Tiger Finds Out What Pressure Really Is All About In Life
Up until now it had been all candy and kisses for young Tiger Woods. Magazine covers and checks for tens of thousands of dollars. Galleries packed with adoring fans and international conglomerates offering him the world. Most days, his biggest worry might be making sure his hips shifted properly to keep the correct swing arc, or some such.
Tough times? Not exactly. Since leaving Stanford two months ago to turn pro after his sophomore year, the 20-year-old had finished in the top five in five straight PGA tournaments, earned $735,000 to push his way into the Tour Championship, bought a new house in Florida and started what appears to be a radical change in the culture of golf.
Friday morning, just before 3 a.m., real life interrupted.
His father, Earl, was admitted to St. Francis Hospital after complaining of chest pains. Doctors repeatedly said Earl Woods was resting comfortably and there was nothing “life-threatening” about his situation. Hospital officials weren’t saying much, but there was some thought that the elder Woods - who like his son had been suffering flu-like symptoms in recent days - had a case of bronchitis.
With his father, first coach and guru hospitalized, Tiger was completely undone. Understandably. The presence of his mother, Kultida, didn’t help much if any. After starting the day very much in contention here, four strokes behind the leaders, he double-bogeyed the second hole, bogeyed the third, bogeyed the fourth, bogeyed the fifth, and before you knew it was 8 over par. He got himself together and birdied holes 11 and 13, but bogeyed 14 and 15 to finish Friday’s round at 8-over 78. With a two-day total of 148, he left Southern Hills 15 strokes behind leader Tom Lehman on what for everybody else was as beautiful and sunkissed a day as is imaginable.
It wasn’t for Tiger Woods, whose heart wasn’t in it. “I didn’t want to be here today,” he said. “There’s more important things in life than playing golf. I love my dad to death… . Hopefully, he’s okay. That’s where I’m going right now.” And with that, he was headed to the hospital.
In a sense, Woods officially turned pro Friday, not two months ago. For those of us lucky enough to grow up in a tranquil, two-parent household where a college education is a foregone conclusion instead of the great exception, being a grownup doesn’t begin until you have to face grownup problems. Like the first time a parent lay ill.
Kids don’t care about the hullabaloo that arises over a big contract or a flap over missing a banquet for a player-of-the-year award. At 20, that’s artificial stuff, adult stuff. Who’s to know? Who understands?
But a sick parent, that hits home, especially when you know your old man is 64 and still smokes like a chimney even after quadruple bypass surgery 10 years ago. What Tiger Woods probably does know, regardless of his interracial makeup, is that black fathers don’t often live to see their sons reach 25, no matter how much money and free stuff from Nike comes rolling in. Tiger’s too smart a kid to not understand mortality.
And it’s not a father-son relationship like even the luckiest of us enjoy. Earl Woods is a father-asarchitect. He didn’t just help give life to Tiger, he more or less created the Tiger we see now, the one with the perfect swing and no nerves who is more of a phenom than Michael Jordan or Troy Aikman or anybody out there playing sports today.
You don’t just go out and play golf when you’re 2 years old on your own. Earl did that. You don’t just go out and shoot 48 for nine holes when you’re 3 by accident. Earl did that, too. Kultida gave birth to Eldrick, Earl renamed him “Tiger.”
There are plenty of indications that Earl Woods was able to help create a champion while stopping short of being Dr. Frankenstein. Or Marv Marinovich. You remember Marv Marinovich, don’t you? Okay, then what about his son, Todd? He was the Southern Cal quarterback who was never allowed to have a Big Mac, and who had supervised workouts of sorts from the time he could take his first steps. Follow a sports prodigy home and you’ll usually find an obsessed parent.
As indelicate as it sounds now, some of us have been wondering about Earl a little bit. He’s a smart, gregarious man given to, well, overstatement. He’s already said his son would “kick Michael Johnson’s ass,” if Tiger was running the 400 even though Johnson is only the fastest or second-fastest man in the world. Earl has compared his son to Arthur Ashe and Muhammad Ali, either not knowing or not caring that Ashe and Ali made their truly lasting contributions away from the athletic arena. When he said recently that Tiger, “is the first black intuitive golfer ever raised in the U.S.,” black veteran golfers who never had the chances Tiger has cringed. Does Earl Woods know all the black golfers ever produced in the U.S.?
There’s certainly some stage father in Earl. But he also has to be credited for helping to produce a kid who is infinitely more disciplined, engaging and sophisticated than some of those one-dimensional phenoms spit out by obsessed parents. We can say, with complete certainty, that there would be no Tiger Woods without Earl’s own discipline and vision. No kid left to his own devices would be what and where Tiger Woods is today.
And nobody knows and appreciates that like the son, whose own passions and brilliance long ago took over whatever blueprint the father originally designed. Of course, the son would feel the father’s pain more than he would feel like playing golf.
Problem is, real life is going to intrude again. And again. The older Tiger gets, the more it will interrupt, the same as it does with any of us. When his father’s ill, when his mother’s ill, when a relationship is breaking up, when his wife is pregnant, when a friend dies young, when some injury or another makes him miserable. Stanford and the safeness of youth will seem so far away. But Tiger will play on anyway, and probably play well, because that’s the real life he’s chosen. They call it growing up.