Tiger Woods

American golfer

• Born: December 30, 1975
• Place of Birth: Cypress, California

Woods helped transform the sport of golf, serving as an example of perseverance, especially for young people of color. He broke and set records with superb shooting skills and at age twenty-one became the youngest Masters Tournament champion.

Early Life

Eldrick "Tiger" Woods was born in Cypress, California, to Earl and Kultida Woods. Earl was from Manhattan, Kansas, while Kultida was from Bangkok, Thailand. They were married in 1969 and dreamed of having a child. After six years, the baby boy that Earl thought would never arrive was born. He nicknamed his healthy son Tiger in honor of Nguyen Phong, his South Vietnamese army combat partner and friend during the Vietnam War. Earl had given Phong the nickname Tiger for his unrelenting prowess and bravery on the battlefield. In fact, Phong had saved Earl from sniper fire. It was also during his years in the service that Earl became hooked on golf.

As a toddler, Woods quickly picked up golfing, and his father knew from the beginning that Tiger had talent and potential. He was driven by the game, and by the age of six sunk his first hole in one. By the age of eleven, Woods had entered more than thirty junior golf tournaments and had won them all. One of the reasons Woods succeeded in the sport was his discipline and the mental concentration his father instilled in him by purposely creating distractions (jingling pocket change, for instance) as the young golfer practiced. Earl never forced Woods to play; it was always the youngster's choice. His father taught him to take the initiative in the sport and helped him develop the skills and techniques he needed to win in the game. Earl, a great teacher and motivator, had some impressive qualifications. His love of baseball, for instance, enabled him to become the first African American baseball player in the Big Eight Conference when he played for Kansas State University. Later, he began to work on a career as an educator and was a US Army Green Beret in Vietnam. He retired from the Army in 1974.

Woods had two significant coaches during his childhood years. One, of course, was his father, and the other was Rudy Duran, who was an exceptional golf instructor. Duran coached Woods beginning at age four and continued coaching the youngster until he turned ten. Woods's wizardry on the links during his childhood and early teens enabled him to appear on such national television shows as The Mike Douglas Show, That's Incredible, The Today Show, and Good Morning America. After gaining the attention of the media as a child, Woods began gaining the interest of universities as a teenager. When he was thirteen, Stanford University's golf coach wrote Woods a letter suggesting that he might someday consider playing golf for the university. Woods wrote back and reported that he was thankful for the letter and that he would seriously consider the offer in the future. In the meantime, he was preparing to attend Western High School in Anaheim, California.

Life's Work

By the early 1990s, Woods was a junior golf phenomenon who had won several junior titles. When he was only sixteen and still in high school, he was invited to play in the Los Angeles Open. It was not only his first Professional Golfers' Association (PGA) tournament, but it also marred the achievement of a personal goal: to become the youngest player to compete in a PGA tournament and play against the pros. Though he did not win, he rightfully acknowledged that the event was a significant learning tool for him. Later experiences in professional golf tournaments as an amateur were, for the most part, equally uneventful. He made the cut in some tournaments but usually finished well behind the leaders. Regardless of where on the leader board he finished, the important thing to Woods was to always watch and learn how the pro game was played. Playing in these events gave him the opportunity to learn what he had to work on to take his game to another level.

By the time Woods enrolled at Stanford, he was already a local celebrity and a celebrity among golfers. One of the major stepping-stones to greatness for Woods was becoming not only the first African American but also, at age eighteen, the youngest player to win the United States Amateur Championship. He then went on to win the championship for three consecutive years. In 1995, Woods made his Masters Tournament debut, in which he finished in forty-first place with a score of 5 over par. He competed in other tour events as an amateur: the US Open (where he had to withdraw in the second round because of a wrist injury), the Scottish Open, and the British Open. Again, there was no doubt that he came out of these PGA Tour events a much better golfer.

Woods, however, seemed to be disassociating himself from Stanford golf. He did not appear to care about the weekly team competition in college but instead focused on how he could make his own game better. After two years at the university and in August of 1996, Woods left Stanford and turned professional at the age of twenty. He was by far the best National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) golfer that the sport had ever seen. He vowed to his parents that he would return to college someday and get his degree.

