Chapter 4

Junior World Golf Championship

Torrey Pines Golf Course

La Jolla, California

July 15, 1986

Adrenaline is coursing through Tiger’s four-foot-nine, eighty-one-pound frame. The ten-year-old is sweating so profusely that his thick glasses start to slip. He’s so nearsighted that he could be considered legally blind without them, but he’s still too young for contact lenses.

“They call him Tiger?” asked ten-year-old golfer Chris Riley in 1984, when the players were both Junior World Golf Championship first-timers. Since 1968, the San Diego County Junior Golf Association has hosted an international field of players from more than eighty countries. Then eight-year-old Tiger won the three-round tournament over Riley, who said, “He had the Coke-bottle thick glasses, but he could flat-out play.”

It’s now Tiger’s third summer in the boys-ten-and-under category. He won again in 1985, and by 1986, he’s collected dozens upon dozens of trophies. But after the first round of the Junior World tournament, Tiger throws his clubs to the ground in frustration. It’s an unusual outburst, though “lately,” his mom says, “he has shown a bit of temper when he didn’t make par.”

Since he was very young, Tida has stressed to Tiger that he is not to throw tantrums on the golf course, as tennis players John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors do on TV. “I don’t want you to ruin my reputation as a parent,” Tida tells him, adding, “I will spank you in a minute if you act like that.”

“We’re working on it,” Earl says of his son’s impatience. “He’s just like any other golfer. He doesn’t like to do badly.” Still, Tiger tends to bang his clubs around when he hits a bad shot. “I don’t want to, Daddy, it just happens,” he insists. “I’m trying very hard.”

“I know you’re trying, just keep trying,” Earl says in encouragement, though he’s convinced that learning to “play angry” actually helps Tiger, allowing him the space to “take responsibility for his actions.”

At the clubhouse—the landmark 1817 adobe home called Casa de Carrillo—father and son have a coaching session.

“It didn’t go well today,” Tiger says. “I couldn’t get anything to go right.”

“Well, it’s no big deal,” Earl replies. “You’ll go out and get them tomorrow.”

Tiger also grouses about using only his sand wedge and putter. “I have to putt a lot better,” he says. “I couldn’t putt. I couldn’t hit the greens.”

He asks his dad if they can go play another course later that day. “I need to use my woods,” the ten-year-old says.

Tiger doesn’t win the 1986 Junior World title. It’s time to find a new coach, especially with Rudy Duran leaving Heartwell to run his own golf course.

John Anselmo, the head pro at Meadowlark Golf Course in nearby Huntington Beach, is Earl’s top choice. “I have this new kid named Tiger Woods,” Anselmo tells his son, Dan, a fellow pro and coach. “He’s a tour player in a little boy’s body. He just needs to grow into it.”

In and around the Woods family home, Tiger designs a practice course.

“Too long,” Earl says of Tiger’s backyard setup, “and hit the neighbor’s house. Too short and… hit the roof.”

Indoors, Tiger decides that the living room coffee table is the perfect height for clearing lob wedges. The ball must stop rolling before it hits the fireplace.

“I chip over that big chair and make the ball stop before it hits the bricks,” Tiger explains. The stakes are high—“If I miss, my mother will get after me”—but “it’s good training for finesse and getting the right feel for delicate shots.”

In 1987, Golf Digest launches its first-ever Armchair Architect contest in golf course design. Eleven-year-old Tiger is too young to enter, but he’s determined to participate.

Working at the same bedroom desk where he plays Nintendo and does his homework, Tiger decides that an “outlandish and creative” design “would end up winning.” Using colored pencils, he draws a 610-yard, par-5 hole featuring a sand trap in the center of the green.

It’s an all-or-nothing hole, dependent on a huge element of luck. The U-shaped fairway has two doglegs that reward either three precise shots or one high shot over the top. A player lacking accuracy or distance will land a ball in the bog.

Earl enters the contest on Tiger’s behalf.

He doesn’t win. When the results come out, Tiger studies the top entry: “a blank hole, tee markers, a green in the distance, and that’s it.”

I wish I had known that, he thinks. I would have done that.

On the course, he’s becoming used to the rush of winning. The year of the Armchair Architect contest, Tiger enters—and wins—thirty-three junior golf tournaments. Thirty-three.

“There’s no feeling I’ve found that matches the feeling that I’ve beaten everybody,” says the eleven-year-old. “Second place is first loser.”