Sitting on the couch in his living room, ten-year-old Tiger Woods stared intently at the television, his mother seated beside him, his father a few feet away in his chair. It was Sunday afternoon, April 13, 1986, and CBS was broadcasting the final round of the Masters. Earlier that day, as part of their father-son bonding, Tiger had played nine holes with Earl at the navy course near their home. But now he was watching forty-six-year-old Jack Nicklaus take the lead with a three-foot birdie putt on the sixteenth hole that sent the gallery at Augusta into a frenzy. “There’s no doubt about it,” the announcer said. “The Bear has come out of hibernation!”
Nicklaus went on to win the Masters for the sixth time that day, making him the oldest golfer ever to be awarded the green jacket and marking his eighteenth and final major championship. Tiger, at this point, had been counting his score in tournaments for about seven years. He dreamed of playing at Augusta someday. Nicklaus’s historic achievement formed the basis of Tiger’s first significant Masters memory. “His reactions over those last holes of the 1986 Masters made an impression on me because they were spontaneous, and they showed me how much of yourself you have to put into a shot,” Woods wrote years later. “Jack was forty-six, and I was only ten, and I couldn’t put it into words then. But I wanted to be where he was, and doing what he was doing.”
Earl was a smoker, and when he was thinking he liked to take a long drag on a cigarette and exhale slowly. There was a lot to think about as he watched his son watching the great Jack Nicklaus on television. The scene at Augusta National, with the all-white gallery and Nicklaus’s golden-blond hair, was starkly different from the one in the Woodses’ living room. In 1934, the PGA of America amended its constitution to restrict its membership to “Professional golfers of the Caucasian Race.” Even though that clause had finally been expunged in 1961, country clubs like Augusta remained bastions of exclusivity for whites. It was the one aspect of golf that Earl despised. Throughout his life he believed he had been denied personal and professional advancement based on the color of his skin—the pretty white girl he couldn’t dance with at school; the motels in the Midwest that wouldn’t give him a room when he traveled with his college baseball team; the racist colonel who blocked his advancement in the army.
“I was constantly fighting racism, discrimination, and lack of opportunities,” Earl said. “There was just no chance for an intelligent, articulate black person to do anything worthwhile or participate successfully in the process of life. It was frustrating and suffocating in so many ways, particularly for someone who wanted to achieve things but wasn’t given the opportunity.”
Earl was determined that his son would change all that. Race wasn’t going to hold him back. Tiger was going to do something worthwhile. He was going to get his opportunity. To hell with any notion of encouraging Tiger to be like Jack; Earl was grooming him to beat Jack.
After the 1986 Masters, Golf Digest published a list of Nicklaus’s career accomplishments. It included his age at the time of each significant achievement. Tiger tacked the list to his bedroom wall. From that moment on, each morning when he woke up and each night when he went to bed, Nicklaus was there.
Tiger had been working with Rudy Duran for six years when Earl decided it was time for a change. Tiger was getting taller, and Earl wanted a coach who could shape his swing to his physical growth. He set his sights on John Anselmo, the head pro at Meadowlark Golf Course in Huntington Beach, about thirteen miles south of Cypress. Anselmo had taught many child prodigies from California over the years. Earl went to see him shortly after the 1986 Masters and quizzed him on his philosophy and method of teaching.
Anselmo had heard about Tiger. But it wasn’t until he saw him swing that he realized he was one of a kind. “I’d never seen a child with that much ability,” he said. He told Earl that the special ones required a different kind of coaching. “You don’t do a lot of things,” Anselmo told him. “You just do things natural. And you grow with that natural sense. You’ve got to have that feel-sense.”
Earl knew enough to know that Anselmo was the best instructor in Southern California. They reached an understanding that was similar to the one Woods had had with Duran—Anselmo didn’t ask for payment, and Earl didn’t offer it.
The first time Anselmo worked with Tiger, he made some immediate observations: Tiger swung on a flat plane, meaning his left arm never rose above his shoulders during his backswing, and early in his swing, Tiger’s right wrist hinged. No one had pointed these things out before.
