Tiger Woods returns from hell
In the history of sport, there has never been a fall to compare with it. Ten years after his life and career fell apart, how on earth has Tiger turned it around like this?
It is late morning on the final day of the US Open Championship at Pebble Beach on California’s Monterey Peninsula. He has been at the practice area for almost three hours this June day and now he walks head down through a human corridor to the pick-up point, where he will take a courtesy car to the first tee. “Have a good one, Tiger,” a fan shouts. From him there are flickers of acknowledgment where once it had all been stony detachment. They love him more than they have ever loved him. It is not the 15 major championships, nor the 82 PGA Tour titles he’s now won (tying with fellow American Sam Snead’s record for most tournament wins). It is that Tiger Woods has returned from hell. From the exposure of his pathologically sleazy personal life, the public shaming that followed, the loss of his reputation, the break-up of his family. After that, the four back surgeries, beginning in 2014 and ending 2½ years later with a spinal fusion in which a disc from his lower vertebrae was removed and replaced with a plastic implant.
Severe spinal problems come with severe pain; it was so bad in Woods’ case that he ended up with an opiate dependency and a conviction for driving under the influence, caused by prescribed medications. Even his golf – the very thing that defines him – deserted him, and bad play coupled with his long absences from the game saw him slide to 1199th in the world. Few saw him returning to the top, certainly not me. Yet in April this year he won the Masters in Augusta, Georgia. And last month he won the Zozo Championship in Japan. In the history of sport, his is the greatest comeback.
Watching him at Pebble Beach, it is clear that some things remain the same. He is wearing a blood-red polo shirt under a sleeveless red pullover, black trousers, black baseball hat, black shoes. Red has always been his final-round colour, the predator’s message to his prey: I bring danger. When the courtesy car driver opens the rear door, Woods climbs in and turns to a young female volunteer who has cleared the way for the car to get out. Woods beams sport’s most charismatic smile and says, “Thank you very much.”
“That million-dollar smile of his, it cost me four thousand bucks,” his dad, Earl, once said, in reference to what he had forked out for his son’s orthodontic work. The smile was part of the deal. With almost military precision, Lieutenant-Colonel Earl Woods planned all this for his boy: fluent swing developed in infancy, work ethic and killer mentality nurtured, every distraction removed. Long before it came to pass, Earl and his Thai wife, Kultida, known as Tida, knew the boy would dominate his world. People without any interest in the game were drawn to him. The black champion in the white man’s sport. His victories at Augusta National in Georgia came with a hint of payback, for this exclusive country club did not admit its first black member until 1990.
Not everyone liked Woods. In the camp of those unenthused by his dominance, I sat somewhere near the back. He was too clinical, too good, too lacking in human qualities. Like a poker player laying winning cards on the table, he delivered his brilliance and took away the winnings. Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, who had cleared a path for Woods and his generation to follow, became salesmen once they walked from the 18th green, selling the game to anyone looking to buy. Woods was more accountant than salesman.
As much as he was a cold, ungiving champion, he was also the best we’d seen and the smartest. Forty years of my life have been spent listening to athletes explaining what they do and no one spoke with the lucidity and understanding that came easily to Woods. Sometimes you had to laugh. In all seriousness, he once complained about the way his putts “were rolling into the hole”. That was before the 2000 US Open that he would win by 15 shots. A week after winning the 1997 Masters by 12 shots, he talked about watching a tape of the final round to check on his swing. “I didn’t see one flaw, I saw about 10,” he said.
On the Sunday evening after he won the 2000 Open Championship, I sat in the press tent at St Andrews in Scotland while he answered the usual questions. On these occasions, there were always one or two insights into how his mind worked. Someone asked a question about how he could play four rounds on a course with 112 bunkers and never land in one. He put it down to luck. People laughed, assuming he was using false modesty. Woods didn’t like that. “I hit bad shots in every round that ended up all right,” he said by way of a correction. “For instance, I hit a terrible tee shot Friday at 10 that landed next to the pot bunker on the right. What did it do? It bounced past it instead of kicking into it, and I had a perfect lie. I made par instead of bogey or double.”
