In three years he became the best sportsman on the planet. JOHN CARLIN charts the astounding progress of Tiger Woods, from golf prodigy to global phenomenon.
What sets Tiger Woods apart from other sportsmen is his almost robotic coldness of purpose. And his obsessive hunger to win, win and win again, his determination to do everything it takes to convert himself into a perfect golfing machine and not to allow anything to stand in the way of his life’s mission, to become the greatest golfer.
His case suggests that to be a genius you do not necessarily have to be born a genius. Genius can be manufactured. A manual is on the market that shows how it’s done.
The author is Tiger’s father, Earl Woods, a former colonel in the US Army who served in Vietnam. The book is called Training a Tiger: the Official Book on How to be the Best.
The first step is to brainwash the child. When Tiger was six months old, Earl would ensure his son would watch him practise his golf shots over and over. He sat the baby in his high chair at an angle that ensured he could not resist falling under the hypnotic effect of his father’s pendulum swing.
Sure enough, within days little Tiger was apeing his father’s rhythmic arm movements. Tiger’s reward, aged seven months, was his first golf club, a putter.
Step two is to familiarise the child with the tools of his future trade. Whether there was any choice involved we will never know. As Earl over-explains in his book, he started training his son "at an unthinkably early age".
Unthinkingly, Tiger took a liking to his putter, so much so that when he was 11 months old dad bought him his second club, an iron.
Earl must have gone through a frustrating few months at this stage. The child would have been learning to walk but the act of hitting a golf ball requires a measure of balance difficult to achieve until you’ve made it to 18 months.
Sure enough, when Tiger was 18 months Earl started taking him to the driving range daily. According to the legend Earl himself has constructed, he discovered that the prodigy was hitting the ball, with accuracy, a distance of 80m.
It was a good thing for Earl that his wife shared his sense of mission. Tida Woods, a Thai woman Earl met while he was on one of his tours of Vietnam, decided after consulting her husband that now was the time to start teaching Tiger about numbers.
Knowing how to add and subtract was an important element of Tiger’s golfing apprenticeship. He had to be able to keep his score on the golf course and, later, he would require a gift for advanced arithmetic to keep track of his astronomical earnings.
Of more immediate value, he memorised his father’s telephone number at work. Every afternoon the 2-year-old would call his father and ask, "Daddy, can I practise with you today?" This is exactly what Earl wanted to hear. Never once did he turn Tiger down.
Yet he always hesitated for a moment before answering, conning the infant into worrying that he might say no. Here is an important lesson for the father who worries his obsession might inspire rebellion in his child. "Through the use of guile and imagination," Earl counsels, "I always kept him wanting more."
The brainwashing was 100 per cent successful. At 2 years old, Tiger played golf with Bob Hope live on American TV. At 3, improving on the average score of 50 per cent of the world’s club golfers, he scored 48 over nine holes.
When he was 4 Earl hired him a professional coach. At 8, Tiger was going around 18 holes in under 80 shots, putting him in the top 5 per cent of all people who play golf. At 10, his dad found him a sports psychologist.
At 12, to toughen his protege mentally, his father would follow him around a golf course day after day, coughing or yawning or dropping the golf bag at the precise moment Tiger was about to make impact with the ball. Tiger’s challenge was to overcome his rage and frustration and silently keep playing his game.
Earl’s methods worked. At 15, Tiger became the youngest winner of the US Junior Amateur championship. He then became the youngest winner of the adult US Amateur championship, then in 1997, at 21, he became the youngest winner in 63 years of the US Masters at Augusta. He won by the widest margin recorded, in the lowest number of shots.
Since then he has won more than $US20 million ($48 million) in prize money and five times more in endorsements from companies like Nike, Rolex and American Express.
The market that might be persuaded to buy products sponsored by Tiger is limitless: young and old, rich and poor, black and white, Asian-American, even Native American.
Shortly after his first Masters victory in April 1997, Tiger told Oprah Winfrey that it bothered him when people referred to him as "African-American". He explained that he was one-quarter black, one-quarter Thai, one-quarter Chinese, one-eighth white and one-eighth American Indian.
"Growing up," he said, "I came up with this name: I’m a Cablinasian." That meant he was Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian.
His parents had taught him at their laboratory of human perfectibility that golf was only the beginning, that, as his mother has put it, he was "the Universal Child" destined to transform the human species.
Having won the Masters in 1997, Tiger Woods’ life did not so much unfold as fall apart. However diligently his father had prepared him for the heavenly mission that lay ahead, he had not prepared him for Tigermania — the mass adulation that came his way, the relentless pursuit of the media hounds eager to feed a hungry public not merely the details on the latest adjustment to his swing, but what he had for breakfast or what girls he was dating.
At this point he was revealed as just another boy of 20, who said and did foolish things. His most spectacular act of arrogance came when he turned down dinner with the then President of the United States.
Bill Clinton put him on the invitation list after Tiger had won the Masters. Tiger said he found it "a little curious" that the President had not considered him important enough to attend the dinner until after he had won the big golf tournament.
Tiger today appears to have shaken off some of the more ham-fisted excesses of his father’s US Army school of indoctrination. He appears to have reverted to the simpler role destiny had in mind for him. His "purpose" is merely to be a remarkable sportsman.
Another factor is his friendship with Michael Jordan. Jordan, the greatest basketball player who lived, is a fanatical golfer. He likes to tell people, only half-jokingly, that Tiger is his "greatest hero on Earth".
Jordan’s value to Tiger is that he endured a similar level of adulation and experienced the same shock of abrupt wealth. And Jordan, unlike, say, footballer Diego Maradona, has not wilted under the strain. He remained a model of level-headed sobriety throughout his professional life.
Tiger has had a steady girlfriend without a whiff of sexual scandal or alcohol or drugs. His favourite indulgence is a McDonald’s cheeseburger washed down with a strawberry milkshake.
Like Jordan, he comes across as a totally dedicated sporting monk. Only when it comes to money does it appear that he cannot have enough.
Tiger’s appeal has extended to parts of America other golfers cannot reach. Television’s advertising revenues from golf coverage, for instance, have sky-rocketed since he arrived on the scene.
His appeal is wide because he does not threaten anyone. His fans are overwhelmingly white-faced middle Americans. Among the many reasons they like him is the fact that, like Jordan, Woods is not obsessive about his accident of race.
Tiger is so conservative that he let out that he was against gun control, never mind the epidemic of school shootings that have assailed America.
Which is ultimately irrelevant. Politics is not the terrain in which he chooses to be judged. The golf course is.
What Tiger most aspires to is to break every record the game of golf has seen. Everybody, including Jack Nicklaus, believes he can do it.
-
Two playoff holes were needed to decide the event, with Alker settling for second.