Tiger embraced Anselmo’s technical approach and thrived on the new drills meant to help him improve. Carefully following instructions, he did things such as balancing on the balls of his feet and letting his arms hang down naturally. At the same time, instead of a club, he took hold of an empty driving-range basket, grasping the left side with his left fingers and the right side with his right fingers. Then he swung back naturally, the basket pushing back from the target, stretching the muscles in his back and left arm. It was a new sensation, and the start of Tiger learning a bigger, fuller athletic motion.
There was something else Anselmo noticed: Tiger was obsessed with hitting the ball far. This wasn’t a technical flaw in his game; it was more of a mind-set. It wasn’t something that could be corrected through drills. Nevertheless, in Anselmo’s view, this had to change. Swinging too hard could destroy a talented golfer.
Tiger started meeting with Anselmo every week.
Transportation to and from golf lessons and practice fell to Kultida. She also shuttled Tiger to all his tournaments. With Earl working full-time, Tiger spent most of his time with his mom. They went everywhere together. The summer before Anselmo entered the picture, Tiger went all the way to Thailand. It was an opportunity to see his mother’s homeland and learn about her religion. He even went with her to meet with a Buddhist monk. Kultida handed the monk a chart she had been keeping since Tiger’s birth, tracking all his achievements through the first nine years of his life. She later recounted to a journalist what happened next.
“The monk asked me when I was pregnant, did I ask God for this boy to be born,” she recalled. “I ask why. He say because this kid is special, like God send an angel to be born. He said this Tiger is a special kid. The monk don’t know about golf. Monks don’t watch TV. Monk said it’s like God send angel. He said Tiger is going to be a leader. If he go into army, he be a four-star general.”
The visit to Thailand was a formative one in Tiger’s relationship with his mother. He didn’t feel compelled to practice Buddhism, but he was determined to please her. Each night before bed, Kultida prayed to Buddha that in her next life, Tiger would again be her son. The head covers on his golf clubs had the Thai inscription Rak jak Mea, which meant “Love from Mom.” “You can always count on Mom,” she assured him. “Mom will never lie to you.”
They logged thousands of hours in the car together, traveling to lessons, practices, and tournaments all over Southern California. When Tiger competed, Kultida walked every hole with him, carrying a scorecard and a pencil. She believed strongly in keeping score. Although pleasant and respectful toward Tiger’s competitors, Kultida didn’t like to see anyone beat her son. While driving him to tournaments, she shared her philosophy with him: “In sport, you have to go for the throat,” she said. “Because if all friendly, they come back and beat your ass. So you kill them. Take their heart.”
Off the course, Tiger knew the rules:
1. Education before golf.
2. Homework before practice.
3. No back talk.
4. Respect your parents.
5. Respect your elders.
On the course, he had only one rule: play without mercy.
It was an unusually hard-edged mentality on the junior golf circuit. But in 1987, at age eleven, Tiger entered thirty-three junior golf tournaments and won every one of them. “There’s no feeling I’ve found that matches the feeling that I’ve beaten everybody,” Tiger said. “Second place is first loser.”
The evening hours were reserved for Earl. Most nights, after Earl got off work, Tiger met him at the navy course, where they would play together until dark. Being alone on the course with Pop was his favorite thing to do. He considered that his “peaceful” time. On rare occasions, when Earl would arrange it, someone would join them for a round.
One day, when Tiger was twelve years old, they were joined by Eric Utegaard, the commanding officer of a navy destroyer. Back in 1969, Utegaard was the first member of the Naval Academy to earn All-America status since the beginning of the navy’s golf program in 1909. He’d made arrangements to play a round with Earl and Tiger. He also brought along a friend, Jay Brunza, PhD, a navy captain who had worked with the academy’s golf team.
“What do you do for a living?” Earl asked Brunza.
Brunza explained that he was a psychologist who had been on the faculty at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. More recently he had been with the pediatric oncology unit at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he worked with children suffering from cancer and other life-threatening illnesses and diseases. When a child faced radiation treatment for leukemia, for example, Brunza would help him or her focus on alternative thoughts—something he called “attentive awareness.” He essentially used a form of hypnosis to help his patients visualize how to deal with discomfort. On a lighter note, Brunza was a very good golfer, and he had worked as a sports psychologist for the navy’s golf team.
