“Tiger Woods” by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian
Paperback, 514 pages
Published March 27, 2018 by Simon & Schuster
ASIN : B078M5J66Z
Date Finished: Jun 27, 2021
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
Find it at BookShop.org or Amazon
A shy kid rises to becomes a reluctant American idol and reaches the top of his sport, then with Shakespearean flare incinerates in a supernova of drugs and prostitutes. Some people still choose to believe that Eldrick “Tiger” Woods is exactly the person his sponsors and handlers have told them he is, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary (psychologists call this persistent belief bias). While in Beaverton, Oregon, reporting my book “Win at All Costs” I interviewed many former and current Nike photographers, some who had worked closely with Tiger. I’ll just say the stories about the golf great were not flattering and the crassness with which Tiger, as a married man, would speak about women was shocking. None of that made it into my book, but it certainly made it into this one—which is a must read sports biography.
My Notes:
He won fourteen majors overall on his way to seventy-nine PGA Tour victories (second all-time behind Sam Snead) and more than one hundred worldwide. He holds the record for most consecutive cuts made (142, covering nearly eight years) and number of weeks ranked no. 1 in the world (683). In addition, he was honored as Player of the Year a record eleven times, captured the annual scoring title a record nine times, and won more than $110 million in official prize money—another record.
Pure and simple, Woods changed the face of golf—athletically, socially, culturally, and financially.
At the height of Tiger’s career, golf beat the NFL and the NBA in Nielsen ratings. As a spokesman for Nike, American Express, Disney, Gillette, General Motors, Rolex, Accenture, Gatorade, General Mills, and EA Sports, he appeared in television commercials, on billboards, and in magazines and newspapers.
Our objective from the beginning was to deliver something fresh and revealing, and in the process construct a complete human portrait of a true, albeit reluctant, American idol. This book is that portrait.
Elin waited until he had taken an Ambien and drifted off to sleep. It was well after midnight when she took Tiger’s phone and started scrolling. A single text from Tiger to a mysterious recipient cut her heart in two: “You are the only one I’ve ever loved.”
The court later issued that judgment, officially recognizing the divorce of Earl and Barbara Woods, on March 2, 1972. But by that time, Earl and Kultida had been married for almost three years,
“This man was a BIGAMIST according to California laws.
There has been FRAUD perpetrated from the very beginning.”
It was clear from the outset that everything about him would be overly complicated, starting with his name: Eldrick Tont Woods.
But Earl had no intention of calling his son Eldrick. He immediately nicknamed him “Tiger,” in tribute to a comrade from Vietnam.
The question of race was even more complex. Through his mother’s side, Tiger was one-quarter Thai and one-quarter Chinese. Through his father’s side, his genes were a mix of Native American, African American, and white. His predominant heritage was clearly Asian. But Earl had every intention of raising his boy as an African American.
Neuroscientists have long studied the effects of repetition on a child’s brain, especially during the first three years. The types of repetitious experience, as well as the quality of relationships, in those first few years have a powerful and lasting influence on the brain’s development.
Based on Earl’s later accounts, a conservative estimate suggests that by the time Tiger turned one, he had spent between one hundred and two hundred hours watching his father hit golf balls.
Tiger slid down from his high chair and picked up a club that Earl had cut down to size for him to make a toy. Then he waddled to the carpet patch, stood over a golf ball, and swung. The ball landed in the net, and Earl shouted to his wife, “Honey, get out here! We have a genius on our hands.” The notion of an eleven-month-old possessing the coordination to execute a successful golf swing sounds like an embellished narrative from a bragging parent. Perhaps.
Beginning when Tiger was two years old, Earl made sure he spent two hours per day hitting golf balls. At an age when most toddlers were developing motor skills and feeling different textures by doing things like playing in sandboxes, Tiger was on a golf course with his father, developing the habit of practice, practice, practice.
It’s easy to see this as a funny moment, but Tiger’s appearance on The Mike Douglas Show also revealed that he shared the textbook attributes of what child psychologists refer to as the gifted child: quiet, sensitive, isolated.
Miller referred to a “glass cellar” as a place where a gifted child locks away his true self while trying to become his parents’ ideal child.
Golf was a double-edged sword for him. On one hand, his anxiety disappeared and his sense of self-confidence bloomed whenever he had a club in his hands. On the other, unlike team sports that facilitate interaction and communication with teammates, golf was a game that required Tiger to spend an inordinate amount of time alone.
