Leading up to his thirtieth birthday, Tiger took an unexplained six-week hiatus from golf. During this period there was a twenty-four-day stretch—the longest in his career—when he didn’t even touch his clubs. His absence during the first few tournaments on the PGA Tour schedule in 2006 coincided with a stormy transition under way in the Woods family. At issue was Earl’s day-to-day care at the family home in Cypress, where he was confined as he struggled through the final stage of cancer. At the end of December 2005, Kultida had placed an urgent telephone call to Earl’s daughter, Royce, saying Earl was in bad shape and desperately needed someone to be with him full-time. It was a full-blown family crisis, brought on by dysfunction and resentment.
The fact was that Earl had been receiving in-home care long before Kultida reached out to Royce. Tiger had paid for nurses to come in and administer medications prescribed for his heart, his diabetes, the poor circulation in his legs, and the complications from his prostate cancer, as well as provide other medical care. On top of that, Earl had a full-time assistant—a woman who had been at Earl’s side for a number of years—to help him with everything from bathing and using the bathroom to transporting him to medical appointments. But in a fit of anger triggered by a misunderstanding concerning Earl’s care, Kultida had abruptly fired Earl’s assistant, whom she referred to disparagingly as a “housekeeper.” She was much more than that. The woman had shepherded Earl through some of the loneliest, most uncomfortable months of his life.
Royce called the blow-up between Kultida and Earl’s longtime personal assistant “a kerfuffle.” That was putting it mildly. When Kultida lost her temper, those on the receiving end of her wrath would not soon for-get. In this instance, the responsibility for cleaning up the mess fell to Royce, so she took a six-month leave of absence from her employment and began the process of relocating to Cypress. She moved in with her father and took over his day-to-day care in mid-January 2006.
Prior to Royce’s arrival in Cypress, Tiger had spent a great deal of time at the family home on Teakwood Street during his break from golf, especially around the holidays. But he remained purposely aloof from the drama that accompanied his parents’ complicated relationship. Dating back to 1996, when Kultida moved into her own place, Tiger was well aware that his father had begun hiring women to wait on him in every way. Kultida always resented these women, but Earl’s home was no longer her home, and she largely chose to ignore his choice of company after the separation.
It’s unclear how much Tiger knew about the details of what went on in his father’s house. One individual with direct knowledge of the promiscuous atmosphere there described it as a “fucking rodeo.” At one point, a young woman who showed up for a job interview wearing a super-short miniskirt and cropped halter top promptly took a seat on Earl’s lap and hugged him. She was immediately hired to be his executive travel assistant. But by the end of 2005, the environment inside Earl’s home had completely changed. He was virtually incapacitated at that point, and the only woman who remained a fixture in the home was the full-time assistant Kultida would soon cut loose.
Remarkably, none of the stress stemming from Earl’s worsening condition seemed to adversely affect Tiger’s golf game. As far back as childhood, he had always managed to thrive inside the ropes despite the dysfunction at home. His most astonishing characteristic—much more so than his ball striking or his athleticism—was his ability to compartmentalize and numb any emotional pain when he competed. When he returned to the PGA Tour at the end of January 2006, he won the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines. A week later, he won the Dubai Desert Classic. Then he won at Doral.
Tiger’s streak to start the year was made all the more impressive by the increasing complexity of his personal life. Just days before returning to the Tour and ripping off the three consecutive wins, he had paid a visit to the Naval Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewman Training Center in Coronado, California. While there, Tiger got the VIP treatment, visiting with SEAL Team 7, watching a weapons demonstration, and speaking to a class of future SEALs in training. He told them he had wanted to be one of them when he was young. Afterward, in a private conversation with the weapons instructor, Tiger asked how the SEALs managed the stress, year after year. “It’s a life,” the instructor told him. “You just do it. You keep practicing.”
It was a message that Tiger could relate to.
