No one does casual understatement of other-worldly sporting achievement like Tiger Woods, but the world number one surpassed even his own standards of quiet assertiveness when asked this year if he could imagine ever going an entire season without being beaten.
‘I’ve already had one perfect season but it’s been a while,†he said, lowering his voice, the better to catch the attention of those who were listening. ‘I was 11 years old. I won 36 tournaments in a row that year. I peaked aged 11.â€
Geoff Ogilvy, defeating him at the CA Championship in Miami a few days after those remarks, ended Woods’s run of seven successive professional tournament victories, just as Trevor Immelman’s win at Augusta put a stop to his dream of winning the grand slam of all four major championships in a calendar year.
The perfect season remains unattained, at least in the professional game, but back in southern California, where Woods has returned this week for the US Open at Torrey Pines, his perfect season as a junior remains unforgettable.
He spent his childhood in this neck of the woods, learning how to play golf and to thrash the living daylights out of his opponents.
‘It was kind of depressing when you turned up at an event and saw Tiger’s name on the draw sheet. You knew straight away you were playing for second place,†recalls Chris Berry, a contemporary of Woods, who eventually became a professional, albeit with limited success. ‘To make us feel better our parents used to say that we would catch up with him as we all got older. We were kids but they weren’t fooling us — we knew that was never going to happen.â€
Aspiring Woods biographers will be horrified to learn that many of the documents detailing his achievements in that era, including the perfect season, have been lost, although those who were around at the time, either watching from outside the fairway ropes or suffering defeat inside them, remember an outlandishly talented kid, polite, obsessed with golf and possessed of a maturity and self-awareness well beyond his years.
Tom Sargent, a golf professional who has been president of the Southern California Junior Golf Association since 1991, first came across Woods in 1986, when the then 10-year-old won a junior invitational event at Sargent’s club.
However, he had heard of the youngster’s reputation long before then.
‘I knew this kid who was at high school, a student of mine, and he was no slouch because he went on to play in professional tournaments later in life. He played in this event at a par-three course called Heartwell and he shot one under par. Tiger shot four under. My student was 16 years old at the time; Tiger was five.â€
Sargent came across Woods countless times at junior tournaments over the years but one incident has remained indelibly inked in his memory.
‘He came back to our invitational when he was 12-years-old and shot 71 in the first of two rounds. He was clearly going to beat everyone in his age group so I pulled him to one side and said, ‘Tiger, would you like to play off the back tees along with older kids in the afternoon?’ He looked at me and said, ‘No thanks, I kind of like the way things are going right now.’
‘To me, that showed that he wasn’t in a rush like most of the other kids. They would all have jumped at the chance to play with the older kids. Not Tiger — he had a sense of purpose, a plan, even at that young age, which was to win.â€
If Woods’s single-Âmindedness was evident back then, so were many of the traits that define the player widely declared to be the best in the history of the game.
‘Everyone said he was cocky, but he wasn’t; he was confident, an entirely different thing,†argues Eric Lohman, another Southern Californian prodigy who learned to live in Tiger’s shadow.
‘I was a couple of years older than him and, like him, I won a ton of events in the region. But the thing about Tiger was that when he started competing at a national level he still kept winning every tournament he entered. The amazing thing about him was that he was able to keep this barrier between himself and the next best guy. It is still that way to this day.†—