In 1934, the PGA of America amended its constitution to restrict its membership to “Professional golfers of the Caucasian Race.” Even though that clause had finally been expunged in 1961, country clubs like Augusta remained bastions of exclusivity for whites.
“I was constantly fighting racism, discrimination, and lack of opportunities,” Earl said.
While driving him to tournaments, she shared her philosophy with him: “In sport, you have to go for the throat,” she said. “Because if all friendly, they come back and beat your ass. So you kill them. Take their heart.”
On the course, he had only one rule: play without mercy. It was an unusually hard-edged mentality on the junior golf circuit.
But in 1987, at age eleven, Tiger entered thirty-three junior golf tournaments and won every one of them. “There’s no feeling I’ve found that matches the feeling that I’ve beaten everybody,” Tiger said. “Second place is first loser.”
“My dad deliberately used a lot of profanity when I was hitting balls, all the time, and throughout my swing,” Tiger said.
It intrigued him that Tiger was far more inclined to practice than to play a round of golf.
Gladwell coined the phrase “the 10,000-hour rule” to explain the effort that separated the greats from everyone else. “The people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else,” Gladwell wrote. “They work much, much harder.”
It was a feeling he had experienced many times previously when entering country clubs. Privately, he referred to it as The Look, which he compared to the feeling of walking into a prison with everybody staring at him.
According to court records from that time period, Earl’s annual income was just over $45,000, and his monthly expenses were in excess of $5,800. Earl was essentially paying for Tiger’s travel and tournament expenses with credit cards and what he later referred to as a “revolving home equity loan,” which he described as money borrowed against the family home each summer, only to be somehow paid back every winter. Bottom line, the family needed money, and IMG provided it. In a big way.
in or around the summer of 1991, the agency started paying Earl Woods $50,000 per year as a “junior talent scout.”
Since Tiger’s amateur status prohibited him from receiving payments, the contributions would actually go to Earl, who would give a speech prior to any round of golf with Tiger.
The USGA determined that IMG could pay Earl as long as he wasn’t designated an agent. The USGA also permitted Earl to negotiate with Nike and Titleist. Essentially, the organization was willing to look the other way because it wanted Tiger to keep participating in the US Amateur tournaments.
Another child raised his hand. “Tiger, what’s your favorite club?” Earl answered again. A third child’s hand shot up. “Yes,” Earl said, acknowledging the boy. The boy pointed at Tiger and said, “Does he talk?” Yellow highlight | Location: 1,834
“How do you like this, Bobby Jones?” Earl said, hoisting the trophy above his head as if it were his.
“A black man is the best golfer who ever lived.”
“I’m not pulling any pussy,” he told Diaz. He said it so cavalierly that it left a lasting impression. “He talked about it that way,” Diaz recalled. “He was trying to compensate for not having any game with women,
Diaz had been around Earl enough to recognize that Tiger was starting to sound more like his father. “It was just Earl’s whole macho ethos toward women,” Diaz explained. “You bang as many as you can and then leave them behind.”
“I recommended how much he should pay his mother and how much he should pay his father,” Merchant said. “Six figures for Mom and an unlimited credit card. I think his dad would get twice what his mom was getting. So if Mom was getting $100,000, Earl was getting $200,000.”
Nike’s final offer: $40 million for five years. The gold-standard endorsement deal in golf at that time was Greg Norman’s arrangement with Reebok—a reported $2.5 million per year.
“Guys, do you realize that this is more than Nike pays any athlete in salary, even Jordan?”
Nike had agreed to pay him $6.5 million per year for five years, with a $7.5 million signing bonus. In exchange for that, he would be required to film commercials, appear in photo shoots, make appearances, and wear swoosh-adorned shoes and apparel. Nike was also going to design a new line of Tiger Woods clothing.
The next day, Norton came back with Titleist’s final offer—$20 million for five years. Tiger would use the company’s clubs and balls, wear its gloves, and have its name emblazoned on his bag. Titleist was also offering to design an exclusive Tiger Woods line of equipment. He would do commercials, photo shoots, and appearances for the company.
Golf pros and golf writers saw the ad as disingenuous and questioned its accuracy. Were there actually courses in America that would not let Tiger Woods play because of the color of his skin? A columnist from the Washington Post put that question to Nike. The company conceded that no such place existed, adding that the words in the ad weren’t intended to be taken literally. That response only fueled the controversy.
