Sports Illustrated (December 23, 1996): 28-43.

"Tiger Juggles Ball, Nike Juggles Ad." Holland Sentinel (Holland, MI) (July 7, 1999).

Verdi, Bob. "Winner and Still Champion." Golf World (August 16, 2002): 18.

Other

Kamiya, Gary. "Cablinasian Like Me." Salon.com. http://www.salon.com/april97/tiger970430.html (February 5, 2003).

Official Site: Tiger Woods. http://www.tigerwoods.com (February 5, 2003).

"Tiger Woods." CNNSI.com—GolfPlus. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/golf/pga/bios/2002/bio184.html (February 6, 2003).

"Tiger Woods." PGATour.com. http://www.golfweb.com/players/00/87/93/bio.html (February 5, 2003).

Sketch by Julia Bauder