The only thing that seemed to be a consistent source of inspiration was Tiger’s foundation and a new education initiative. Back on 9/11, when he was in St. Louis preparing to play in the WGC–American Express Championship, the tournament was abruptly canceled. With flights grounded, Woods rounded up a rental car and started driving toward Orlando and home. Alone on the highway for fifteen hours, he had a lot of time to contemplate what mattered in his life. With the country reeling in the immediate aftermath of the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, Tiger felt inspired to do something more in the world. He didn’t have a clear vision, but he knew he wanted to focus his efforts on helping young people, and he began to see that the Tiger Woods Foundation, as then constructed, was not the best vehicle. A phone call to his father led to a brainstorming session. By the time Woods reached home, he had decided to change the focus of his foundation from golf clinics—which had become something of a circus act and had little lasting impact—and grants to community groups to something more meaningful and lasting: education. The result was a four-year effort to fund and construct the Tiger Woods Learning Center, a state-of-the-art facility focused on teaching science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to underprivileged children. The thirty-five-thousand-square-foot flagship building was constructed near his childhood home in Anaheim, a city with a high percentage of minority and low-income students.
With the grand opening scheduled for February 2006, Woods was looking to generate publicity. His foundation requested that former first lady Barbara Bush attend as a guest of honor, but after initially accepting the invitation, she had to cancel. Tiger’s team then approached California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he was unable to fit the event into his schedule. His wife, television correspondent Maria Shriver, was suggested instead, but she was not quite what the foundation was looking for in terms of star power. With time running out, Executive Director Greg McLaughlin called Casey Wasserman, a prominent entertainment and sports industry executive based in Los Angeles and the grandson of legendary Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman. Casey, in turn, reached out to attorney Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s longtime counselor. Band couldn’t help seeing the irony in Tiger’s asking Clinton for a favor.
“Did they tell you the story?” Band asked Wasserman.
The story, of course, involved the Jackie Robinson ceremony snub back in 1997, sparking a schism between Clinton and Woods that was later widened by a subsequent Ryder Cup incident in which Clinton walked into the US team’s locker room only to see Tiger walk out. Later, Woods refused to have his picture taken with Clinton when the victorious American team visited the White House. For these reasons, Tiger was sure Clinton would never go for it. The ex-president, he insisted, hated him. Woods never let a slight go, and he assumed Clinton operated the same way.
However, after much wrangling, the former president’s people came back and said Clinton would be amenable to an appearance under certain conditions: Tiger had to personally call and make the request; as an icebreaker, he wanted to play a round of golf with Woods in Orange County when he came out for the event; and he needed a private plane to travel to the West Coast.
After several moments of whining, Tiger got over his reluctance and made the call. A gracious Clinton put him at ease, and the event and golf game were scheduled. Wasserman had already agreed to provide a private plane, so the deal was done.
“Wow, that was easy,” Woods told everyone after hanging up.
On the day before the official opening of the learning center, Woods met Clinton, Doug Band, sports agent Arn Tellum, and Wasserman for the promised round of golf at Shady Canyon Country Club in Irvine. Tiger was having breakfast with McLaughlin in the clubhouse when Tellum and Wasserman approached. At that point, Woods had never met either man. Dispensing with introductions, Tiger wanted to know if the president had arrived. When told Clinton was on his way, Woods replied with a straight face, “I can’t wait to talk about pussy.”
The situation got even more awkward after Clinton arrived. Tiger’s behavior did nothing to bridge the gap between him and Clinton. At the outset, Clinton started carrying on, monopolizing the conversation, as he was known to do, before Woods interrupted and said, “How do you remember all that shit?” Once they got onto the course, Tiger acted completely indifferent to the entire group, mostly riding alone in his cart and spending an inordinate amount of time on his phone. After finishing a hole, he would routinely exit the green while others were still putting, a major breach of golf etiquette. When the president hit a wayward drive, Woods snickered. He also told a series of off-color jokes, including his go-to “black-guy condom” knee-slapper.
“He was really obnoxious,” said one observer. “It was so clear to me that day who Tiger really was. I’ve never seen the president more put off by a person than that experience.”