Earl had taught Tiger to say very little to the press, but he rarely practiced what he preached.
But Earl wasn’t happy. He had already secured his own book deal with HarperCollins, and he was angry when he learned that IMG had persuaded Tiger to do a book. It went without saying that Tiger’s book might undercut sales of Earl’s.
One of the hardest things for Tiger to do was admit wrongdoing and apologize.
The world will be a better place to live in by virtue of his existence and his presence. I acknowledge only a small part in that, in that I know I was personally selected by God himself to nurture this young man and bring him to the point where he can make his contribution to humanity.
Remarkably, he had won two of his first seven professional tournaments.
David Letterman and Jay Leno were clamoring to have him on their shows. Bill Cosby was willing to compose an episode of the Cosby Show around Tiger just to get him to appear on the top sitcom on television.
two things about Lt. Col. Earl Woods that were in play: he never remembered to say thank you, and he never forgot a slight.
He had a very cold, ruthless side. Tiger once said that his father could “slit your throat and then sit down and eat his dinner.”
Sports Illustrated had put him on the cover of its year-end issue, naming him the 1996 Sportsman of the Year, the youngest athlete ever to win the honor.
“Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity,” Earl told Smith.
Unlike the other pushy parents behind so many talented athletes, Earl wasn’t satisfied with Tiger reaching the top of his sport. He wanted his son to eclipse mankind’s most prominent spiritual leaders.
From the time he was old enough to walk, Tiger had been told by his parents that he was different, special, chosen, a genius—and he had been treated accordingly. Through his adolescent years, he had never worked a day in his life other than on his golf game; never mowed lawns, delivered newspapers, or pumped gas. Nor did he do household chores. He wasn’t expected to take out the trash, do the dishes, or cook for himself. He was so pampered that he had never even had a babysitter. Not once.
a journalistic heavyweight as Gary Smith, Charlie Pierce was a prolific writer with a reputation for iconoclastic insight and irreverent prose.
The experience cemented the policy Earl had been advising all along when it came to dealing with reporters—just answer the question; never say a word more. Going forward, Tiger would not veer off script again.
The Grand Slam was golf’s Holy Grail. No one—not even Nicklaus or Hogan—had come close to winning the Masters, the US Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship in a single season. “Unrealistic,” O’Meara said finally.
Maureen Dowd, the New York Times political writer with a reputation for skewering presidents and senators, wrote a column titled “Tiger’s Double Bogey.”
The results reinforced a powerful truth—in the eyes of fans, winning and greatness in athletics overshadow frailties in human character.
He was the youngest player in history to earn $1 million in a season, and the first to surpass $2 million in overall career earnings.
In her book Just Can’t Stop: An Investigation of Compulsion, longtime science writer Sharon Begley references a growing body of scientific evidence that concludes compulsions are responses to anxiety.
Specifically, Begley cites creative geniuses like Ernest Hemingway, who felt so compelled to write every day that he once remarked: “When I don’t write, I feel like shit.” Hemingway’s drive may have come from a dark, tortured place, but, as Begley points out, it drove him to “literary immortality.”
Tiger Woods had developed habits that put him on a path toward golfing immortality. It would not be inaccurate to say that when he didn’t practice, he felt like shit.
When he left Chicago, he would walk away from the swing that had taken him to the top.
Earl’s book ended up selling more than 233,000 copies in hardback and almost 60,000 copies in paperback.
EA was ready to sign. But the negotiations stalled because of a contract dispute between IMG and Nike, one that boiled down to a single subclause regarding Tiger’s “interactive rights”: Nike owned them, and wanted to sell them to EA to help offset the millions they were paying Woods.
Mike Shapiro, the Tiger Woods brand manager at Nike, said Norton didn’t realize this until he pointed it out to him. Norton and his team at IMG had brilliantly orchestrated a remarkable number of deals for Tiger in a very short time. Many of them were complicated, and none more so than the Nike agreement. In the hundreds of pages of terms negotiated on Tiger’s behalf, IMG seemed to have overlooked this critical provision.
But he suddenly found himself in a standoff with Tiger’s biggest corporate partner. Nike’s lawyers held their ground, and Mike Shapiro wasn’t the least bit intimidated by Norton’s tactics. Before joining Nike, Shapiro had been the vice president of business affairs at Turner Sports, where he negotiated telecast rights with the NFL, NBA, PGA Tour, and Major League Baseball. Prior to that he’d been general counsel of the San Francisco Giants. He knew contracts, and he knew rights. There would be no endorsement deal between Tiger and EA without Nike’s approval.
