Tiger Woods’s father believes his son will `do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity’. Many golf fans will concur after he won the US Masters last weekend
GOLF:Greg Williams
THIS week America officially remembered an infamous footnote in its history. Tuesday marked the 50th anniversary of Jackie Roosevelt Robinson trotting out for the Brooklyn Dodgers to become the first black man to play in League baseball since an unofficial colour bar had been implemented in 1895. Sadly, it’s not an exceptional anniversary in American sporting history; only 10 years before, Joe Louis had become the first black man allowed to fight for the world heavyweight crown for 42 years.
Robinson died in 1972, and his headstone bears this epitaph: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other people’s lives”. Tiger Woods, who became the first black man to win the US Masters this week, would do well to heed these words, not just because his is the most extraordinary entrance into the world of professional golf since Jack Nicklaus, but also because he is a young, black man who has achieved phenomenal success in a sport that has traditionally been the preserve of middle-aged, middle-class, white, corporate America.
Remember, we’re taking about a sport that is run by people who, until 1990, were quite happy to sanction events at places that excluded Afro-Americans. And this is why Tiger may be just what golf needs. Tiger Woods, you see, isn’t simply a golfer – he’s a phenomenon, a marketing professional’s dream who has recently signed contracts worth a total of $60- million with Nike and the golf-club manufacturer Titleist. Talented and good- looking, he’s a young man in a world of seasoned war horses, with just the right level of attitude to make him saleable. His name alone is a golf merchandiser’s fantasy.
His real name is somewhat less fearsome; Eldrick doesn’t sound quite the same as Tiger, which is the nickname given to him by his father, Earl Woods, a retired Green Beret lieutenant-colonel, who served two tours of duty in Vietnam. The story goes that Tiger was the nickname of a South Vietnamese soldier who saved Earl’s life during the war.
And it was in Vietnam that Earl met a Thai girl, Kultida Punsawad, whom he married in 1969. Their son Eldrick was born in December 1975 in Long Beach, California. Fast forward 22 years to Tiger’s arrival in Thailand last February for the Asian Honda Classic. Tiger Mania, as the Thai press dubbed it, swept across the nation and the media coverage saturated the country as thoroughly as any south-east Asian monsoon.
Americans will tell you that Tiger’s “ethnicity” is an important part of what makes him such a powerful totem. Describing himself as Asian Afro-American, he is actually a mixture of African, Thai, Chinese, American-Indian and European, which pretty much encompasses the entire racial make-up of the US.
Look into Woods’ upbringing and you will find much of what makes him the man he is today: his determination is drawn from a childhood during which it was always expected that he would succeed as a professional golfer.
Returning from the war, Earl Woods purchased a house next to a golf course. By the age of 10 months, Tiger was hitting practice shots in the family garage . When he was three, he was outputting Bob Hope on national television and being coached in public relations by his father. With a family able to stump up competition costs of around $20 000 per year, Tiger spent his teens in amateur competition, winning three US junior amateurs, thereby repaying his father’s faith and encouragement.
In a recent interview with the American magazine Sports Illustrated, his father claimed that “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity”. When pressed on this point – “more than Nelson Mandela? More than Gandhi?” – Woods continued, “Yes, because he has a larger forum than any of them. Because he’s playing a sport that’s international. Because he’s qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He’s the bridge between East and West. He is the Chosen One. He will have the power to impact on nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power.”
His mother concurs. “He can hold everyone together,” she says. “He is the Universal Child.” Woods – who shares some of his mother’s Buddhist faith (every year on his birthday he travels with her to a Buddhist temple where he makes a gift of rice, sugar and salt to the monks) – claims that these expectations are not a burden on him: “I see it as fortunate,” he has said. “I’ve always known where I wanted to go in life. I’ve never let anything deter me. This is my purpose. It will unfold.”
However, doing little but play golf for most of his life has brought its own pressures, and questions are now being asked as to whether Tiger is well equipped to deal with the situation in which he now finds himself. Last year, he was criticised for failing to attend an awards dinner held in his honour, on the grounds that he was “tired” (“I can’t remember being tired when I was 20,” the old American pro Tom Kite commented).
Similarly he reacts angrily to the portrayal of his father as a controlling Svengali basking in the reflected glory of his son’s success.
Meanwhile, golf experts scratch their heads in wonder while trying to deconstruct Woods’s swing, and thereby discover the secret of his extraordinarily powerful driving, which is longer even than that of noted huge hitters such as Greg Norman and John Daly.
People who know about golf will tell you that there is no weak aspect to his game. He is steady, competitive, balanced and controlled. Woods announced his arrival on the professional circuit last August, at the Greater Milwaukee Open, with a drive that took the ball 336m down the fairway. It was enough to quieten the doubters who questioned whether the success he had achieved as an amateur player – he won the American Amateur Championship an unprecedented three times in a row – could continue in the rarefied atmosphere of the professional circuit.
If the truth be told, there was nowhere left for Woods to go as an amateur, so last year he quit his economic studies at Stanford – where he had been studying on a golf scholarship – to play full-time. Since then he has had an enormously encouraging start on the US tour – and now he has won the US Masters at the age of 21. A quite staggering achievement in a sport in which players usually reach their peak during their thirties and forties. Middle-age is a long way off for Woods but, if he wanted to, he could retire now. Money is no longer an issue for him, although some in the game wonder whether this might reduce his desire to win. Nike’s investment in a 21-year-old playing a sport that has little of the glamour of basketball, soccer, tennis or athletics might seem a little risky.
But Nike likes to play strictly by its own rules and is aware that golf is one of the few truly global sports. Hence, along with other Nike-endorsed athletes, such as baseball’s Ken Griffey Jr and sprinter Michael Johnson, Tiger is a pretender to the throne still occupied by the ageing but still sprightly basketball legend Michael Jordan, the highest earner in US sport. The boom in sports television over the past 15 years has boosted the earnings of successful contemporary athletes ever skywards and the sign of the swoosh can continue to push Woods into an earnings league not dreamed of by Jackie Robinson.
Woods is now part of an industry that has become as important as music as a vehicle for mass communication. It’s arguable that sport is the most potent marketing device of our times and Nike, perhaps more than any other, is the company that has grasped and capitalised on this most fully. Its ad campaigns have placed Woods very carefully as an outsider intent on kicking over the bastions of rich, white, corporate America – and nowhere could possibly be richer, whiter and more corporate than America’s golf clubs.
In Tiger Woods: The Making of a Champion by Tim Rosaforte, Michael Jordan is quoted as saying, “I admire Tiger for what he’s done thus far because for so long it was truly a game that a lot of minorities couldn’t play … so in that sense he’s carrying an extra burden with him, to succeed and expand across all racial barriers.”
Whether Tiger Woods will change the world in the way that his father believes he can, in the way that Muhammad Ali did, is unlikely, but then Tiger has other things on his mind, ambitions that transcend issues of race. Tiger Woods doesn’t simply want to be the best black golfer of all time, he wants to be the best golfer of all time. He may just do it.
ENDS