To make matters worse, about a week later, Clinton’s office sent a picture of Clinton and Woods on the course together and asked Tiger to personalize it and send it back to the president for framing. Whether Tiger forgot or simply ignored the request remains unclear. Many months later, a staffer for Clinton called Tiger’s office in exasperation and asked, essentially, what the fuck was going on. At that point, Tiger scribbled his name on the photograph and sent it back. Years later, a longtime Clinton staffer had unpleasant memories of the entire situation. “Clinton hauled his ass out west, and you can’t sign a picture? The whole experience was a lot of ‘I’m Tiger Woods, king of the world, go fuck yourself.’ ”
In his illustrious twenty-five-year career at 60 Minutes, Ed Bradley had profiled a wide range of subjects, from Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan to Bob Dylan and Lena Horne to Michael Jackson. With his career winding down due to ill health, Bradley had a few major interviews left on his bucket list—one of which was Tiger Woods. Bradley and his longtime producer Ruth Streeter had courted Woods for years with no success. That finally changed when Woods, wanting publicity for his new learning center, granted a two-part profile. He agreed to be interviewed as long as the 60 Minutes segment was built around the grand opening. Woods said no to Bradley’s desire to see his yacht. He said no to Bradley’s visiting his estate. And he made it clear that Elin was strictly off-limits. “He was really definite about not wanting us to meet his wife,” said Streeter. “We went left. We went right. Tried everything. But he would not let us meet her.”
Still, Bradley was eager to ask Tiger about other aspects of his life—the role his father had played in shaping him, how he had dealt with childhood celebrity, and his views on race. The interview took place in early 2006, and Bradley was uncharacteristically nervous.
Woods, on the other hand, showed no signs of anxiety. By then, Tiger had gone one-on-one with many skilled interviewers—Charlie Pierce, John Feinstein, Charlie Rose, Barbara Walters, and Gary Smith—and he’d been profiled countless times. The days of telling off-color jokes in the back of a limousine with a journalist or crying on Oprah’s couch were ancient history. From the moment he sat down with Bradley, Woods made it clear that he had no intention of opening up about anything.
This exchange was typical of how the interview went:
Woods: I’m kind of a private person.
Bradley: So how do you handle it?
Woods: Try and do the best I can.
On the subject of race, Bradley brought up the kindergarten incident, prompting a halfhearted response from Woods. “Well, they tied me to a tree. And, you know, threw rocks at me. It happened.”
When Bradley asked why it happened, Woods said he didn’t know. Trying a different approach, Bradley asked what his parents had said about the incident, and Tiger said he couldn’t remember. Even when Bradley ventured into safe territory, such as Woods’s greatness as a golfer, he churned out short sentences that relayed next to nothing.
Afterward, Bradley and Streeter rode together to the airport. En route, like an old married couple, they rehashed the interview. “We didn’t lay a glove on him,” Bradley said to her. “We didn’t touch him.”
It was a remarkable admission coming from Bradley, whose streetwise style and innate ability to connect with his subjects had established him as the most skilled interviewer at 60 Minutes. “His best quality was that he could be spontaneous,” said 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager. “No matter how the subject responded, Ed could come up with just the right next question.” He had even managed to get Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh to open up about his motivation for carrying out one of the worst terrorist attacks in American history. But Woods proved to be more fiercely guarded than a man facing the death penalty. “Even at thirty years old, he was frozen and undeveloped as a person, isolated in many ways,” recalled Streeter. “There was no there there. To be fair, I don’t think Tiger was trying to hide anything from us. I think he was doing what he had programmed himself to do. There was something weird, and we couldn’t unravel it.”
In fact, there was a lot that Woods kept hidden from Bradley, especially with respect to his marriage and his image as a family man. “I have found a life partner, a best friend,” Woods told Bradley. “You know, Elin’s been incredible for me. She’s brought joy and balance in my life, and we love doing things together.”
