Chapter 6

Southern California

Summer 1988

Tiger, Earl boasted to Ebony in 1982, “is one of the first Black golfers with natural skills whose parents have the means to get pro instructions that even exceed those afforded Jack Nicklaus in his formative years. We are willing to pay the price.”

That was when Tiger was six—when Tida stayed home with him and Earl worked as a contract administrator and materials manager at McDonnell Douglas. In 1988, Tida goes back to work and Earl retires, replacing his wife as Tiger’s companion at national junior tournaments.

Year-round tournament play is expensive. Costs associated with Tiger’s junior tour schedule, including travel, tournament fees, and equipment, run to almost $70,000 annually (nearly $155,000 today). The schedule—fly in on the morning of a tournament, stumble out sleepless for the opening round, then check into a Motel 6—is wearying.

“Pop, do you think we could get to the site early enough so I could get in a practice round?” Tiger asks.

“From this day forward, you will have just as good of a chance as any of these country club kids, and if I have to go broke, that’s what we’re going to do,” Earl vows. And from then on, “we went a day in advance, he stayed with his peers at the Marriott and the Hiltons, and he kicked butt and took names.”

Earl and Tida provide unconditional support. “We didn’t want Tiger to grow up with an inferiority complex,” Tida says. “So even if we have to take out second mortgage or home equity loan, we let him have it.”

“Oh, I get everything paid for by sponsors,” Earl jokes. “There are three companies: Earl, D., and Woods,” the D referencing his middle name, Dennison. “I have about five very floating credit cards and two mortgages on the house.”

Tiger’s health and development have also been placed in the care of professionals, including Captain Jay Brunza, PhD, a navy doctor who has doubled as Tiger’s sports psychologist and occasionally, at major tournaments, as his caddie.

“Would you help me give Tiger the kind of advantage that a lot of country-club kids get?” Earl asks Brunza. “Would you work with him?”

They settle on a plan. Brunza will drive up from San Diego to Cypress on weekends, and Tiger will do his golf homework on the weekdays in between.

Using breathing, hypnosis, and visualization exercises he developed for the seriously ill children he treated at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Brunza teaches Tiger how to visualize shots by accessing “a level of real focus technique.” Imagining a picture around the hole, he putts to that image rather than to the cup.

Coach John Anselmo, who honed his teaching eye while watching fellow navy man Sam Snead play near the end of World War II, and who has seen a lot of players over the course of his nearly seven decades, marvels that “with Tiger, anything is possible. I kid his dad that Tiger is not his, but that he comes from another world. I just hope I live long enough to see what’s going to happen. It’s going to be amazing.”

Wally Goodwin at Stanford University isn’t the only coach with an eye on Tiger.

Don Crosby, the golf coach at Western High School, in Anaheim, California, keeps noticing a junior high kid—a “little guy, maybe five feet tall in golf spikes”—hitting balls on the driving range where he takes the team to practice. That’s Tiger Woods.

The entire team is impressed—Look how good he is. Look how much he practices—and Crosby can barely believe his luck when one of his high school golfers reports, “Coach, Tiger Woods lives in my neighborhood. He lives right around the corner from me.”

“He might just as well have told me that Johnny Unitas, Mickey Mantle, and Michael Jordan were going to play for Western High,” says Crosby. This is a coach’s dream.

Except that Western High School is continually redistricting. Crosby rushes into the principal’s office and points at Teakwood Street on the map.

“This little square over here, that’s in Cypress, and that’s where the future best golfer in the world lives,” he tells the baffled principal. “So, if they start messing with our boundaries, you can give away anything but hold onto that little square.”

They do, and in the fall of 1990, Tiger enrolls as a freshman at Western High School.

On the first day of practice, a hardworking senior approaches Crosby. “I guess I’m not No. 1 anymore,” the senior says.

“You’re right. But you’ll be a heck of a No. 2,” the coach assures him.

Crosby’s had experience with other young sports stars—and their overbearing parents—so he cautiously contacts Earl Woods to ask how involved he and Tida intend to be in Tiger’s high school golf career.

“Once the high school season starts,” Earl tells him, “you won’t see me.”

The press keeps calling.

“I’d like to do something on Tiger,” Golf Digest reporter Jaime Diaz tells Earl.

“Find a place where we can play,” Earl says, “and we’ll do it.”

Earl and Tiger meet Diaz at Coto de Caza Golf he has it now, Earl thinks.

“Son, the training’s over,” he tells him. “You’ll never play anyone who’s mentally stronger than you are.”

Earl holds on to one tradition. When he wants to get his son’s attention on the golf course, he doesn’t call him Tiger or even Eldrick but a different name entirely.

Sam.

“That was one of our codes, too,” Earl says. “Sam, so he’d know it was me talking.”

“Why aren’t you calling me Tiger today?” Tiger sometimes asks.

Earl answers, “You just look more like a Sam today.”

To the press, Tiger is looking more and more like a rising star.

In November of 1990, a television crew from Trans World Sport arrives at the Woods home to profile the promising young athlete.

On camera, Earl shares his vision of Tiger’s future. “The world is ready. It is absolutely ready for a nonwhite golfer to be successful. The next booming area in the world for golf is Asia. Tiger is already Asian. He is Thai. Uh, in the United States, Tiger is Black… So he can’t lose unless he doesn’t win, and I don’t anticipate him not winning.”

The world might be ready, but fourteen-year-old Tiger describes the entrenched attitudes of those whom Earl calls “country-club kids.”

“Not every day, but, uh, every time I go to a major country club, I always feel it. I can always sense it. Um, people always staring at you,” Tiger says. “I call it The Look. It makes you uncomfortable, like someone is saying something without saying it.” It’s especially noticeable “when I go to Texas or Florida, you always feel it, ’cause, uh, they’re saying, ‘Why are you here? You’re not supposed to be here.’ And, uh, that’s probably because that’s where all the slavery was. So, uh, oh well.”

It’s an uncomfortable position for a kid who identifies as more Asian than Black. His father is half Black, a quarter Native American, and a quarter Chinese. His mother is half Thai, a quarter white, and a quarter Chinese. When he’s filling out forms that only allow for one ethnicity, “I always fill in ‘Asian,’” Tiger says.

“All the media try to put black in him,” Tida says. “In United States, one little part black is all black. Nobody want to listen to me. I been trying to explain to people, but they don’t understand. To say he is 100 percent black is to deny his heritage. To deny his grandmother and grandfather. To deny me!”

Earl and Tida were subjected to hostility as the first nonwhites in their neighborhood in Cypress in 1973. Their house was pelted with limes; a rock once shattered their kitchen window. It was a hard adjustment for Tida. “There’s no color in Thailand,” Tida says of her home country, “not like U.S.”

But she also sees the positives of her son’s mixed heritage. “Tiger has Thai, African, Chinese, American Indian and European blood,” she says. “He can hold everyone together. He is the Universal Child.”

Earl’s view is more jaded.

“The boy has about two drops of black blood in him,” he says. “But like I told him, in this country there are only two colors. White and nonwhite. And he ain’t white.”