He then listed three other shots that should have been in bunkers but weren’t. I listened and thought, this man has come from another planet. An alien with intelligence different to ours.
That wasn’t all that was different – as the world discovered in the early hours of Friday, November 27, 2009. Woods’ wife of five years, Elin, had discovered over the course of a grim domestic row that he was involved with another woman, nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel. There had been a story linking them in the National Enquirer, which Woods denied when confronted by his wife. Admitting he knew Uchitel, he then called her and brazenly asked her to speak with Elin. Uchitel tried to convince Elin there was nothing between her and Tiger. Unconvinced, Elin waited until her husband slept, then got his phone and found an incriminating text sent by him to an unidentified number: “You are the only one I’ve ever loved.” She dialled the number and her suspicions were confirmed on hearing Uchitel’s voice. That was the night everything changed.
Woods left the house wearing nothing but shorts and a T-shirt. At about 2.30am, behind the wheel of his Cadillac Escalade, he left his driveway, bounced over a concrete kerb, then swerved left, jumping another kerb before swerving back across the road and colliding with a fire hydrant. It didn’t end there. The Escalade lurched on into a neighbour’s driveway before hitting a tree. Police and an ambulance would soon arrive.
“Golf never needed a shower more than it did after Tiger Woods careered off a fire hydrant into a tree, shaking loose a multitude of cocktail waitresses, lingerie models and porn actresses, none of whom accused him of gentleness,” wrote the author Tom Callahan. “Forgetting morality, Tiger had done the absolute last thing anyone ever expected him to do. He made himself ridiculous.”
In the history of sport, there has never been a fall to compare with Woods’. Before him, there had been no need to coin a collective noun for mistresses. Over the following two months they would seem like a shoal, moving beneath the waves until each in turn came to the surface and told of a man we never knew. For 21 consecutive days, Woods was on the front page of the New York Post, beating by one the previous record set by the fallout from the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre.
The intervening years have taken a toll. Forgetfor a minute the back surgeries and operations on his left knee. It’s the arthritis that gets him, especially on cool, damp days. There’s a cold front hanging over Monterey during this year’s US Open and his body has ached from the first day. That and a cold putter leave him 11 shots behind the leader, Gary Woodland, as he sets off on his final round.
Look around and there’s the strangest thing. He is still the god of this sport. They stand 20 deep around the tee, camera phones raised upwards, a forest of human periscopes. They shout encouragement. They give love. This afternoon they follow him from hole to hole, a gallery as great as any in his heyday. They don’t mind that he’s out of contention (he ended up tying 21st), nor desert him when he makes bogey on four of the first six holes. He is Tiger Woods and they still believe. In his gallery there are many African-Americans and people of Asian descent, diversity that you don’t often see at golf tournaments. Later in the round, a man in a tiger suit reaches out as Woods walks from a green and, rather than blank the joker as he once would, Tiger hands him his putter. It is his way of saying, “Here, you could do better with this than me.” At a time in his career when his aching body yearns to say goodbye, the 43-year-old is learning to say hello.
Two hours after Woods leaves the first tee, the leaders arrive. Rory McIlroy and Louis Oosthuizen, Chez Reavie and Brooks Koepka, Justin Rose and the eventual winner, Woodland. Take all the fans who follow these three pairings while Woods is still on the course and the total will not amount to a quarter of the throngs with the old champion. At Pebble Beach, there is but one man on this course. His presence back on the front line has also meant that golf, ailing as a sport until recently, is in recovery. It is the greatest and most banal cliché, but it’s nevertheless true: Woods moves the dial.
February 19, 2010. He stands behind a lectern in a room at the PGA Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. It is the first time he has spoken publicly about the behaviour that led to the car accident the previous November. He wears a dark jacket and a light shirt. A giant navy curtain with sprawling folds has been hung and the ambience is that of a funeral parlour. Close to 40 invited guests fill the seats in front of him, his mother, Tida, in the front row.
