The Secret History of Tiger Woods
April 21, 2016 8:03 PM   Subscribe

ESPN's noted longform writer Wright Thompson charts the decline and fall of Tiger Woods in the years after his father's death.

"The death of his father set a battle raging inside the world's greatest golfer. How he waged that war - through an obsession with the Navy SEALs - is the tale of how Tiger lost his way."
posted by chris88 (18 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've always felt kind of sorry for Tiger. His transition from sheltered child prodigy to unapproachable uber-celebrity was overnight, without any stretch of "being a normal person" in between. I remember thinking one of the first times I read an in depth Tiger feature on him and his Dad, "what going to happen to him when he's gone?" Nothing good. It really seems like his Dad was his only real friend, and of course he got pretty messed up when Earl passed. Even now he's a tragic figure, his personal life messes got thrown wide open for everyone to see, and right afterwards his body betrayed him much earlier than expected. I hope he can eventually have a second act in life as something else.
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:35 PM on April 21, 2016 [10 favorites]


Beautiful article. (As I've come to expect when I see Wright Thompson's name.) I'm surprised but very glad they got the quotes and insight from Michael Jordan, one of the few other people who have been in Tiger's shoes.
posted by sallybrown at 8:47 PM on April 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


One thing that made me realize how messed up Tiger Woods' life was came from a quote from his father about his father's hopes for Tiger:
"Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity," Earl Woods said. No kidding? Smith was understandably skeptical, so he followed up: Would the kid do more than Buddha, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela?

"Yes, because he has a larger forum than any of them," Earl said.
Basically, the whole childhood golf training regimen his father put him through was to made Tiger famous so that he would have a podium to influence the world.

Except that Tiger is just a really, really good golfer, and not especially charismatic, and kind of awkward, You can even see this in the commercials he did, where basically his job was to show his face briefly after the product was presented, and then disappear. He wasn't a compelling "presence", and he didn't want to be: he just wanted to concentrate on golf and pursue his other interests.

His father wasn't content raising a child to be one of the best golfers in the world-- Tiger had to use golf to become a "world leader" to satisfy his father's vision. When you have the precise opposite temperament, that's going to do some damage to you.
posted by deanc at 9:09 PM on April 21, 2016 [8 favorites]


"Why are you here?" Brown remembers asking.

"My dad," Tiger said, explaining that Earl had told him he'd either end up being a golfer or a special operations soldier. "My dad told me I had two paths to choose from."


I wouldn't call that father a friend, quite frankly.

But look - it took Jack Nicklaus something like 25 or so years to win all of his majors. Longevity and balance speaks for something, and Nicklaus was able to handle some ups and downs and fix problems with his game when he started slipping.

He didn't take the path of, say...

On July 22, he finished tied for 12th at the Open Championship, and then came home. In the weeks afterward, he'd announce that he'd ruptured his left ACL while jogging in Isleworth. His news release did not mention whether he'd been running in sneakers or combat boots. At the time, he chose to skip surgery and keep playing. Tiger's account might be true, as might the scenario laid out in Haney's book: that he tore the ACL in the Kill House with SEALs. Most likely, they're both right. The knee suffered repeated stresses and injuries, from military drills and elite-level sports training and high-weight, low-rep lifting. A man who saw him doing CQD training says, "It's kind of funny, when you have an injury it almost seems like a magnet for trauma. He almost never had something hit his right knee. It was always his left knee that got kicked, or hit, or shot, or landed on. Always the left knee."

And from reading the article in its entirety, it really looks like the military physical training/"kill house" shit he took up not only did nothing to improve his game - it led to his body breaking down through overtraining, and doing it in a way that wasn't specific to working on his game.

Let alone the fact that the attention and money that became involved when Woods was at the height of his game were nothing like what his PGA predecessors ever dealt with. So it had to be one hell of a pressure cooker.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:12 PM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


I remembered watching this on TV when it first aired: Tiger Woods at 5 on "That's Incredible." Lots of practice footage and interviews with his dad.

I can't be sure, but I feel like even then I thought his dad was a bit intense. Tiger and I are the same age, but it still made an impression.
posted by klanawa at 9:31 PM on April 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Right, elite athletes have more ways of staying in superhuman shape longer than ever before now, look at your Kobe Bryant's, Dirk Nowitzki's, Tim Duncans, Roger Federer's, Serena Wiliams'. But they're all doing specific training regimes within their areas of competence, and highly strategic management of when they're using their bodies. Duncan's Spurs are pioneers in limiting his minutes played to only the most effecitve ones possible. Kobe and Dirk redefined their games as they grew into older players. Serena and Federer for the most part only put their full effort into the majors. Meanwhile Tiger's messed up relationship with his dad had him out playing Seal Team Six, when the real professional guys are burned up at probably the same rate as an NFL running back, on top of his already maybe too intense training schedule.
posted by T.D. Strange at 9:34 PM on April 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