A little more than one month after Woods joined the ranks of professional golfers, he won his first professional tournament, the Las Vegas Invitational. Several weeks later, he won again at the Disney Classic in Orlando, Florida. Nobody other than Jack Nicklaus had such a quick impact on the sport, and Woods's first year as a professional was certainly extraordinary. Beginning in August 1996, he competed in eight tournaments and won two of them. His earnings for the eight tournaments was $790,594, which put him in twenty-fifth place on the PGA Tour money list for 1996. In addition to more calls for autographs and interviews, Woods was soon signing endorsement contracts that were worth millions of dollars.

One negative theme that hounded Woods was racism. The media labeled him the "great Black hope" for golf to attract more Black players to the game, and Black people generally felt that Woods offered a chance to finally end, or at least greatly reduce, discrimination in the golf world, especially in the American South. Woods was quick to point out that his heritage included not only African American but also Chinese, American Indian, Thai, and Caucasian. The media, however, continued to portray Woods as Black, and Black only. For his part, Woods had little interest in becoming the spokesperson for an entire race and instead wanted to be known as the best golfer in the history of the sport, not the best Black golfer. Still, some of his fan mail was littered with racial slurs and racist remarks. Like a true champion, Woods let his golf game do the talking for him.

The highlight of Woods's young professional career was his victory at the Masters in Augusta, Georgia, on April 13, 1997. On the way to victory, he broke numerous records such as winning the tournament by a phenomenal twelve strokes, finishing with the lowest score ever recorded (270), and finishing the tournament at eighteen under par. At the age of twenty-one, he was also the youngest player ever to win the event. Woods stated that he had dreamed of winning the Masters since he was a child, and he celebrated the victory with his parents. By winning this prestigious event, Woods perhaps did more for the game of golf than any other player before him. Black Americans and other minority groups soon began playing the game en masse, and Woods became an idol to millions of children who also began playing the sport. He was overwhelmed by the publicity he received, but he had the support and guidance of his parents, his managers, and other star athletes such as basketball player Michael Jordan, who reached out to give him much-needed advice on how to handle the publicity and his celebrity status.

In 1997, Woods won the GTE Byron Nelson Classic and the Mercedes Championships tournaments and signed a whopping $30 million advertising contract with American Express. He also set the record for achieving $1 million in winnings faster than any other PGA player by doing so in just nine events (the previous record of twenty-seven had been held by Ernie Els).

Despite his early success, Woods's golf career saw its share of ups and downs. Shortly after his impressive start as a golf phenomenon, his growing impatience, distance, and control issues affected his game. He hired a new coach, Butch Harmon, who helped him change his swing and his image. Though he experienced a winning streak in 2000, including achieving the Grand Slam (winning four consecutive major tournaments), his game faltered yet again. Some blamed burnout, some believed he was distracted, others pointed to a knee injury. Another new coach, Hank Hanley, helped Woods develop another new swing, and by 2005, he began to make a comeback, finishing second at the Mercedes Championship. He went on to win six major tournaments in 2005, including the British Open and the Masters. In 2006, he suffered a deep personal loss when his father and mentor, Earl Woods, died. Later that year he was named PGA Player of the Year, a point-based award, for the eighth time in ten years. He also opened a 35,000-square-foot children's learning center in Anaheim, featuring community outreach, online learning programs, and a golf training area.

In 2004, Woods married former Swedish model Elin Nordegren, and in 2007 they celebrated the birth of their daughter, Sam Alexis Woods. Woods and Nordegren had a son, Charlie Axel, in 2009. The family's outwardly happy life together was not to last, however. On November 27, 2009, the car Woods was driving crashed into a fire hydrant and tree near his home in Florida. He accepted responsibility for the accident and was later issued a traffic citation and a small fine. In early December, US Weekly published an interview with a cocktail waitress who claimed to have had an affair with Woods. Although Woods issued a statement of regret, several other women soon alleged that they had also had affairs with the golfer. On December 11, Woods announced that he was taking time off from the game, publicly apologizing to his family and his fans in a February 2010 press conference. He explained that he had undergone therapy for what he referred to as his "issues," but he and Nordegren divorced later that year and several of his corporate sponsors ended or suspended their endorsements.

