PART 1 Prodigy Chapter 1

Navy Golf Course

Cypress, California

Summer 1978

A call comes in to the sports desk at CBS Los Angeles.

Jim Hill picks up. Hill, a six-foot-two Black man who played eight NFL seasons at defensive back, has only been on the sports desk at Channel 2 for a couple of years.

“My name is Earl Woods,” the caller announces. “And my son Tiger is getting ready to revolutionize the sport of golf.”

It’s not the first time Hill has heard a dad brag about a son’s athletic ability. “Well, what else is interesting about this story?” he asks.

“You’ve got to see him to believe him,” Earl says, then adds, “I’m a former Green Beret. Get your butt down here.”

“Here” is Cypress, California. The Orange County city of forty thousand is twenty-five miles southeast of Los Angeles. Hill is intrigued enough to assemble a camera crew to film the demonstration Earl sets up at Cypress’s Navy Golf Course.

“How much do you practice?” Hill asks the toddler.

“A whole lot,” Tiger answers.

Using three custom clubs that his father has had cut down to child size, Tiger hits balls and sinks putts, one after the other. Hill is suitably impressed.

“This young man is going to be to golf what Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert are to tennis,” Hill declares.

Soon after Tiger’s appearance on Channel 2, a national TV show seeks him out. The Mike Douglas Show, a talk show newly relocated to Los Angeles from Philadelphia, is looking for local talent. The host sees Hill’s piece on Tiger, and soon the producers book him for the season’s premiere week in their new Hollywood location.

On Friday, October 6, 1978, Tiger and Earl—dressed in coordinating red-and-white outfits—arrive on the soundstage at CBS Television City’s Studio 43 and greet Mike Douglas as well as beloved comedian Bob Hope and legendary actor Jimmy Stewart, who is cohosting with Douglas for the week.

In front of the live studio audience, Stewart oversees a putting contest between Hope—a serious golfer with a single-digit handicap and the longtime host of the Bob Hope Desert Classic celebrity golf tournament—and Tiger, toting his tiny clubs in the canvas golf bag he brings everywhere.

“You got any money?” Hope jokes. “You wanna bet a nickel?”

Stewart asks Tiger to putt first. When Tiger misses the hole, Hope gives him a mulligan, while the It’s a Wonderful Life star encourages him to take a second shot. “Tap it right in there.”

Earl sets up the ball. Tiger moves it closer, focusing his gaze under the brim of his red cap. After three tries, he picks up the ball in frustration and throws it into the cup.

The young golfer charms the audience, but he also has a complaint. The putting green is uneven.

“Mike Douglas knew it, too,” Earl Woods says once the cameras are off. “All he could do was laugh. He couldn’t believe that Tiger could see the break, also.”

Earl survived two tours in Vietnam, channeling a combination of innate athletic talent and a calm, focused demeanor. During his second tour as a Green Beret lieutenant colonel, he daringly planted explosives behind enemy lines.

Once he retired from active duty in 1974, Earl and his second wife, Kultida Punsawad—a native of Thailand who met Earl in 1968, when she was in her twenties and working on a US Army base in Bangkok—moved to Cypress, California, where they purchased a home on a corner lot at 6704 Teakwood Street.

Earl spends his days working at the aerospace company McDonnell Douglas, his evenings hitting 5-irons in his garage, and his weekends playing at the nearby Navy Golf Course, open to active-duty and retired military personnel.

On December 30, 1975, Tida and Earl—already father to two adult sons and a daughter with his first wife, Barbara—welcome a baby boy: Eldrick Tont Woods. Tont is a traditional Thai name, but Eldrick is Kultida’s creation, a combination of her and Earl’s initials. Earl nicknames the boy Tiger in honor of his friend and comrade Vuong Dang “Tiger” Phong, a brave South Vietnamese army colonel who went missing during the war.

Based on his belief that “the next generation of great golfers are going to be those who were introduced to the game between six months and a year,” Earl set out to instill greatness in his infant son by power of example. He’d place Tiger’s high chair in the garage so his son could observe as Earl practiced hitting balls into a net while narrating “exactly what I was trying to accomplish.” His tactics worked, Earl says. “I’d monitor him out of the corner of my eye, and he’d be staring at the club, his eyes like marbles, waiting for my next swing.”

When Tiger reached ten months old, Earl changed it up. “I just unstrapped him out of his highchair. He picked up a putter, put a ball down, waggled and hit a ball into the net. First time.”

Earl immediately noticed that Tiger’s “first swing was a perfect imitation of mine,” like “looking at myself in a miniature mirror.”

“Honey, get out here!” Earl shouted to Tida. “We have a genius on our hands.”

In 1980, around a year and a half after Tiger’s appearance on The Mike Douglas Show, Tida takes the four-year-old over to Heartwell Golf Course, in Long Beach, a small eighteen-hole, 2,143-yard par-3 course that specializes in classes and camps for beginning and junior golfers.

Although Tida herself recently took up golf so she could spend more time with Tiger, both parents recognize that it’s time for him to get professional instruction.

Tida walks into the Heartwell pro shop with Tiger and his bag of mini clubs.

“My son is very talented,” Tida tells assistant pro Rudy Duran. “My husband and I are interested if you could give him some private lessons.”

Like Earl Woods, Duran first fell in love with golf when he was in the military, in his case the air force. After spending time as a pro golfer, Duran now teaches around a hundred kids between the ages of eight and eighteen. But he’s a little taken aback at Tida’s request that he coach a four-year-old. The little dude can barely see over the pro shop counter, he thinks.

Still, he’s willing to see what the boy can do. At the practice range, Tiger gets out his cut-down 2.5-wood.

They really did a nice job getting the club to fit him, Duran thinks as he tees up four balls for Tiger.

Then: four perfect shots in a row. Each around sixty yards, with a bit of a draw.

Next, they venture to the chipping green to hit some pitch shots. Tiger pulls out another sized-down club, a wedge this time, and asks Duran, “Do you want me to pop them up?”

Duran is stunned at the skills he’s witnessing. “What would Jack Nicklaus shoot if he was 3-foot-7? That’s what Tiger shot.”

The two of them start playing together daily. Duran sets a distance-adjusted “Tiger par” of 67; within a year, Tiger’s shot a 59 at Heartwell, where on Saturdays his opponents are teenage junior golfers. On Sundays, he, his father, and Duran play nearby regulation courses, where, Earl notes, “at the end of the day he was always under par. This is important: He never developed a complacency or a fear of going low.”

Duran develops an easygoing relationship with Tiger’s parents, whom he calls “lighthearted” and “really easy to be around,” not at all pushy or demanding. “To me, the family was raising a child, not a golfer,” he says. “The golf was just something he had an aptitude for.”

But this is a kid who “popped out of the womb a Magic Johnson or a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He had talent oozing out of his fingertips,” Duran says. “Mozart composed finished music in his head. I saw that in Tiger. He was composing shots in his head.”

“What he’s accomplishing at his age is phenomenal,” he tells Golf Digest magazine, which runs a small piece on Tiger in 1981.

“The kid’s not exceptional,” Duran says. “He’s way beyond that.”