Utegaard offered to play with Earl, and he suggested that Tiger be paired with Brunza in their foursome. Tiger immediately started talking trash to Brunza, who gave it right back to him. Tiger liked that, and he appreciated that Brunza could play. Throughout the round, Earl noted that there was an affinity between them. Afterward, he pulled Brunza aside.
“Would you help me give Tiger the kind of advantage that a lot of country-club kids get?” he asked. “Would you work with him?”
Tiger had already spent over a year working with Anselmo to improve his balance. Brunza started driving up on weekends from San Diego to teach Tiger how to visualize shots. At the outset, he gave Tiger cassette tapes containing subliminal messages that were custom-made for him. The two did breathing and visualization exercises together, in which Tiger learned to take a deep breath and hold it, and then exhale slowly while settling over a shot. It was a way of putting him at ease. Then Tiger changed his approach to putting. Instead of putting to the cup, he started visualizing a picture around the hole and putting to it. Brunza was using a blend of hypnotic techniques that he’d been using with cancer patients for years.
“The hypnotic element is that absorption,” Brunza explained. “You think you lose control with hypnosis, but you don’t. It’s actually a heightened state of awareness and absorption. I taught Tiger a level of real focus technique, a creative awareness that you work into your nature.”
After each session, Brunza sent Tiger home with a list of things to work on. He never had to tell him to practice. “Tiger was one of the best students ever,” Brunza said. “A very creative and gifted child.”
Like any kid, Tiger liked toys and games. But equipment fascinated him—the grips on clubs, the smooth, shiny surface of the shaft on a driver, even the smell and texture of the soft leather on a new golf bag. He took exceptional care of every item he owned, from his golf shoes to his golf balls to the covers on the heads of his clubs. Anselmo noticed this and decided to introduce Tiger to one of his former students, twenty-five-year-old Scotty Cameron.
When Cameron was a boy, he and his father started experimenting with putters in the family garage. At first they were just tinkering, but soon the garage morphed into a workshop. When Cameron and his father weren’t on the golf course, they were in the shop, wrapping grips, shaping club heads, and designing putters for what they referred to as “field tests.” It didn’t take long for Cameron to realize that he wasn’t going to make it as a pro and that his real gift was handcrafting putters. In his early twenties, he moved out of the garage and into a studio, where he could produce elite clubs with state-of-the-art tools.
Tiger was in awe when he saw Cameron’s work. Despite being thirteen years younger than Cameron, Tiger spoke his language. As for Cameron, the future, he felt, was in making putters that would end up in the hands of a golfer who would revolutionize the game. Tiger started using Cameron putters.
At twelve years old, Tiger Woods was a boy surrounded by adults. He had the top golf coach in Southern California. He had a military-trained sports psychologist who often doubled as his caddie at junior tournaments. He had a true craftsman custom-making putters for him. His equipment—right down to his bag—was noticeably superior to that of other kids his age. And he had two parents—sometimes outfitted in “Team Tiger” T-shirts—whose lives were consumed with giving their son every advantage necessary to beat the wealthier country-club kids he was up against. When he stepped onto the course at a junior tournament, the other kids were intimidated by him.
Yet when Tiger looked in the mirror, he saw himself as small and scrawny. He was convinced that he wasn’t tough enough, so he turned to his father for help.
Earl put him through what he called Woods Finishing School: using psychological warfare and prisoner-of-war techniques that he had once taught to soldiers, Earl broke his son down in an attempt to toughen him up.
“The psychological training that my father used inured me to whatever I might have to deal with in golf,” Tiger later said. “He taught me to be completely aware of my surroundings, while maintaining complete focus on the task at hand.”
Earl would later brag to golf writers that he would jingle the change in his pocket when Tiger was putting, or he would cough or drop his golf bag during Tiger’s backswing. “It was psychological warfare,” Earl wrote in his memoir. “I wanted to make sure he would never run into anybody who was tougher mentally than he was, and we achieved that.”
The stories, when told by Earl and others, sounded benign—just one more ingenious lesson passed from a father to a son. In reality, as Tiger would reveal long after his father’s death, some of Earl’s tactics, under today’s standards, bordered on abuse.