Standing six feet one, Tiger arrived at the 1998 Masters weighing 170 pounds, a twenty-pound increase from his weight at the ’97 Masters. The extra weight was all muscle.
Cowan broke a cardinal rule for caddies by disclosing how much Tiger was paying him: $1,000 a week, plus 10 percent of wins. Aghast at the breach of professional protocol, the other caddies pressured Cowan to tell McDaniel he hadn’t meant to say what he said. “Nah,” Cowan said nonchalantly. “It’s fine.” Only it wasn’t.
By the end of 1999, however, Tiger was no longer on the outside looking in; he was the inside. He had taken the torch from Jack Nicklaus as golf’s supreme talent, and he had taken the torch from Michael Jordan as the world’s most famous athlete.
Golf writers, seasoned pros, and historians universally agreed that Tiger’s fifteen-stroke victory at the 2000 US Open was the single most dominant performance in golf history.
was the subject of a twelve-page profile in the New Yorker titled “The Chosen One.”
And everyone on the Tour—players, caddies, swing coaches—recognized that Tiger had established himself as the best—or damn close to it—in every single aspect of the game. Driving, ball striking, short game, putting, scoring—he didn’t have a weakness.
and the scene at Tiger’s childhood home had gotten out of hand. Women came and went. Pornography played steadily on the television. Sex toys were stuffed in drawers, and sexual favors were performed at Earl’s request. “It was a house of horrors,” recalled a former employee. “Every drawer. Every cabinet.”
In 2000, Tiger earned an estimated $54 million from endorsements. To put that in context, the most that Michael Jordan ever made off the court in a single year at that point was $45 million. But Steinberg believed that Tiger was worth still more—much, much more, especially when it came to Nike.
The two sides had been negotiating a new deal for eighteen months, and in mid-September of 2000, they finally came to an agreement on a $100 million endorsement contract. It was the richest deal of its kind in the history of sports.
five million or so hard-core players in the US
Just a couple of years earlier, in the fall of 1998, Nike’s nascent golf business had been losing about $30 million a year on about $130 million in sales. Prior to Woods’s record-setting win at the US Open in 2000, less than 15 players in an average 156-man field were playing with solid-construction balls. But after Pebble Beach, virtually everybody on the Tour wanted to try the Nike ball. Tiger had single-handedly broken Titleist’s long-standing stranglehold. Suddenly, Nike found the door to a potential 10, 12, or even 15 percent market share to be wide open.
But when García edged Tiger by a single shot to claim the $1 million prize, Woods was so upset that the future of the series was in jeopardy.
“There’s more ‘fuck you’ in Tiger Woods than in any athlete I’ve ever covered.
anything upon request—fine cuisine, a corner table, endless rounds of free drinks, exotic women, and, most of all, absolute discretion. That’s what made Vegas so attractive. It was his private playground, a place where he could indulge without fear of scrutiny, what locals called being “in the bubble.”
got to the point where PGA Tour representatives were often quietly leaving $100 tips on Tiger’s behalf with locker room attendants at Tour stops to keep his parsimonious ways out of the press. For Tiger, even the most basic human civilities—a simple hello or thank you—routinely went missing from his vocabulary.
Tiger’s inability to show gratitude, apologize, or express appreciation was rooted in his warped upbringing. His mother pampered him like a prince, and his father rarely uttered the words thank you or I’m sorry.
His unapologetically self-centered attitude was critical to his success in golf, but it had an utterly devastating impact on the way people perceived him. Sadly, Woods didn’t seem to care about the latter part.
“Between the ropes, he’s the toughest son of a bitch to compete against I’ve ever seen,” Harmon said in 2017. “But he’s not good at looking you in the eye and saying something.”
Harmon’s departure marked the start of an unprecedented drought for Tiger. He finished second at the PGA, losing by one stroke. Thirty-four months would pass before he would win another major championship.
At Nike, athletes of Woods’s wattage were never wrong.
Suddenly, Tiger pulled over to the side of the road and hit his caddie with the verbal equivalent of a 9-iron to the gut. “Stevie,” he said, “I think I’ve had enough of golf. I’d like to try to be a Navy SEAL.”
