(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The first 150 pages of Tiger Woods, an exhaustively researched biography of golf’s biggest star, could be plucked out of a heartwarming children’s movie: A young man of modest means, and a person of color as well, conquers the elite world of golf through hard work and steadfast vision. At 21 he wins his first professional major tournament, the 1997 Masters, by a record-shattering 12 strokes. On the final green at Augusta National Golf Club, our hero’s father, Earl, embraces him and whispers, “I love you, son, and I’m so proud of you.”
Cue the swelling violins as words crawl across the screen: Tiger Woods would go on to win 79 PGA tournaments, including 14 major championships, as the greatest golfer of all time.
But what investigative journalists Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian make clear in Tiger Woods (Simon & Schuster, $30), out Tuesday, March 27, is that life for Woods was never free from extraordinary pressure. His father called him the “Chosen One” and predicted he would “change the course of humanity”—burdening the young Woods, in the authors’ opinion, with “more impossible expectations than any parent in the history of sports.” Kultida, his Thai mother, helped inculcate his assassin-like instincts on the golf course. “You have to go for the throat,” she would say, because if you don’t, “they come back and beat your ass.”
From a golf perspective, the parenting strategy worked. The authors estimate that Woods surpassed 10,000 hours of deliberate practice—the amount of time some experts believe is required to achieve mastery in any discipline—by age 12. He was the PGA Tour Player of the Year a record 11 times and, in his early 30s, became the first athlete to earn more than $1 billion.
What Benedict and Keteyian do better than in any biography I’ve read about Woods is detail the human costs of this machine-like focus. Most chilling are the anecdotes from those who were once close to him: He dispatched his high school girlfriend, who’d changed her college plans to be near him, by leaving her suitcase at the front desk of a hotel with a curt letter saying he never wanted to see her again. In 2002 he dismissed swing coach Butch Harmon in a similarly coldhearted way.
And when excellence in golf wasn’t enough, Woods sought adrenaline rushes through body-damaging workouts, Navy SEALs training, high-stakes gambling, and, most famously, extramarital affairs with dozens of women. The MGM Grand in Las Vegas provided a secluded, back-alley door for some of these trysts; at the Bellagio’s exclusive nightclub, a VIP host would help set them up by advising a pretty girl on the dance floor that “Tiger would love to meet you,” and escorting her to his table.
Despite the tawdry details, readers may find their sympathies for Woods growing as the Shakespearean tragedy of his life unfolds. Rich, famous, and dominant on the course, the man depicted here was a loner and often miserable, particularly after his father died in 2006. Only when his infidelities were exposed in 2009 did Woods, according to the authors, begin to recognize the degree to which his life was a lie. More than 40 million people watched or listened live to a 13-minute apology to his then-wife in February 2010. For a proud and private Woods, the humiliation was overwhelming.
Last May, his story seemed to take an even worse turn when he was arrested for driving under the influence of a disabling cocktail of painkillers after a spinal fusion procedure. The surgery seems to have worked, though: In his last three tournaments, Woods has finished near the top of the leaderboard for the first time since his last win in 2013. Improbably, he’ll enter the Masters on April 5 as a betting favorite.
Should Woods start winning again and make a credible run on Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 major championships, it may not matter whether, behind the scenes, he’s a better man today. He played some of his best golf in 2008, while his personal life spiraled out of control. The authors present Woods as a man “both blessed and cursed” by his otherworldly ability to separate his off-the-course problems from his performance on it. Tiger Woods is a fascinating analysis of the former, but for golf fans—and probably for Woods himself—his worth will still be judged by the latter.
To contact the author of this story: John Paul Newport in New York at jp@jpnewport.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Gaddy at jgaddy@bloomberg.net.
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