by scott michaux
In January 2006, I wasn’t prepared for a one-on-one interview with Tiger Woods. Nobody ever is.
This was my third Tiger rodeo in five years of producing exhaustive takeout cover stories on the reigning Masters champions for The Augusta Chronicle’s annual preview edition, and every journalist knows sit-downs with Woods don’t exist. The mission is to go to some tournament for a week and try to steal as many moments as possible during press conferences and post-round scrums and hope you get enough to blend it with material from more accessible sources.
Showing up late Monday afternoon at Torrey Pines to pick up credentials and learn the lay of the land, I walked out to the far end of the driving range to get my bearings and maybe catch a straggling player before he left for a pre-tournament column.
The only player still working the range with his swing coach at 5 p.m. on a Monday was Tiger Woods. He was wrapping things up with Hank Haney, so I hung around to reintroduce myself and let him know I’d be there all week gathering and would appreciate any help he could offer.
“How about right now?” he said.
“I thought there would be more of us out here. I’d like to say I have made a little bit of difference in this game as far as accessibility into our sport – kids, minorities participating in the game. I’d like to do more. I would love to do more.”
TIGER WOODS
You know that recurring dream where you show up for a test and haven’t studied? Well, this wasn’t a dream. Armed with only a vague idea for a theme about where golf was 10 years into Tiger’s professional career, it was time to wing it and hope to get through the next five minutes or so without embarrassing myself.
Not knowing how many innings there’d be, there were no at-bats to waste. So the first big swing referenced all the efforts and initiatives to introduce golf to underserved communities, but 10 years into the Tiger era he was still the only guy who looked like him on the PGA Tour.
“I thought there would be more of us out here,” he acknowledged. “I’d like to say I have made a little bit of difference in this game as far as accessibility into our sport – kids, minorities participating in the game. I’d like to do more. I would love to do more.”
Of course, the issue isn’t that simple. His emergence as the most visible golfer in the world caused interest in the game to grow exponentially in all corners of the globe. It also sparked drastic increases in purses, which attracted more players from every continent to the PGA Tour. Focusing on the lack of other Black golfers on tour diminishes the scope of Tiger’s influence.
“You have to have a bigger base,” Woods explained, citing time and tools as the foundation to build a pyramid. “Yes, I’ve seen a bunch of junior golfers who have a lot of skill. But as you grow up through the ranks from local junior golf to state and national and college and amateur golf, at each level you think this guy is can’t miss and he doesn’t make it. … That process, you need to have a bigger base. If you only have 10 guys, what are the chances of those 10 guys versus a million?”
We talked about the recently launched Tiger Woods Foundation and Learning Center, which includes golf as one of those tools to motivate kids toward bigger opportunities in life.
“If we produce golfers, that’s fine,” he said. “But I want to produce good citizens and citizens that will help and give back.”
Woods, whose ancestry includes Thai, Chinese, Native American, African and European bloodlines, never liked to pigeonhole himself as a Black man. But as former NBA star Charles Barkley so uniquely pointed out, “they let your ass know you’re Black when you get the hate mail.”
So, 10 years and 10 major wins into his professional career, we talked about the hate mail, of which he admitted, “It’s less; I wouldn’t say it’s less and less.”
“It happens,” Woods said. “I still receive them now to this day, and I always will.
“There are people out there who don’t quite understand. They have a belief that is different than ours. That’s just the way it is. I try to have everyone understand that’s not the way it’s supposed to be, but we have generations that believe in one thing. It takes generations to unlearn it.
“Look at our society. Look at how it is. [Racism is] still prevalent in the inner cities. It’s prevalent in suburbia. It’s prevalent everywhere. It’s just not as open as it used to be, but it’s still there. It’s going to take time.
“Our generation is umpteen times better than what my father grew up in. My father wasn’t allowed to stay in the same hotels as his team when he played college ball. Charlie Sifford wasn’t allowed to play on the PGA Tour. I am allowed. Charlie wasn’t allowed to play in the Masters. I am allowed to play in the Masters. These are things that happened and transpired in one generation. One generation from now, things should be umpteen times better.”
Afraid any lull would invite Woods to withdraw and end the interview, I kept asking the first thing that came into my head as we stood behind his car in the parking lot. Not a single question was about his fourth green jacket won in a playoff over Chris DiMarco or the iconic pitch-in on the 16th hole where his Nike ball travelled a parabolic route across the green and hung on the lip before dropping and igniting a roar unlike any other.
It was mostly about the bigger picture or more personal things, including his dying father whom he desperately wanted to win another major for (Earl Woods died four months later in May before Woods won the 2006 Open Championship and PGA Championship). Tiger never flinched from the weight of expectations placed on him when his Pops famously promised his son would “change the course of humanity.”
“He was being truthful and honest about how he felt his son could do in life,” Woods said. “I certainly understand that.
“I didn’t grow up in a time when Blacks were treated different than whites, but he did. … For him having gone through all that and seeing what I accomplished at Augusta [in 1997], it was monumental for him.”
Not once did Tiger ever get impatient and step toward the car to end the inquiry. Absent his usual gatekeepers – agent Mark Steinberg or caddie Steve Williams (Haney just sat in the car on his phone) – Woods didn’t shut it down. Eventually, the adrenaline wore off and my unprepared mind ran out of anything to say except, “Thank you, Tiger; I really appreciate this.”
“No problem,” he said, before adding a courtesy lie. “Any time.”
I had been on the ground in Southern California for only a couple of hours. As Woods spun his car into the traffic on North Torrey Pines Road, I looked down at the digital recorder. It told me 28 of those minutes were spent talking alone with Tiger Woods.