Tiger’s quest resulted in additional upper-body muscle mass, which forced him to significantly modify his golf swing yet again.
The answer may lie in the fairy-tale life that Woods desired—a heart-stopping wife and adorable children living with him in the six-bedroom mansion on Deacon Circle that he had purchased four years earlier.
But it soon became clear that he wanted it both ways—the picture-perfect marriage and the freedom to walk on the wild side.
“Tiger never allowed himself to be satisfied, because in his mind, satisfaction is the enemy of success,” said Haney. “His whole approach was to delay gratification and somehow stay hungry. It’s the way of the superachiever: the more celebrations, the less there’ll be to celebrate.”
A group of sixth graders tied me to a tree, spray-painted the word “nigger” on me, and threw rocks at me. That was my first day of school.
This was not the first time Woods had told this story about his first day in elementary school. By 2005, he had been repeating it in one form or another for well over a decade.
As best as can be determined, the tale was first told by Earl Woods, who shared it with Golf Magazine in 1992, when Tiger was sixteen years old.
No single story fueled the Tiger Woods racial narrative more powerfully than his account of being the victim of a brazen hate crime at the age of five. But under scrutiny, the incident seems to be made up.
As a human being, he might not have been lovable—or even likable—but as a performer, he possessed unsurpassed talents that he honed through a lifetime of practice.
From then on, every time Tiger wanted Jungers to fly somewhere, Bell would make all the travel arrangements, always in coach.
But sex-addiction experts see serial infidelity in a more complex light, particularly among high-powered narcissists used to being in control. In general, they say, narcissists build a brick wall around their softhearted center and fragile self-esteem. Only after treatment do they come to realize that their vulnerability drives the addiction.
“I got to hang with Michael Jackson for a long time,” said Khalilian. “Tiger reminded me a lot of Michael. He was that kid who never lived that childhood life. And he wanted to be bad. He wanted to do whatever he wanted. He wanted to do, in my opinion, what he thought he shouldn’t do because he always had to do what he was told to do.”
When told Clinton was on his way, Woods replied with a straight face, “I can’t wait to talk about pussy.”
“Even at thirty years old, he was frozen and undeveloped as a person, isolated in many ways,” recalled Streeter.
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’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 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
One of the perks of being a celebrated athlete is that tact and personality are not prerequisites for securing female companionship.
Initially, according to Braun, Woods was interested in the clean-cut girl-next-door type, and he was paying five figures for a weekend. But after a while, Braun set him up with one of her most exotic women—Loredana Jolie Ferriolo, a former Hawaiian Tropic model and Playboy Playmate whose matchmaking fee ran as high as $100,000.
“There were subtle changes below the surface,” Haney said. “Tiger’s work habits started to slip. There were more distractions.”
“Nothing that some drugs can’t take care of,” he told Haney. “I’m fine.” The first reported instance of Tiger using painkillers during a tournament was in 2002, when he experienced constant aching in his knee. By 2008, the pain was more severe, and, according to his trainer, Woods used Vicodin at the 2008 Masters to manage the extreme pain in his left knee.
Orthopedic surgeons Thomas Rosenberg and Vern Cooley, who had operated on Tiger’s left ACL in 2002, intended to clean up some of the damaged cartilage around his knee.
At thirty-two, he had won his fourteenth major, a milestone Nicklaus didn’t reach until he was thirty-five.
According to court records and other sources, Dr. Galea’s unique medical services centered around four treatments: PRP; anti-inflammatory IVs, which contained, among other things, Actovegin, an unapproved drug derived from calf’s blood; injections containing Actovegin; and “injections containing a mixture of substances including but not limited to Nutropin, a human growth hormone, injected into the knee and administered for the purpose of regenerating cartilage” and reducing joint inflammation.
According to records later obtained as part of a Florida Department of Health investigation, Galea actually made fourteen trips to treat Woods between January and August 2009, charging $3,500 per consultation plus expenses for first-class travel and lodging. Galea’s total invoices amounted to more than $76,000.
“Dr. Galea would at times inject a cocktail containing HGH into an athlete. The . . . HGH injections were designed to help regenerate cartilage growth.”
Galea admitted he had personally used HGH for ten years. So was Woods getting some kind of pharmaceutical boost to speed his recovery from injury? One source with knowledge of Dr. Galea’s treatment of Woods had no doubt. “One hundred percent,” the source said. “No question.”