The scandal tarnished his personal image and may have contributed to his slump when he returned to golf in April 2010 at the Masters, where he finished fourth. In 2011, his world ranking among professional golf players fell to fifty-eighth. His performance improved in 2012 and 2013, however, and by the end of 2013 he was once again the top-ranked pro golfer in the world. In 2014, Woods underwent back surgery and his performance declined once again, and he fell to 34 in the World Rankings as he entered the 2015 professional tournament season. Despite falling so dramatically from his previously held first-place spot on the golf course, he still maintained the top slot in earnings, albeit with a much narrower margin than in previous, pre-scandal and pre-injury years.

Woods was once again plagued by injury during 2015, which resulted in missed cuts and in Woods withdrawing from tournaments. He played well in several showings, however, most notably achieving a tenth-place finish in the Wyndham Championship in August, but he did not win any tournaments. Many sports commentators refer to 2015 as Woods's lost season. Later in 2015, Woods underwent back surgery. He returned to the competitive game fifteen months later, in December 2016, to play in the Hero World Challenge, a PGA Tour unofficial event and a tournament hosted by the Tiger Woods Foundation. He finished fifteenth in a seventeen-player field.

Woods continued to have difficulty on the course in the opening months of 2017. He missed the cut in the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines Golf Club in January (a course on which he had previously won eight tournaments, including the US Open) and withdrew from the Omega Dubai Desert Classic tournament in early February because of back spasms. A few weeks later, he again was forced to withdraw from a tournament, this time from the Genesis Open, due to back pain and at the advice of his doctors. He had a fourth back surgery in April.

Woods also had further difficulties off the course; in May 2017, he was arrested in Jupiter, Florida, for allegedly driving under the influence. He was found asleep in his car, which was running but was stopped at the time, and a Breathalyzer test detected no alcohol in his system. Woods later released a statement in which he said that "alcohol was not involved" in the incident, and that it was caused instead by "an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications." He was released on his own recognizance the same day.

Beginning in 2018, however, Woods started to mount a comeback. He finished second at the Valspar Championship, his first top-five finish in five years, and also placed second in the PGA Championship, two strokes behind first-place winner Brooks Koepka. He then won the season-ending Tour Championship, which he had won twice before, in 1999 and in 2007. In early 2019 Woods neared a top-ten world ranking with a tenth-place finish at the WGC-Mexico Championship. That April he won the Masters for the fifth time in his career, his fifteenth career major championship overall. In October 2019 Woods won the Zozo Championship in Japan for his eighty-second career PGA Tour victory, moving him into a tie with Sam Snead for the all-time most.

Following struggles with his game during events in 2020, it was reported in early 2021 that Woods had been taken to a hospital and brought in for surgery after suffering serious leg injuries during a single-vehicle crash in California in which his SUV had gone off the road and rolled over several times; an investigation into the cause of the accident was opened as Woods began recovery.

Woods surprised fans and the media by playing in the 2022 Masters Tournament after spending nearly a year and a half away from the sport of golf following his car crash in 2021. After making the cut, he finished the tournament in forty-seventh place with a score of 13-over par.

Woods returned to the Masters in 2023; however, he withdrew from the tournament after he sustained an injury. The following year, Woods made his twenty-sixth appearance and twenty-fourth cut in a row at the Masters; he surpassed Fred Couples and Gary Player to set and hold the record for the most consecutive cuts made in the tournament's history. He finished in last place with a score of 16-over par—his major career-worst and second-worst at any professional event at the time.

Significance

Woods's evolving legacy includes his meteoric rise to become the world's top golfer and record-tying number of PGA victories. He had more professional victories by age twenty-three than any other pro golfer, surpassing the record of Horton Smith set in 1931, and continued to succeed later in his career even in the face of challenges on and off the course. Although his brand and his game suffered after his infidelity scandal in 2009, he showed a refusal to give up despite injuries and disappointments along the way. Woods's popularity and his impact on the sport have arguably been more far-reaching than any player before him. In 2019, he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Donald Trump, and while he was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame the following year, his induction ceremony was postponed due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Woods refined the way golf was played and viewed by the general public. A frenzy of interest in the sport, from players and fans, followed his rise to the top. Most significant, perhaps, was that his success increased interest in golf in both people of color and young people of all backgrounds, making him an ambassador for the game.

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