“My dad deliberately used a lot of profanity when I was hitting balls, all the time, and throughout my swing,” Tiger said. “ ‘Fuck off, Tiger,’ he would sometimes say. . . . It was ‘motherfucker’ this, ‘you little piece of shit,’ or ‘How do you feel being a little nigger?’—things of that nature.
“He constantly put me down,” Tiger recalled. “Then, when I really got mad, he would say, ‘I know you want to slam down that club, but don’t you dare do it! Don’t you dare!’ He would push me to the breaking point, then back off. Push me to the breaking point, then back off. It was wild.”
We may never know how Tiger really felt at age eleven, twelve, or thirteen as he was repeatedly called those demeaning names by his father. But in 2017, at age forty-one, Woods said this about the experience: “I needed him to push me to the edge of not wanting to continue, because I had to learn to block out any feeling of insecurity. We had a code word that I could use whenever I thought I couldn’t take it anymore. But I never used the code word. I was never going to give in to what he was doing. I was a quitter if I used the code word. I don’t quit.”
The code word that Tiger never uttered was enough.
Earl’s approach was a huge departure from anything Tiger had previously experienced. Rudy Duran and John Anselmo had always focused on building up his self-confidence. And Dr. Brunza was an extremely sensitive, mild-mannered teacher who didn’t raise his voice. His whole approach was to put Tiger at ease. Earl, on the other hand, tried to make him feel insecure.
At the time, no one but Tiger knew what Earl was up to. “He had trained me to be what he sometimes called a ‘cold-blooded assassin’ on the course, by applying more of the principles he had learned and used while in the military,” Tiger admitted in 2017. “I needed this training if I was going to be able to deal with life as a professional golfer, with life as the supposed ‘black hope’ in the game . . . and of whom big things were expected. . . . I entered every tournament to win, and I expected to win.”
It was harsh—but it worked. Tiger simply overwhelmed the competition on the Southern California junior circuit. Even at the Leyton Invitational in Yorba Linda, California, an elite tournament that attracted the finest players in the region, he absolutely dominated. Tom Sargent, one of the most honored teaching professionals in Orange County, was the head pro at Yorba Linda Country Club. He knew nothing about Earl’s methods, but he’d been watching Tiger for years and had gotten to know Kultida pretty well. They frequently spoke at tournaments, and Kultida would even call Sargent on occasion to compare notes afterward. Sargent felt that she had as much to do with Tiger’s success as anyone.
“Tida is a force,” Sargent said. “And you really don’t want to stand in her way. I say that in a positive way. Tiger was surrounded by toughness. Let me put it this way: You wouldn’t dare fuck with her son. You’d get your ass kicked.”
Sargent had been hired as a private instructor for Bob May, an upperclassman at nearby Lakewood High School, who was considered the top college prospect in Southern California. Two coaches in particular—Wally Goodman at Stanford and Dwaine Knight at UNLV—were pursuing May and would regularly check in with Sargent for updates on his progress. But Sargent had watched Tiger consistently dismantle older, bigger kids. At one point, Sargent told both Goodman and Knight that they should keep an eye on a twelve-year-old named Tiger Woods. He was, in Sargent’s estimation, a decade ahead of the other kids.
In the spring of 1989, Tiger came home from middle school and found a letter from Wally Goodman addressed to him. The letter mentioned Tom Sargent and made clear that Stanford was interested in Tiger as a prospective member of the golf team. NCAA rules prohibited college coaches from contacting high school athletes between their freshman and junior years, but there were no rules forbidding coaches to write to middle school students—nor were there any regulations preventing a middle school kid from writing to a coach.
On April 23, 1989, Tiger wrote back to Goodman:
Dear Coach Goodman,
Thank you for your recent letter expressing Stanford’s interest in me as a future student and golfer. At first it was hard for me to understand why a university like Stanford was interested in a thirteen-year-old seventh grader. But after talking with my father I have come to better understand and appreciate the honor you have given me. I further appreciate Mr. Sargent’s interest in my future development by recommending me to you.