Tiger may not have known exactly what Tony was putting in there.” No question has hovered over Woods more than whether he used performance-enhancing drugs. In a 2010 survey conducted by Sports Illustrated, 24 percent of the seventy-one PGA Tour pros who responded said they thought Woods “used HGH or other performance-enhancing drugs.”
After initially declining to speak on the record, Dr. Lindsay—through his Toronto-based attorney, Timothy S. B. Danson—obtained a limited doctor-patient privilege waiver from Woods, authorizing him to disclose information about his treatment of the golfer and to provide his medical opinion on whether Woods used banned substances or performance-enhancing drugs.
It was also the year that he became the first athlete in history to exceed $1 billion in career earnings. By every visible measure, Tiger Woods was alone at the pinnacle of professional sports, the most talented golfer to ever play the game, the greatest athlete of his generation, and the richest athlete of all time.
At thirty-three, he was untethered from his family by a narcissism that fed his self-destructive addictions to bodybuilding, painkillers, sleeping pills, and sex.
Woods, who started taking Ambien to combat sleeplessness back when his father was dying, was still in the grip of insomnia.
He persuaded one after another to believe that she was his only mistress. All of these women—the ones he paid and the ones he picked up—were women he could control. For the most part, they were younger than he was, less sophisticated, enamored of his status, and in the dark about his exploits. It was a situation that made it easier to maintain his secret life.
Steve Williams later told a friend that he thought the loss of the PGA Championship to Yang was the first crack in the armor.
After he fell into an Ambien-induced sleep on Thanksgiving night, she searched his text history. She found one from him that said: “You are the only one I’ve ever loved.” He had not sent that text to her. Unsure of the recipient’s identity, Elin sent a text to the person from Tiger’s phone. It read, “I miss you. When are we seeing each other again?” Before long, a reply came back. While her husband slept, Elin called the mysterious number, and Uchitel picked up. Immediately recognizing her voice, Elin lost it.
two bottles of pills—the sleep aid Ambien and the painkiller Vicodin—that she said her husband was taking.
Nike immediately made clear that it was standing by Woods, issuing a strong statement that he and his family had the company’s full support.
Although terms were not disclosed, it would later be reported that Woods had paid $10 million to Uchitel in exchange for a comprehensive confidentiality agreement that prohibited her from saying anything whatsoever about him.
Accenture became the first sponsor to cut all ties with Woods, who had been the face of the company since 2003.
One by one, Tiger’s sponsors separated from him. AT&T severed its relationship; Procter & Gamble scaled way back; and so did Swiss luxury watchmaker Tag Heuer. In the end, only Nike and EA Sports decided to stand by their man. The EA decision had gone all the way to chairman Larry Probst and the company’s board of directors—EA’s long-standing partnership with Woods balanced against the weight of damaged goods.
Now EA sensed a business opportunity. “The pendulum swung back our way from a power standpoint, and I know we got some concessions that we’d been wanting,” said Chip Lange, vice president of marketing for EA at the time. First and foremost was the ability to supplant Woods’s top billing on products in favor of an emerging Rory McIlroy.
Losing corporate sponsors was one thing; losing his family felt entirely different. In a few weeks’ time, the carefully crafted image that had taken thirteen years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build and maintain had been obliterated by his addiction to sex.
Carnes believed, sex addiction—like addiction to alcohol, compulsive gambling, nicotine, or drugs—is an illness of escape, the alternative to letting oneself feel hurt, betrayed, and, most of all, lonely.
The Enquirer snapped the photo. It would later accompany a report in the tabloid alleging that while enrolled in Gratitude, Woods confessed to cheating with as many as 120 different women.
As a result, Tiger developed into the greatest golfer who ever lived, a virtually unbeatable machine—but at the same time, he didn’t know how to love and be loved as a human being. The adoration he experienced was always tied to golf and performance.
Basketball fans had embraced Kobe Bryant when he led the Lakers to an NBA championship after being accused of rape. Football fans had welcomed back Michael Vick when he turned in the best season of his career after serving twenty-one months in federal prison for his role in a dogfighting ring. Mark Steinberg believed that golf fans would forgive and forget Tiger’s indiscretions too. The key, he told Tiger, was to perform well.
