The Chosen One: Tiger Woods and the Dilemma of Greatness - Softcover

Chapter One: Oklahoma City

Tiger woods conducted a golf exhibition in Oklahoma City on a hot Sunday afternoon in May 2000. During the hour before he appeared, while a large crowd baked in the bleachers, a member of his entourage held a trivia contest, with T-shirts for prizes. One of the questions: In what year was Tiger Woods born? The first guess, by a very young fan, was 1925. That's off by half a century, but the error is understandable; Woods has accomplished so much as a golfer that it's easy to forget how young he is. In a sport in which good players seldom peak before their thirties, and often remain competitive at the highest levels well into their forties, Woods is off to a mind-boggling start. He is the youngest player (by two years) to have won all four of modern golf's so-called major tournaments -- the Masters, the United States Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship. He is the only player in history to have won all four in succession. And, as if all that weren't enough, he holds the all-time scoring record in three of them and shares it in the other. After Woods blew out the rest of the field in the 2000 British Open, which he won by eight strokes, Ernie Els, a terrific young South African player and the winner of two U.S. Opens, said with a resigned smile, "We'll have to go to the drawing board again, and maybe make the holes bigger for us and a little smaller for him."

When Woods finally appeared for his Oklahoma exhibition, his entrance was appropriately dramatic. A small convoy of golf carts bore down on the bleachers from the far end of the driving range, while martial-sounding rock music blasted from the public address system. The exhibition was the final event in a two-day program put on by the Tiger Woods Foundation, a charitable organization whose goal is to inspire children -- especially underprivileged children -- and "to make golf look more like America," as Woods himself says. Forty-two cities had applied for visits by Woods and his team in 2000, and Oklahoma City was the first of just four cities to be chosen. Among the reasons for its selection was the existence of this particular facility: a low-fee public golf course, with free lessions for children on weekends, situated in an unprepossessing neighborhood not far from Oklahoma City's unprepossessing downtown.

Before stepping up to the practice tee, Woods answered questions from the audience, whose members differed from golf's principal constituency in that many of them were neither middle-aged nor white. One of the first questions came from a junior-high-school-aged fan, who asked, "How do you maintain your personal life and your golf career at the same time?"

Woods, who was leaning on his pitching wedge, said, "That's a great question. When I'm off the golf course, I like to get away from everything, and I like to keep everything private, because I feel that I have a right to that. I have a right to my own private life, and things I like to do." There was heavy applause from the crowd. "But there are exceptions to that, where the press likes to make up a few stories here and there. That's just the way it goes. Sensationalism tends to sell now."

When he said that, I shifted uneasily on the small, roped-off patch of ground from which I and other members of the press had been asked to view the proceedings. Woods doesn't think highly of reporters. Particular journalists have annoyed him repeatedly over the years, and he had a couple of memorably unpleasant experiences early in his career. The best known incident occurred in 1997, when a writer for GQ quoted Woods telling off-color jokes and making a variety of indiscreet remarks, all of which Woods had assumed to be off the record. There was nothing truly scandalous about anything that Woods was quoted as saying, and in the long run the writer (whose article is inevitably mentioned in paragraphs like this one) has probably suffered more than his subject has. But the experience was a transforming one for Woods: A certain air of tension -- like background radiation -- remains detectable in almost all of his media encounters, even though openly chilly exchanges between him and the press have become less frequent as he has resigned himself to the public relations side of his job. (He now knows many of the press tent regulars by name -- even by nickname -- and he sometimes goes out of his way to be courteous and helpful.) He has always been impatient with people who don't work as hard as he does, and no one in the press tent works as hard as he does. Woods also often seems annoyed that writers who have no contractual business relationship with him are able to profit from his achievements by writing about them. (Sportswriters, for their part, have a tendency to believe that the most telling aspect of any athlete's character is the way in which that athlete treats sportswriters.)

Many very famous people become very famous because, for some compelling and probably unwholesome reason, they crave the approval of the rest of us. That's why they put up with the media, among other things. Even the ones who vigorously defend their privacy do so in a way that attracts an awful lot of publicity, suggesting that their aversion to celebrity is more complicated than they let on. With Woods, though, you get the feeling that his fame mostly gets in his way. We intrude on his golf when he's playing golf, and we intrude on his private life when he's not. He can be a dazzlingly emotional and telegenic performer, and he surely finds it thrilling to walk down fairways lined with thousands of deliriously happy admirers who are shouting his name (or bowing to the ground, as a group of his fans did on the final hole at the 2000 U.S. Open), but he conveys the impression that he would play every bit as hard if the cameras and the microphones and the galleries all went away. His goals are entirely public ones -- he wants to be universally recognized as the best in the world, not to exorcise some merely personal demon -- but, unlike most celebrities, he shows no sign of needing or desiring or depending on help from any of us.

That's an awe-inspiring character trait, but it's also a chilling one. Part of the fun of being a sports fan is harboring the delusion that great athletic achievements are in a sense collaborations between athletes and their rooting sections. We ourselves may not throw the game-winning touchdown pass, but at some level we believe that our boisterous enthusiasm intimidated the free safety and helped generate the adrenaline that powered the quarterback's arm. Woods's accomplishments are so outsized, though, that it's hard to conceive of them as belonging to anyone but himself. We may cheer him on, but he is clearly measuring his achievements by a standard so high that none of us would have dared to dream it up. The script is his, not ours. As Tom Watson said of him after the 2000 British Open, "He is something supernatural."

Between the mid-1970s and just a year or two ago, sportswriters viewed Jack Nicklaus's remarkable career (which was crowned by eighteen victories in the four major tournaments) as the permanent benchmark of greatness in golf; the new consensus is that Woods has already outdone Nicklaus in several categories, and that eventually he will probably break all of Nicklaus's records unless he loses interest in the game or injures himself or decides to run for President instead. That sportswriters have come to this opinion is no surprise to Woods himself, because he reached the same conclusion back in junior high school: before he turned thirteen, he had researched and memorized Nicklaus's main competitive accomplishments because he already intended to exceed them. He views Nicklaus as the best player in the history of the game, and his goal is, with all due respect, to give the master a run for that title. Nicklaus himself was similarly u