Aside from the literally crushing physical demands that SEAL team training requires, I wonder if Tiger Woods ever even tried to resolve the unbridgeable gulf between the anonymity that guys who are doing that sort of thing absolutely require (at least while they're doing it; afterwards, of course, they can become like Chris Kyle) and the fact that he was already Tiger Fucking Woods. (Not to mention that, in 2007, he was already very near the age limit for enlisting in the Navy, which is 34.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:36 PM on April 21, 2016


can you imagine having to talk about your sex life in a news conference with your mom in the front row

I can handle it as long as the guy with the news that I actually didn't graduate high school and have to go back and finish stays out of it
posted by thelonius at 10:39 PM on April 21, 2016 [18 favorites]


That is some fine writing. Also very fair and insightful. Thanks for posting this.
posted by mosk at 1:38 AM on April 22, 2016 [4 favorites]


I can handle it as long as the guy with the news that I actually didn't graduate high school and have to go back and finish stays out of it

Oh god, everyone has that one?
posted by leotrotsky at 4:23 AM on April 22, 2016 [5 favorites]


I don't get the secret history premise. There were statements in that story that were impossible for anybody except maybe Tiger's psychiatrist to know if he had done a couple hundred hours of psychoanalysis. In other words, this is fiction.

Look forward to the secret history of Prince written up in the New Yorker with no disclaimer. That should be entertaining as fuck.
posted by bukvich at 6:36 AM on April 22, 2016


Oh god, everyone has that one?

I'm turning 33 and I have this dream a few times a year. I figured it would stop in a few years.

Then my mom, who is 30 years older than me told me she still has that dream. And it's always high school, never college. The human mind is the greatest troll.
posted by Dark Messiah at 6:44 AM on April 22, 2016 [6 favorites]


Off-topic, but regarding the “I didn’t finish school” dream, here’s the obligatory XKCD.
posted by Riki tiki at 8:10 AM on April 22, 2016 [2 favorites]


These bits jumped out at me:
"I just reached out to the guys I know who jumped with him and interacted with him," says a retired SEAL. "Not a single one wants to have any involvement, or have their name mentioned in the press anywhere near his. His interactions with the guys were not always the most stellar, and most were very underwhelmed with him as a man." ... "...He's a weird f---ing guy. That's weird s---. Something's wrong with you."

...

...but even with the boasts and dirty jokes, she saw him as more of a big kid than a playboy. "Nerdy and socially awkward" are her words, and he seemed happiest standing in the river riffing lines from the Dalai Lama scene in Caddyshack.

...

Many of these relationships had that odd domestic quality, which got mostly ignored in favor of the tabloid splash of threesomes. Tiger once met Jaimee Grubbs in a hotel room, she told a magazine, and instead of getting right down to business, they watched a Tom Hanks movie and cuddled. Cori Rist remembered breakfast in bed. "It was very normal and traditional in a sense," she says. "He was trying to push that whole image and lifestyle away just to have something real. Even if it's just for a night."
Underwhelmed with him as a man. He's just a nerdy kid, and his Dad has created a fantasy world in his mind that he's physically talented enough for but never connects with naturally and easily, a world of manly men and womanizers. He's an introvert who connects slowly and cautiously with people, so his connection with his father looms huge in his mind, overwhelms other voices that might've helped him make real connections, that might've helped him find things he was interested in doing for himself, in his own world instead of his father's.

There are a lot of guys like that, nerdy guys living lonely lives in some fantasy world or another, but few of them are on the world's stage.
posted by clawsoon at 8:45 AM on April 22, 2016 [7 favorites]


Tiger Woods as Jay Gatsby. A sad story. I enjoyed reading it.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 12:32 PM on April 22, 2016 [1 favorite]


He's not Jay Gatsby. More like Patrick Bateman with a Titleist instead of a chainsaw.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:29 AM on April 23, 2016 [1 favorite]


Coincidentally, I just read another portrait of a guy like him, from 2005's "Sunday Money" by Jeff MacGregor.

"Like Tiger Woods, or Pinocchio, Jeff Gordon was turned on the lathe of a father's ambitions."

The trajectory was similar - winning races by the time he was six under his father's dominating tutelage, becoming the youngest NASCAR champion ever, becoming the bland corporate face of the sport, drawing in huge numbers of new fans, having the Perfect Marriage to the Perfect Wife, and then having it all fall apart because of infidelity. There were two differences that stood out: He kept racing, and was able to go back to winning, and, unlike Tiger, a lot of fans hated him. He was Big City Smooth in the most redneck major sport of all, "Homo Gordon" to Dale Earnhardt Sr.'s manly manliness.

Or was that last part true of Tiger, too, in one way or another, perhaps because of his race or physical fitness or whatever?
posted by clawsoon at 10:05 AM on April 23, 2016


I forget who said it on here, but "Tiger Woods" is an anagram for "Got So Weird."

also while I'm here, "debit card" = "bad credit"
posted by ostranenie at 2:42 PM on April 23, 2016 [3 favorites]


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