Nike aired a jarring new commercial that featured Tiger somberly staring into the camera as if facing his father. Like a voice from beyond the grave, Earl speaks to him: “Tiger, I am more prone to be more inquisitive . . . to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything?” The camera zoomed in on Tiger’s eyes as the screen faded to black and the Nike swoosh appeared.
People magazine feature writer Sandra Sobieraj Westfall.
Tiger’s mind-set had always been what separated him from everyone else. Players flat-out feared him. He had the biggest muscles, the fastest swing speed, the best overall game, the bodyguards, the toughest caddie, the biggest corporate backers, the shrewdest agent, the most money, the prettiest wife; it was all part of the outsize image that he leveraged to intimidate opponents.
“I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have to go far to find them.”
To others, Tiger appeared selfish; to Vonn, he looked familiar. Elite athletes—especially those who play individual sports—have to be self-centered.
Each tournament, it seemed, saw him setting a new personal record for worst performance ever.
The secret to Tiger’s dominance was that he was the most one-dimensional human being on the PGA Tour. The game was his life. He wasn’t prepared for life without the game.
Although Tiger’s silence toward the Frey family and Vonn may appear callous, it’s plausible that he was simply consumed by his own personal struggles with chronic pain and insomnia, relying more and more on powerful medication for relief.
He was in such bad shape that he had to walk up the steps backward. Even more troubling was the look of his eyes—glassy and bloodshot. “He was way, way, way overmedicated,” observed one eyewitness.
He posted that statement on May 24, 2017. Five days later, Woods took a potentially lethal cocktail of drugs—Dilaudid, a controlled substance prescribed for severe pain; Vicodin, another powerful opiate used for pain relief; Xanax, an antianxiety medication also used to help treat sleep deprivation; THC, the active ingredient in marijuana; and Ambien, an anti-insomnia medication—and lost consciousness while behind the wheel of his Mercedes sports car.
By combining the opiates Vicodin and Dilaudid with the powerful sedatives Xanax and Ambien, plus THC, Woods had put his life at risk—not to mention the lives of other motorists—when he got behind the wheel.
Phelps looked at Tiger’s arrest through a unique lens. “I feel like that’s a massive scream for help,” he said. The first time Woods spoke
A changed man, he stood poised to show his children—and a fresh generation of golf pros and fans—just what a living legend looks like.
The Stanford Daily provided us with copies of every article it ever published mentioning Tiger Woods. At the same time, a research librarian at Sports Illustrated shipped us boxes containing hard copies of more than a thousand articles about Tiger Woods from newspapers, magazines, journals, and other periodicals.
Journalists Jaime Diaz, Alan Shipnuck, John Strege, John Feinstein, Jimmy Roberts, and Wright Thompson were gracious in sharing their valuable insights.
Kelvin Bias was our astute fact-checker.
NOTES When reporting what Tiger said, we relied on statements he’s made—in press conferences, in interviews, or during competitions or other events that were videotaped—and on his writings, primarily those in his book The 1997 Masters: My Story. We also relied on interviews with scores of individuals who recounted direct conversations with him. Similarly, when reporting Tiger’s thoughts, we relied on statements and writings in which he discussed his thinking. We also conducted interviews with individuals with whom Tiger shared his thinking. In instances where we’ve described scenes, we interviewed at least one source who was present or had firsthand knowledge of what took place. Where we’ve reconstructed dialogue, we always attempted to interview at least one person who was a party in the conversation, and when possible we also interviewed a witness to the conversation. Additionally, we pulled quotations and dialogue from press-conference transcripts, court records, sworn affidavits, police records, video footage, and previously published works. Unless otherwise specified in these notes, direct quotations derive from interviews with the authors. Roughly half of those whom we interviewed asked not to be identified. While we seldom quoted anonymous sources, we found their input invaluable. We are particularly grateful to those who agreed to speak to us on the record: Al Abrams, Charles Barkley,
We also relied on the military records of Earl Woods obtained from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri (the official repository for military records), and records obtained from Kansas State University and the PGA Tour. died of a heart attack: Frank Litsky, “Golf: Earl Woods, Tiger’s Father, Dies,” New York Times, May 4, 2006.
“No way”: Josh Gardner and Lydia Warren, “Tiger Woods’ Tooth Was Not Knocked Out by Photographer,” DailyMail.com, January 20, 2015.
Sooner or later”: Authors’ interview with Mark O’Meara.
to relieve the discomfort: Associated Press, “Complete List of Tiger Woods’ Injuries.”
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