In truth, by 2006, Tiger’s life was anything but balanced, and nothing was more out of sync than his marriage. He and Elin were seeing little of each other, and when they were together in public, Tiger looked disengaged and empty. Meanwhile, he was spending much more time on the road, where he increasingly pursued other women behind Elin’s back. Yet he told Bradley, “Family always comes first. Always has been in my life, and always will.”
On May 2, 2006, Earl’s kidneys started shutting down, and he was placed on oxygen. Tiger was with Jamie Jungers at his nearby luxury condo in Newport Beach when his mother telephoned him with the news. Woods immediately drove to the house on Teakwood, where Royce was doing all she could to keep her emotions in check. It was eminently clear that the end had arrived. Tiger spent a few hours with his dad that evening, but then he returned to his condo, where he had sex with Jungers. “I could see he was preoccupied and worried about his dad,” Jungers would later say. “But when he went to bed, he still wanted to have sex as usual.”
At about three a.m., Tiger was awakened by the phone. Jungers was lying next to him when he picked up and heard his mother’s voice on the other end of the line. She had called to tell him that his dad had passed. Tiger didn’t shed a tear, nor did he say a word. He’d known for some time that his father was dying, and now the dreaded moment had arrived. Woods hung up and stared blankly.
So much has been made of the storied father-son relationship between Earl and Tiger. It’s hard to count how many times Woods has said over the years that his father was his best friend, the person who understood him better than anyone else. And the scene of Tiger in Earl’s arms after winning a tournament had become so commonplace that the networks always had a cameraman ready to capture the shot at the end of their broadcasts. Yet when Earl passed, Tiger wasn’t at his father’s bedside but rather a few miles away, in bed with a lingerie model he had picked up in Vegas. Earl took his final breaths in the arms of his daughter, who had stayed by his side day and night for the final four months of his life.
“People are aware of how close Tiger and my father were,” Royce said. “But they are not aware of how close Dad and I were. I’ve always been Daddy’s girl. When he passed away, it was very hard. I was just lost. Very lost. He was a major, major part of my life.”
Earl’s death devastated Tiger as well. Although he didn’t verbalize it, he had lost his best friend, his anchor, the one person who understood him the most. But Tiger didn’t grieve in front of others. At a private wake and funeral service held for Earl in Southern California, people who had known him since Tiger first burst onto the national scene—guys like Joe Grohman, now the head pro at the navy course, and golf writer Jaime Diaz—were in attendance. So were some of Tiger’s famous acquaintances, such as Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan, as well as Tiger’s newest associates, like Hank Haney. They couldn’t help noticing that Woods remained stoic when talking about his father’s life. And his comments about his father were so emotionless that it was hard for some who were there to remember what he had said.
Earl was cremated, and after his funeral, the family flew on a private plane to Kansas to bury his ashes in Manhattan, the town where he had been born. Earl’s children from his first marriage always assumed that he would receive a traditional headstone. They were surprised to discover long after the burial that no headstone had been ordered. To this day, the father of the wealthiest athlete in history remains buried in an unmarked grave. It’s an inexplicable fact that was still a source of speculation and dismay to certain family members a decade after the fact.
“Tida handled all the burial and funeral arrangements,” Royce said in 2016. “So as to why, I don’t know. I don’t even know if there is a reason.”
Only Kultida can explain the motivation behind her decision to bury her husband in this manner, but the biggest clue may be found in a statement she made back when Earl was still alive. Referring to him, she said: “Old Man is soft. He cry. He forgive people. Not me. I don’t forgive anybody.”
Kultida Woods may have spoken broken English, but she wasn’t hard to understand. And no one needed her forgiveness more than Earl. His relationship with her began with an act of betrayal when he brought her to America while he was still married to his first wife. Eventually, he betrayed Kultida too. Along the way, he degraded her with verbal abuse and insults. She bristled when Earl piled impossible expectations on their only child—saying that Tiger had been sent by God and that he would be the most important human ever—and when he hogged the credit for Tiger’s success. If it had been up to Earl, his son would have financed the construction of a giant monument with an inscription that said something along the lines of “Here lies the father of Tiger Woods.” But it was up to Kultida, and she buried him in a way that would make him virtually impossible to find. The closest Earl got to public recognition was an obituary in the New York Times. The headline read: “Golf: Earl Woods, Tiger’s Father, Dies.”
