Chapter 14

Stanford University

Palo Alto, California

September 1994

Tiger arrives on the 8,180-acre Stanford campus, an architectural wonder of sandstone buildings in the straight-line Richardsonian Romanesque style, with the key to his hometown, a parting gift from Cypress—and seventy-five media requests.

“We took a little poll in the office, asking what athlete has entered Stanford with more notoriety,” says Steve Raczynski, the university’s assistant sports information director. “We had John McEnroe, who advanced to the Wimbledon semifinals the summer before college; [swimmer] Janet Evans, who won Olympic gold medals before coming here; [quarterback] John Elway. None of them was in Tiger’s category.”

Hughes Norton—the IMG sports agent most likely to represent Tiger when he turns pro—agrees. “He’s everything you could want,” Norton tells Sports Illustrated. “He’s a very genuine kid, he’s good looking, long off the tee… You add it all up, and it’s not fair.”

“I’ve started wearing sunglasses a little more,” Tiger jokes.

Stanford University has established its own athletic dominance, winning forty NCAA team titles since 1980—more than any other school. The golf team holds the 1994 NCAA championship, and coach Wally Goodwin is returning four of five starters, led by Notah Begay III, a fifth-year senior, an ambidextrous putter, and a full-blooded Native American.

Begay was twelve and Tiger was nine when they first met on the junior golf circuit, in the early 1980s. “There was talk that this kid Tiger Woods was winning his age group by 10 to 15 shots,” Begay says. “He was better than the rest.” Recognizing Tiger as a fellow outlier among the typical country-club kids, Begay approached him back then, saying, “You’ll never be alone again.”

Begay told Sports Illustrated in 1991 that “other guys always ask me before the tournaments if Tiger is really as good as people say he is,” noting that the then fifteen-year-old “has taken on a celebrity status, and most of the guys are afraid of him.”

While Goodwin talks up the strength of the “five relentless guys” on the team (incoming freshman Tiger plus four senior players: Begay and Casey Martin as well as Steve Burdick and Will Yanagisawa), Tiger describes himself as “very mellow,” explaining, “I’m not a guy who has a lot of mood swings—peaks and valleys—I’m pretty stable.”

Martin describes Tiger’s joining their team as being “like Michael Jordan coming in… You know you’re looking at absolute greatness.” Both Begay and Martin had gambled on Tiger’s choosing Stanford when they’d intentionally chosen to redshirt their junior seasons. “We wanted to stack the tables for our fifth year,” Martin tells ESPN.

“Hey, we’re Stanford kids, we plan for our future,” Begay says with a laugh. Like Begay and Martin, Tiger declares a major in economics, following the custom curriculum promised by Stanford’s dean, athletic director, and business director—“We’ll work with you, we’ll create you a major”—to soften his disappointment that Stanford doesn’t offer a major in accounting.

He shares room 8 at Stern Hall with an engineering major who, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, disassembles Tiger’s computer then “puts it back together again, just for kicks.” Their coed dorm is the only one on campus that hasn’t been renovated. Conveniently, the building isn’t even fitted for cable. If Tiger had a TV in his dorm room, he knows, “I would watch all the time and I wouldn’t study.”

Even the classes Tiger assumes will be easy are anything but no-brainers at Stanford. The high level of discussion gets him thinking, Whoa! I need a thesaurus to keep up with these guys! He tells the Los Angeles Times that he’s “doing fine” in school, though in truth he’s had to drop calculus.

If Tiger’s smart, coach Wally Goodwin advises, he’ll “chop wood” and put in the grunt work. He assigns Tiger “typical freshman duties,” instructing him to “get the luggage into the van when we [go] someplace; then get it out of the van and take it to the front desk.”

Tiger makes a counteroffer to the team.

“Ok, I get it. I’ll do the job. But I have a proposal. If I win a tournament, and beat the entire field, including you guys,” Tiger says, “I’m off the hook. I don’t have to carry your bags.”

It’s a bet bound to appeal to his competitive teammates. “You’ve got yourself a deal,” Begay says. “You beat us, and you’re off the hook.”

On September 18, Tiger wins his first collegiate tournament—the William H. Tucker Invitational—by three strokes. On the Championship Golf Course in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Cardinal team finishes outside the top three.

Tiger is no longer required to handle the luggage, but the team’s newest member is never allowed to forget his freshman status. Whenever Tiger switches his contact lenses for glasses, Notah Begay III calls him Urkel, after Steve Urkel, the ultranerd character Jaleel White played on the hit ABC-TV series Family Matters.

“The more you tell me to stop, the more I’ll call you that,” Begay says.