He’d come from 45 days at the Pine Grove clinic in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And now, whatever his handlers wanted he was ready to give. “The issue involved here was my repeated irresponsible behaviour. I was unfaithful. I had affairs. I cheated. What I did is not acceptable, and I am the only person to blame. I stopped living by the core values that I was taught to believe in. I knew my actions were wrong, but I convinced myself that normal rules didn’t apply. I never thought about who I was hurting. Instead, I thought only about myself. I ran straight through the boundaries that a married couple should live by. I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have to go far to find them. I was wrong. I was foolish. I don’t get to play by different rules. The same boundaries that apply to everyone apply to me. I brought this shame on myself.”
Books would follow. Steve Williams, his longtime former caddie, wrote that when Woods petulantly threw clubs, he (the caddie) was made to feel like a slave because he had to pick them up. This was the first known case in history of a white man accusing a black man of turning him into a slave. Woods’ former swing coach Hank Haney wrote about the difficulties of working with him during what we now know as the distracted years. Most damning of all was the story told by the investigative journalists Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian in their book, Tiger Woods. Even for the keenest voyeurs, there was too much to see in their compelling account of his fall.
Tom Callahan’s book His Father’s Son (2010) is the most helpful for those wishing to understand one of the most complex athletes in sport’s history. Callahan knew Earl Woods, liked him and saw Woods Sr as the creator of Woods Jr. “He assembled his son in a garage, but he left out some of the human parts,” Callahan wrote.
Tida was Eve to Earl’s Adam. They gave Tiger everything except what he may have most needed. There is the story of Earl, Tida and the four-year-old Tiger visiting Earl’s sister Hattie Belle at her home in the small Kansas town where Earl had grown up. Tiger and his aunt Hattie were throwing a football in the yard until Earl and Tida went shopping. Then Hattie picked up the small boy because she felt that’s what he needed. Earl, she noticed, spoke to the child as if he was a miniature adult, while Tida just corrected the boy. What they never seemed to do was touch him. Three months before Tiger’s third birthday, Tida initiated contact with an LA sports anchor that led to the child appearing on The Mike Douglas Show. In front of the cameras, he swung the club like no two-year-old anyone had ever seen. Bob Hope, the Hollywood icon and keen amateur golfer, was a fellow guest. “I don’t know what kind of drugs they got this kid on, but I want some,” he said.
Woods turned professional in 1996. Aged 20, his first contract with Nike was worth $37 million. Titleist paid him $20 million to use its equipment. This was before he’d won a tournament. Eight months later, he won the Masters by 12 shots. By his early 30s, Woods had earned more than $1 billion, and in 2009 Forbes magazine declared him the first billionaire sportsman. That was also the year of the fall.
Perhaps Earl, who died in May 2006, feared what was coming. He had told the story of phoning Tiger and his son telling him he was in Australia. “What the hell for?”
“Scuba diving,” Tiger said.
“Don’t you know there are great whites [sharks] down there?”
“I won’t bother them if they don’t bother me,” his son replied.
Earl sensed, though, that all wasn’t perfect in paradise. “When I hung up, I felt a little sad. I thought, ‘Does he have to go all the way to Australia to get out from behind all those $20m houses? You know why he scuba dives, don’t you? Because the fish don’t know who he is.”
Woods and Elin tried to work their way through the mess of his affairs, but without love and trust she didn’t see a way for them to stay together. In 2010 they divorced. She left and he began the long process of putting his life back together. It seemed a road without an end. Somehow, he got there. Even in the bad times, he was constantly praised for being a good father to his daughter, Sam, and son, Charlie.
During the dark months when he couldn’t walk because of spinal pain, he kept going. Because Woods doesn’t give up. Even in the final round of the US Open he couldn’t just throw in the towel. Four over par after six holes, he played the next 12 in six under. He keeps grinding.
Woods has learnt his lessons. There are more smiles now, more empathy with those asking the questions, more moments when he connects with those who come to bow before him. One thing Billy Payne, the Augusta chairman, said was true. “I hope he realises that every kid he passes on the course wants his swing, but would settle for his smile.” They’re getting some of that now.
His comeback has breathed new life into an old game. The danger, though, is that when he goes, he will take the game with him.
Woods is the captain of the US team that will take on the Internationals in the 2019 Presidents Cup at The Royal Melbourne Golf Club, December 9-15
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