A few weeks after burying his father, Tiger disappeared to a mountainous region close to the Mexican border, outside the little-known city of Campo. Following a winding road that passed through a stretch of barren desert, he arrived at a remote facility called the Mountain Warfare Training Facility Camp Michael Monsoor. It was a place where the landscape resembled Afghanistan. In an award-winning profile that appeared in ESPN The Magazine in 2016, journalist Wright Thompson detailed what happened there. Wearing camouflage pants and a brown T-shirt, Tiger carried an M4 assault rifle and had a pistol strapped to his right leg as he entered what’s known as a kill house—a place where SEALs simulate clearing rooms and rescuing hostages under extreme duress. With a SEAL instructor running him through the house, Tiger took fire from high-powered paint rounds that cause large bruises on impact. He also fired at targets dressed up as terrorists with weapons. “Eventually,” Thompson wrote, “Woods learned how to clear a room, working corners and figuring out lanes of fire, doing something only a handful of civilians are ever allowed to do: run through mock gun battles with actual Navy SEALs.”
With the 2006 US Open just two weeks away, Tiger was off the grid, handling guns and dodging mock enemy fire rather than gripping clubs and working on his short game. Even the SEALs were a bit perplexed. One of the SEAL instructors, a petty officer whose father had also served as a Green Beret in Vietnam, pulled Tiger aside for a private conversation outside the shooting facility.
“Why are you here?” the instructor asked respectfully.
“My dad,” Tiger told him, insisting that his father had told him he would be a golfer or a special ops soldier. “My dad told me I had two paths to choose from.”
This was a new narrative, one that diverged quite significantly from the consistent story that Earl had told about raising Tiger. In the three books Earl published and in the countless interviews he granted over the years, there is no mention of him telling his son that he had a choice between being an athlete or a soldier, nor had Tiger ever said anything publicly about such a decision. But in the aftermath of his father’s death, he had a lot weighing on his mind.
“I definitely think he was searching for something,” the SEAL instructor told Thompson. “Most people have to live with their regrets. But he got to experience a taste of what might have been.”
Tiger’s foray with the SEALs panicked Hank Haney, one of the few people in Tiger’s inner circle who had access to his schedule. Haney fired off a text message:
With the US Open 18 days away, do you think it was a good idea to go on a Navy SEALs mission? You need to get that whole SEALs thing out of your system and stick to playing Navy SEAL on the video game. I can tell by the way you are talking and acting that you still want to become a Navy SEAL. Man, are you crazy? . . . That Navy SEAL stuff is serious business. They use real bullets.
Woods wasn’t crazy. He was suffering and emotionally disoriented. Not long after vanishing into the Southern California desert with the SEALs, Tiger ended up in a nightclub in New York when he spotted a group of women. One of them, Cori Rist, a curvaceous blonde in her late twenties, caught his eye. Rist turned out to be an exotic dancer at the Penthouse Executive Club on Manhattan’s West Side. Moments later, he sent an associate over to use the familiar pickup line: “Tiger would like to meet you.”
As Rist approached his table, Tiger scooted over, making room for her. Then he started telling her jokes. At one point, he put the tips of his shoes together, moving his feet up and down, and asked: “What’s this?”
Rist wasn’t sure.
“A black guy taking off his condom,” he said, laughing.
It was one of the jokes he had told the girls at the GQ photo shoot in front of Charlie Pierce back in 1997. Nine years later, he was using the same sophomoric humor as a substitute for conversation. One of the perks of being a celebrated athlete is that tact and personality are not prerequisites for securing female companionship.