I became interested in Stanford’s academics while watching the Olympics and [Debi] Thomas. My goal is to obtain a quality business education. Your guidelines will be most helpful in preparing me for college life. My GPA this year is 3.86 and I plan to keep it there or higher when I enter high school.
I am working on an exercise program to increase my strength. My April USGA handicap is 1 and I plan to play in SCPGA and maybe some AJGA tournaments this summer. My goal is to win the Junior Worlds in July for the fourth time and to become the first player to win each age bracket. Ultimately I would like to be a PGA professional. Next February I plan to go to Thailand to play in the Thai Open as an amateur.
I’ve heard a lot about your golf course and I would like to play it with my dad sometime in the future.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
Tiger Woods
5'5" /100 lbs
Privately, Goodman suspected that Tiger hadn’t written the letter on his own. There are other verifiable instances when Earl told Tiger what to say in his letters, and this letter, in particular, appears to have been dictated by Earl. It was too polished and calculated for a thirteen-year-old. But Goodman didn’t care. He was so pleased that he shared Tiger’s letter with his team and bragged about how well it was crafted. The way he looked at it, Stanford had gotten a leg up on all the other colleges that would eventually be recruiting this kid.
The summer of 1989 marked a turning point for Tiger and his family. Although he was only thirteen, everyone agreed that he was ready to start competing in national junior golf tournaments. This prompted a change in parental roles. Earl retired from his job at McDonnell Douglas, which enabled him to go on the road with Tiger. Meanwhile, Kultida would remain at home to take care of the house and the dogs. Tiger’s first event was the Big I National Championship, the nation’s largest junior golf tournament. He would be up against all the top junior golfers in the country—Justin Leonard, David Duval, Notah Begay III, Chris Edgmon, Patrick Lee, and many others. In all, there were 155 participants. Tiger was the youngest.
The tournament was held at the Texarkana Country Club in Arkansas, and tournament officials had placed the junior golfers in private housing for the weekend. But Earl made it clear that he wanted no part of that. He didn’t want his son to stay with other people. Tiger, he told the tournament chair in a phone call, would be staying in a hotel, away from everyone else. He wanted to keep his son focused.
On the first day of the tournament, Tiger looked like a child among teenagers. But he shot a 71 and cruised to a three-way tie for first place. He easily made the cut, and on the third day, when the juniors were paired with PGA Tour pros, he found himself playing with twenty-three-year-old John Daly, a rough-and-tumble young gun known for being the longest hitter on the Tour. As soon as the round started, Daly began blasting balls over trees with his driver and hitting sand wedges to par 5s. Woods resisted the temptation to show off his power, instead remembering to follow Anselmo’s advice about not overswinging. After nine holes, he led Daly by two strokes. Determined not to get embarrassed by a thirteen-year-old, Daly buckled down on the back nine. Still, with three holes to play, Tiger was in position to beat or tie him. It wasn’t until Tiger bogeyed two of his last three holes that he finally ended up losing the round to Daly by two strokes. But he finished second overall in the tournament, making him the youngest player ever to finish in the top five.
The fact that Tiger had nearly beaten Daly was the talk of the tournament, and it triggered speculation about when he might turn pro. Tiger remained mum. Earl, on the other hand, went out of his way to tell reporters that Tiger was free to be whatever he wanted to be. “If he wants to be the head fireman in Memphis, Tennessee, that’s fine with me,” Earl told one journalist. “There are no expectations or inherent pressure on him to become a pro.”
That fall at Orangeview Junior High, Tiger was undoubtedly the most gifted athlete in the school. Yet he didn’t play football, basketball, soccer, or baseball—at least, not officially. “In junior high he did it secretly,” one of his closest friends recalled. “He wouldn’t tell his dad.”
Tiger couldn’t join other sports teams, but he couldn’t resist competing on the playground. In one instance he was playing football during recess when he fell and scraped his knee while leaping to catch a pass. He made a big deal out of what appeared to be a relatively minor abrasion.
“Oh, man!” he said, inspecting his knee.
“Don’t worry,” one of his friends said. “It’s not that bad.”
“You don’t understand,” Tiger told him. “My dad is going to kill me. I’m not supposed to be playing football on a playground.”