Despite their good-natured ribbing, the teammates are supportive of one another. Begay, for example, sleeps on an air mattress in the basement of his Sigma Chi fraternity house, donating the room-and-board allowance from his athletic scholarship to transfer student Yanagisawa. Team captain Casey Martin gives Yanagisawa a Bible and invites him to study sessions organized by Athletes in Action.

But the golfers aren’t just studious nerds. Martin also “knows how to party,” Yanagisawa says, and once “ripped out ‘Great Balls of Fire’” on a hotel piano while the team was traveling.

Although Tiger tells his teammate Steve Burdick that all he does other than play golf is “eat and sleep,” that’s not exactly true. “He does everything normal kids do,” Tiger’s high school friend Bryon Bell says. “The only difference is, he has to go out on the golf course every once in a while.”

As Tiger, who soon pledges Sigma Chi, too, assures the Los Angeles Times, “I’ll let loose at parties”—though exactly how, he says with a smile, “I can’t tell you.”

During the fraternity’s house parties, Martin takes to sitting on the stairs “overlooking this big mosh pit” and watching Tiger in action. In addition to Urkel, the freshman has earned another nickname: Dynamite. It’s a reference to Tiger’s dance moves, which Stanford student Jake Poe calls terrible and golf teammate Eri Crum describes as resembling “blowing up a house, or pumping up a bike.”

Martin says, “You know a guy that’s so dominant, you’ve got to bring him down a little. You’ve got to look for his weakness and really expose it. I think we found it: dancing. It’s a bad deal.”

The good-natured hazing continues when the golf team travels for tournament play. “Some of the guys were a little in awe of Tiger,” Begay says with a laugh. “Number one, he was our teammate; and number two, he was a dang freshman. We had to keep him in his place. I kind of went out of my way to remind the guys Tiger was getting no preferential treatment. He was sleeping on the rollaway.”

“That’s all right,” Tiger says. “The rollaway’s better than my bed at home.”

“Hi, Mr. Walsh. It’s great to meet you. I’m Tiger Woods.”

The first-year student has come to the university athletic department, where the football head coach, Bill Walsh, has his office.

Tiger is thrilled to meet “the great Bill Walsh of the 49ers,” a 1993 Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee.

“Sit down,” Walsh says. Tiger does, explaining that he wants “to know a lot about football.” He’s come to the right place. Walsh led the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowls before returning to Stanford in 1992 for his second stint as head football coach.

The two hit it off immediately, and Walsh tells Tiger, “Come back any time you want and we can talk.” An avid though “terrible” golfer, Walsh is intrigued by Tiger’s “incredible blend of intellect and athletic ability, combined with zeal and self-confidence.”

Walsh’s “door open” invitation makes Tiger feel like he has “a father away from home my freshman year,” a trusted mentor he can “talk to for two hours about anything.”

Later that fall, Walsh gives Tiger an astonishing gift: the coach’s personal key to the weight room. The young golfer spends two hours daily lifting weights, stretching, and doing aerobic exercise, putting in even more time than some members of the Stanford football team.

Tiger may be slim, but he’s far from weak. He can bench-press 215 pounds—on repeat. According to a report that the weight-room supervisor delivers to coach Wally Goodwin, “Pound for pound, Tiger’s one of the strongest athletes on campus.”

And a constant draw for the press. “I was averaging 51 requests a day,” says the coach. “And those were only the calls on my personal office line.” He makes the protective decision to limit Tiger’s availability to a single monthly news conference, explaining to Golf Digest: “Tiger is absolutely up to his ass in alligators with schoolwork, adapting to living away from home, handling reporters and trying to play golf.”

Tiger’s parents stay out of it. They don’t set up junkets or even come to tournaments or visit campus. They don’t want to interfere.

“It is time for him to have his own life now,” says Tida.

But the family home remains a shrine to Tiger’s achievements, a place where “nearly every wall and nearly every table is crammed with Tiger tracks: Tiger’s awards, Tiger’s photos, Tiger’s trophies, hundreds and hundreds of them, swallowing the space from floor to ceiling, from window to door,” notes Sports Illustrated reporter Rick Reilly.

The first time he returns to Cypress, Tiger approaches Earl, who’s watching television.

“What are you drinking, Pop?” he asks.

“A Coke. Why?”

“Give me that,” Tiger says, and instead mixes the two of them drinks.

Father and son take a walk to the park, where they sip and talk.

“I just want to share this first drink with you,” Tiger says. “This is the first drink we’ve ever had, the two of us.”

“One of the most beautiful moments of my life,” Earl says.