Chapter 9

Old Marsh Golf Club

Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

December 31, 1991

On New Year’s Eve, Tiger takes a car ride on I-95 north to Palm Beach Gardens and the Old Marsh Golf Club, PGA pro Greg Norman’s unofficial headquarters.

Yesterday, he celebrated his sixteenth birthday by winning the 1991 Junior Orange Bowl International Golf Championship, part of the youth sports and arts festival held in conjunction with the Orange Bowl each year in Coral Gables, Florida.

It’s a far better outcome than last year’s loss. “We had a debriefing,” Earl told Golf Digest reporter Jaime Diaz. “This is what I learned in Vietnam—you have a debriefing after a battle. He learned that he can’t win everything, even though he may want to. Right now it’s important for him to enjoy. When he’s 17, I fully expect him to win everything. But not now.”

IMG agent Hughes Norton and the agency founder, Mark McCormack, are also thinking about Tiger’s future—as a prospective client.

International Management Group has been keeping in touch with the Woods family for ten years, and they’ve recently brokered an arrangement with the USGA that protects Tiger’s amateur status while also providing financial support, in the form of hiring Earl Woods as a talent scout. In return for scouting promising junior golfers, IMG will pay Earl $50,000 per year.

There’s no question that Tiger is the most promising player of all.

While Tiger is in Florida, where the agency was sponsoring the Junior Orange Bowl, IMG has arranged meetings with the biggest names on the agency roster.

“Greg Norman and Nick Faldo” are the golf heroes Tiger names to Trans World Sports. “I like the aggressiveness of Greg Norman, and the consistency of Faldo. I like to apply that to my game.”

Norman, a thirty-six-year-old Australia-born PGA star—famously nicknamed the Great White Shark by a reporter covering the 1981 Masters—is one of Hughes Norton’s clients. He’s a power hitter, best known for a tournament-tying round of 63 at Scotland’s Turnberry course on the way to winning the British Open in 1986. He led the PGA in earnings that year and again in 1990.

Though he didn’t win any tournaments in 1991, Norman did use some of those high earnings this year when he dropped close to $5 million for a house on Jupiter Island. “Jack Nicklaus called me,” Norman says of his friend and rival. “He said I needed to look at it. So I did and I bought it the same day.” The property stretches across eight acres, from the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean, and reminds Norman of his youth spent snorkeling and swimming with sharks in Queensland, Australia.

Sports Illustrated reporter John Garrity interviewed Norman for the magazine’s October 28, 1991, issue, asking, “Is it possible for anyone to dominate professional golf the way Nicklaus did? The way people expected you to?”

“I don’t know if it will ever happen again,” Norman answered. “Tom Watson was the last one who really dominated golf. Now, you can just finish in the top 20 every week and still make $300,000 or $400,000 a year. But if I were a young kid, my Number One ambition would still be to dominate… That’s what people want to see. They don’t want to see this plop, plop, chip, putt stuff. They want to see a guy who hits it 300 yards.”

It’s what Tiger wants, too. “I want to be the next dominant player. I want to go to college, turn pro and tear it up on the tour,” he’s said. “I want to win more majors than anybody ever has.”

Norman and Tiger meet on the Old Marsh driving range. They board a cart to take them around eight holes of what Norman calls “a quiet game of golf” on the course Pete Dye designed within a marshland border.

Despite their twenty-year age difference, the players both stand six feet tall, though the 180-pound Norman outweighs Tiger by forty pounds and, in his ninth year in the PGA, far surpasses the Junior Amateur champion in experience. But Tiger is curious and engaged, taking the opportunity to ask Norman, “Why do you play so aggressively?”

Tiger’s instincts instantly catch the veteran golfer’s interest.

“His all-around presence with questions and ambience is fabulous,” Norman tells Sports Illustrated writer Tim Rosaforte. “I’m just impressed by the guy. I like young talent like that… the flair, the cool, calm collectedness that he shows.”

Norman steps up to the tee on the par-five 2nd hole to demonstrate the driving technique that ranked him second on the PGA Tour in 1990, with an average distance of 282.3 yards.

Except when they reach the fairway, Norman sees that Tiger’s drive is longer. “He was four to five yards past me,” the Australian exclaims.

Hole after hole, Tiger holds the advantage. “That little s— was driving it by me all day,” Norman says with a laugh.

After he plays with Norman, Tiger’s next stop is Orlando, where he plays another IMG client—the 1991 British Open champion, Ian Baker-Finch, whose score is only two strokes better than the teenager’s.

PGA pro Mark O’Meara—another IMG client—brings Tiger to play eighteen holes at Windermere, an area west of Orlando that Arnold Palmer and a group of investors purchased in 1984 and have been turning into an exclusive residential community, with tennis courts, docks, and a clubhouse, all surrounding a Palmer-designed golf course.

“Have fun,” O’Meara counsels the teenager. “There’s no rush to get to the Tour.”

Tiger is making plans for the future. “I’ve always wanted to play around the world,” he says, so he can learn “to handle all different types of conditions.” He’s enjoying the conditions in Florida, both the weather and staying on Eastern Standard Time. “When you fly [from the] west you always lose time,” he observes. “That’s tough on your body, especially on a 16-year-old body, and I’m sick of that.”