After some drinks, he led Rist to a friend’s apartment and took her to bed. They exchanged phone numbers and started sleeping together whenever he came to New York. When they were together, he would talk a lot about his father and how he’d made him the man that he became. When they weren’t together, Tiger would repeatedly text her, wanting to know whom she was with. As an exotic dancer in a high-end strip club, Rist was used to possessive men. But Tiger was unusual. “He was very jealous,” she said. “It was almost like high school, when you call someone all the time: ‘Where are you? How do you feel about me?’ He needed constant attention and reassurance.”
He needed no such reassurance on the golf course. Six weeks after Earl’s death, Tiger returned to the PGA Tour and played in the US Open at Winged Foot Golf Club just outside New York City. It was the first time in thirty-seven majors as a professional that he missed the cut. But a month later at the British Open, he finished eighteen under to win his third Claret Jug and his eleventh major championship. He played so flawlessly that his ball-striking was described by even the toughest critics as sheer perfection. His swing coach pointed to Tiger’s performance at Royal Liverpool Golf Club as the greatest display of iron play he had ever witnessed. In four rounds, Tiger didn’t hit a single fairway bunker. He hit driver only once in seventy-two holes.
Tiger dedicated his majestic performance to Earl, and as soon as he sank his final putt, he did something he hadn’t allowed himself to do since Earl died: break down. First, he buried his face in the shoulder of caddie Steve Williams and wept as the two men stood on the green. Then he sobbed like a baby as Elin put her arms around him and he exited the course. “It just came pouring out of me,” Woods said, “all the things my dad meant to me, and the game of golf. I just wish he could have seen it one more time.”
The victory at the British Open marked the start of one of the most sublime runs of Tiger’s career. The next week he won the Buick Open, then the PGA Championship by five strokes, making him the first player in the modern era to win more than one professional major in consecutive years. A week after that he won the Bridgestone Invitational. Two weeks later, he won the Deutsche Bank Championship. He finished the year by winning six straight tournaments, displaying absolute and utter dominance in every phase of the game. But his iron play in particular was what separated him from everyone else. “In 2006, Tiger was eight feet four inches better than the Tour average with his irons,” explained Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee. “That is unfathomable. A foot would separate thirty to fifty players, and Tiger was eight feet better than the Tour average.”
Golf historians still point to Tiger’s performance in 2000 as the single greatest season in golf history, but in the six years that had elapsed since then, he had become a more precise and consistent golfer. In 2006, for example, he won eight of the fifteen tournaments he entered. It was unprecedented in the modern era for a pro golfer to win more than 50 percent of the time. The most extraordinary aspect of Tiger’s splendid display of victories to close out the ’06 season was that his game had finally reached perfection at a time when he was struggling more than ever in his personal life.
Weeks before his father died, Tiger had been in Las Vegas to film a new commercial for Nike. It was shot by renowned cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, whose work on Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan earned him two Oscars. Tiger dressed all in black for the shoot, which took place in a sound studio. With Woods using his driver, Kamiński filmed him face-on and from several other angles, capturing his swing from takeaway to follow-through. Then he slowed down the sequence to fifty-three seconds and added a cello solo. The commercial—titled “Swing Portrait”—was a tribute to the greatest golf swing in history.
Viewed another way, the ad ingeniously captured the dichotomy of a man both blessed and cursed by parents who found little in common outside of a desperate devotion to their son, a son whose own life now was, tragically, descending into a similar sense of desperation and sadness just as he finally reached perfection in the game. The man most responsible for this predicament was not there to shepherd his son through the sadness, nor was he there to witness the culmination of triumphs that ultimately emerged from the little boy who had started imitating his father by hitting balls in the garage as a toddler.
Earl surely had his flaws, but he was nevertheless the one person Tiger looked to as a North Star. Now that star had disappeared, and Woods was indulging in his personal obsessions like never before, forcing him into an exhausting game of lying and covering up more and more to maintain his wholesome image. Tiger, more than anyone realized at the time, was living a lie.