Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 211

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Tiger Woods," by Jeff Benedict.



Tiger wasn’t just alone atop the world of golf. In a very literal sense, he was alone, period. Despite his killer instinct on the course, he was an introvert off it, more comfortable playing video games, watching television, or practicing and training in solitude. As far back as childhood, he spent far more time by himself in his bedroom than playing outside with other children. An only child, he learned early on that his parents were the only ones he should truly trust and rely on. They more or less programmed him that way. His father took on the roles of golf mentor, sage, visionary, and best friend. His mother, Kultida, was Tiger’s disciplinarian and fearsome protector. Together, his parents proved an impregnable force that never let anyone trespass on the tightly guarded path to success they had paved for their son. In their Southern California home, where life revolved around Tiger and golf, the mantra was clear: Family is everything.

Dreamed up exclusively for their son, the name symbolized the nature of his relationship with his parents. The E in Eldrick stood for Earl; the K for Kultida. From the moment he entered the world, Eldrick was figuratively and literally surrounded by his parents, an attention-grabbing father on one end and an authentic Tiger Mom on the other.

Sitting on the couch in his living room, ten-year-old Tiger Woods stared intently at the television, his mother seated beside him, his father a few feet away in his chair. It was Sunday afternoon, April 13, 1986, and CBS was broadcasting the final round of the Masters. Earlier that day, as part of their father-son bonding, Tiger had played nine holes with Earl at the navy course near their home. But now he was watching forty-six-year-old Jack Nicklaus take the lead with a three-foot birdie putt on the sixteenth hole that sent the gallery at Augusta into a frenzy. “There’s no doubt about it,” the announcer said. “The Bear has come out of hibernation!” 

Nicklaus went on to win the Masters for the sixth time that day, making him the oldest golfer ever to be awarded the green jacket and marking his eighteenth and final major championship. Tiger, at this point, had been counting his score in tournaments for about seven years. He dreamed of playing at Augusta someday. Nicklaus’s historic achievement formed the basis of Tiger’s first significant Masters memory. “His reactions over those last holes of the 1986 Masters made an impression on me because they were spontaneous, and they showed me how much of yourself you have to put into a shot,” Woods wrote years later. “Jack was forty-six, and I was only ten, and I couldn’t put it into words then. But I wanted to be where he was, and doing what he was doing.” 

Earl was a smoker, and when he was thinking he liked to take a long drag on a cigarette and exhale slowly. There was a lot to think about as he watched his son watching the great Jack Nicklaus on television. The scene at Augusta National, with the all-white gallery and Nicklaus’s golden-blond hair, was starkly different from the one in the Woodses’ living room. In 1934, the PGA of America amended its constitution to restrict its membership to “Professional golfers of the Caucasian Race.” Even though that clause had finally been expunged in 1961, country clubs like Augusta remained bastions of exclusivity for whites. It was the one aspect of golf that Earl despised. Throughout his life he believed he had been denied personal and professional advancement based on the color of his skin—the pretty white girl he couldn’t dance with at school; the motels in the Midwest that wouldn’t give him a room when he traveled with his college baseball team; the racist colonel who blocked his advancement in the army. 

“I was constantly fighting racism, discrimination, and lack of opportunities,” Earl said. “There was just no chance for an intelligent, articulate black person to do anything worthwhile or participate successfully in the process of life. It was frustrating and suffocating in so many ways, particularly for someone who wanted to achieve things but wasn’t given the opportunity.” 

Earl was determined that his son would change all that. Race wasn’t going to hold him back. Tiger was going to do something worthwhile. He was going to get his opportunity. To hell with any notion of encouraging Tiger to be like Jack; Earl was grooming him to beat Jack. 

After the 1986 Masters, Golf Digest published a list of Nicklaus’s career accomplishments. It included his age at the time of each significant achievement. Tiger tacked the list to his bedroom wall. From that moment on, each morning when he woke up and each night when he went to bed, Nicklaus was there.

Tiger hadn’t been the only world-class athlete to make his professional debut in 1996. Eighteen-year-old Kobe Bryant joined the Los Angeles Lakers; twenty-two-year-old Derek Jeter started with the New York Yankees; and fourteen-year-old Serena Williams had played in her first professional tennis tournament at the end of 1995. Each would go on to become superstars in their respective sports. But in 1996, Tiger shot past them and everyone else like a comet, instantly establishing himself as a game-changer on the PGA Tour and the most compelling athlete in America.

So much has been made of the storied father-son relationship between Earl and Tiger. It’s hard to count how many times Woods has said over the years that his father was his best friend, the person who understood him better than anyone else. And the scene of Tiger in Earl’s arms after winning a tournament had become so commonplace that the networks always had a cameraman ready to capture the shot at the end of their broadcasts. Yet when Earl passed, Tiger wasn’t at his father’s bedside but rather a few miles away, in bed with a lingerie model he had picked up in Vegas. Earl took his final breaths in the arms of his daughter, who had stayed by his side day and night for the final four months of his life. 

“People are aware of how close Tiger and my father were,” Royce said. “But they are not aware of how close Dad and I were. I’ve always been Daddy’s girl. When he passed away, it was very hard. I was just lost. Very lost. He was a major, major part of my life.”

In early 2007, Woods had no clue that his late-night ventures into the Orlando nightclub scene had long since tripped the radar of the National Enquirer. In major cities like New York and Los Angeles, the Enquirer made it its business to know what A-list celebrities were doing after the sun went down. To that end, it employed a loose network of women pretty enough to blend right in at the hottest clubs, then backed up that surveillance with various valets, bartenders, bouncers, and cocktail waitresses at hotels, restaurants, and clubs, along with a stable of young stunners who worked the private-party circuit. Everyone keeping tabs for the Enquirer was paid between $200 and $500 a night in cash to inform on the behavior of various actors, comedians, musicians, and politicians known to boost newsstand sales. In 2007, Woods was by no means a sales commodity on the scale of Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston, but a fall from grace was a fall from grace, and nobody monetized that kind of misery quite like the Enquirer.

Ideally, parents put an emphasis on helping a child become well-rounded, popular for the right reasons, friendly, respectful, appreciative. But Tiger got little of that. Instead, Earl and Kultida created an alternative universe for their son, one where they were in control and he was the little boy emperor who was going to be the best in the world at one thing. In the process, they took away some of Tiger’s humanity and replaced it with skills. It was a parenting approach that worked for Earl and Kultida in spite of their dysfunctional marriage. Even after they split up after Tiger turned pro, they remained a controlling presence in his life. All Woods had to do was see his father or his mother on the golf course, and it was like the remote control was there. As a result, Tiger developed into the greatest golfer who ever lived, a virtually unbeatable machine—but at the same time, he didn’t know how to love and be loved as a human being. The adoration he experienced was always tied to golf and performance.