Chapter 15

Jerry Pate National Intercollegiate golf tournament

Shoal Creek Club

Birmingham, Alabama

October 24–25, 1994

Tiger’s on the cusp of winning his second collegiate tournament. But he has no desire to discuss the importance of where exactly it’s taking place and why there are protesters outside the front gates.

At age fourteen, Tiger admitted to Golf Digest that encountering prejudice “makes me want to play even better. That’s the way I am. Little things like that motivate me.”

Still, he says, “It’s tough enough worrying about one shot.”

While the rest of the freshmen were settling into the dorms and starting fall classes, Tiger had instead spent nine days in France, competing for the Eisenhower Trophy at Le Golf National. At eighteen, Tiger was the youngest on the four-man team representing the United States in the nineteenth World Amateur Team Championship.

Despite the stunning location, in Versailles, Tiger hadn’t strayed far from the golf course—except to take all his meals at the McDonald’s closest to the hotel. In 1990, during an exchange between Californian and French junior golf organizations, Tiger quickly decided French food didn’t agree with him. “I can’t handle all these sauces,” he’d said, crinkling his nose.

The French were fascinated by Tiger—Le Figaro comparing him to Mozart; the sports journal L’équipe labeling him TIGER LA TERREUR. Allen Doyle, the forty-six-year-old US team leader, decided that because Tiger “already had the crowd, and the young man is not afraid of pressure,” he would “bat cleanup” for the American foursome.

Tiger prepared himself with solo sessions on the practice range at the Golf de la Boulie. One early morning, he was joined by journalist Jaime Diaz.

“You want to see something weird? Watch this,” Tiger told Diaz before whiplashing a ball fifteen yards farther than the two hundred yards he’d been regularly hitting.

Do it again, Diaz said. Tiger did, easily sending the ball even farther than before.

“I mean, what’s wrong with that?” Tiger asked rhetorically.

“Nothing,” said Diaz in agreement. “You ever think of going with it?”

But the swing is too unconventional for Tiger. “Nah. Looks too funny,” he decided.

He’s been diligently working with Butch Harmon, even calling him from Paris to vent about putting issues, until he found his groove. “I’m going to be tough to beat now,” he said.

The American team pulled off a win for their first Eisenhower Trophy since 1982, eleven strokes ahead of Great Britain and Ireland.

Back at school in California, Tiger has to cram to get up to speed.

“When I finally got to my room, my roommate said to me, ‘Well, I guess it’s time for you to unpack a few of these boxes,’” Tiger says. “I’ve missed some classes, but I’ve got the notes. People are so smart here, they know what to write down. I also missed some social events, but the night I got back from France, the whole dorm threw me a party.”

His favorite part of being at Stanford is feeling like he can get “lost in the crowd”—though it’s impossible for Tiger to avoid being singled out when he’s on the golf course.

And that spotlight is especially bright on him at Shoal Creek Club.

The club faced intense controversy four years ago. Just a few weeks before Shoal Creek hosted its second PGA Championship, in 1990, the founder, Hall W. Thompson, was questioned by a Birmingham Post-Herald reporter about the country club’s lack of female, Jewish, and Black members, to which Thompson replied, “That’s just not done in Birmingham, Alabama.” The club, he said, had “the right to associate or not to associate with whomever we chose,” then doubled down on that statement, saying, “We don’t discriminate in every other area except the blacks.”

Thompson’s unwelcome candor exposed the exclusionary practices of private country clubs, especially those in the South, and prompted the PGA Tour to establish an explicitly antiracist policy.

“I find it highly unlikely that you will see any championships held at all-white clubs anymore,” David Fay, executive director of the United States Golf Association, told the New York Times. “Sports has often been an instrument of social change. This is another example.”

In 1990, following the negative publicity, Shoal Creek quickly admitted a token Black member, but little else has changed in the four years since.

So when Tiger Woods—the most accomplished junior golfer in the country, who happens to be both exceptionally talented and Black—is playing Shoal Creek, it’s national news.

Tiger’s not the only one downplaying the significance.

“For the most part, I think we’ve put all that behind us and gone forward,” says the 1976 U.S. Open winner, Jerry Pate, himself a Shoal Creek charter member. “Tiger’s a super player. He’s a little erratic at times, but he’s got a lot of poise.”

Tiger doesn’t want the label of “being the great black hope in golf. I’m a golfer who happens to be black,” he insists.

Tiger crosses his legs and leans on his putter. Heading into the final hole of the Jerry Pate National Intercollegiate golf tournament, he holds a one-stroke lead over his Stanford Cardinal teammate Will Yanagisawa.

Before the team headed down to Alabama, they’d discussed the implications of playing at Shoal Creek. “I’ve talked about it a little bit with my teammates,” Tiger tells reporters. “We had a few jokes about it.”

Senior teammate Notah Begay III—who chooses to honor his own southwestern Native American heritage on tournament days by wearing gold hoop earrings in both ears and dabs of red clay under his eyes—lightheartedly calls the club “Soul Creek.” He tells Tiger “what a great slap in the face it would be to those who think that minorities are inferior, if [you] went down and won.”

As Tiger now walks to the 18th and clinches the win with a twenty-five-foot two-putt for birdie, Hall Thompson stands by, impressed. A yell comes from a nearby spectator: “Go Tiger Woods!”

Tiger raises his putter in acknowledgment and smiles shyly.

“You’re a great player,” Thompson says as Tiger walks off the course. “I’m proud of you. You’re superb.”

Tiger tries his best to sidestep questions about the social significance of the win.

“I just went out and wanted to play well,” he says. When a reporter from the Associated Press asks about the impact of winning at a site controversial for being until recently an all-white club, Tiger replies, “The significance to me is our team won, and I also happen to be the individual champion. That’s what we came to do. We play to win.”

Tiger is quick to deny that racism gives him any special provocation.

“Of course it does,” his father, Earl Woods, counters. “It provides drive. It provides inspiration. It provides motivation. It provides toughness.”

To coach Wally Goodwin, toughness only goes so far. “My first concern was the safety of my team,” Goodwin says. “I knew Birmingham was pretty far south and something could happen.” And Tiger is not the only minority Cardinal: “On the very same team is a full-blooded Navajo Indian [Notah Begay III] and a Japanese American [William Yanagisawa] and a Chinese American [Jerry Chang], and here they’re picking on Tiger. It was ludicrous.”