Manhattan Monthly - February 2009

Manhattan College History Professor Authors New Book on Golf

GOLF IN AMERICA

By George Kirsch

As the racial ramifications of the Shoal Creek affair reverberated throughout the American golfing fraternity during the early 1990s, sportswriters were raving about a precocious teenager who seemed destined to be golf’s next superstar. Tiger Woods was born on December 30, 1975, in Cypress, California, the son of Earl and Kultida Woods. His father was a retired Green Beret lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who met his mother in 1967 when she was a secretary in the U.S. Army office in Bangkok, Thailand. When Tiger was an infant, Earl dragged his high chair into the garage so that his boy could watch his father drive golf balls into a net. At eleven months the baby was imitating his dad by swatting balls with a sawed-off club. At age two he appeared on the Mike Douglas television show, competing against Bob Hope in a putting contest. The following year he scored a 48 for nine holes on a regulation length navy golf course, and at five he was a guest on another television program, “That’s Incredible.” With his father as his first instructor and then with the support of a professional coach and psychologist, Tiger won a series of state and national championships as a boy and adolescent, often defeating opponents who were many years older. In 1991, at fifteen, he became the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship. He defended his title successfully over the next two years, and from 1994 through 1996 he added three consecutive U.S. Amateur crowns. A highlight of his final Amateur Championship was a thirty-five-foot birdie putt over an undulating green on the thirty-fifth hole of the championship final. He sank the putt to extend the match, which he won on the second extra hole.

After Woods turned professional in the fall of 1996 he dramatically transformed golf in the United States and across the world. Over the next ten years his spectacular achievements went a long way toward fulfilling the remarkable prophecy that his father proclaimed in an interview with Sports Illustrated in December 1996. Earl Woods predicted: “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity … he’s qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He’s the bridge between the East and West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don’t know exactly which form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He’ll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting the taste of his power.” Before he reached his thirty-third birthday Woods had won fourteen major championships (Masters 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005; U.S. Open 2000, 2002, 2008: British Open 2000, 2005, 2006; PGA 1999, 2000, 2006, 2007). His victory at the Masters in 2001 earned him the “Tiger Slam” – the distinction of being the only player ever to hold all four major professional titles at the same time (though not in the same calendar year). During his first decade as a pro he also earned hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsement income, exhibition fees, prize money, and investments. His enormous popularity boosted television ratings, PGA Tour purses, and soles of golf equipment and clothing. His fame helped to popularize golf among youngsters, and especially among minorities in the United States. His world travels promoted the game in Europe and especially in Asia and Africa.

Although Woods’s impact on golf at home and abroad has been enormous, it was in the realm of race relations that he began to realize his father’s dreams of serving humanity. From the time he was a boy the media described him as an African-American, but as he grew to maturity he rejected that label because of his mixed ancestry through his Thai mother and his multiracial father. Kultida Woods as descended from Thai, Chinese, and Dutch stock, while Earl had forebears who were African American, Chinese, Native American Indian, and Caucasian. As a result Tiger invented a name for himself – “Cablinasian” – which reflected his heritage of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian cultures. In the United States the black community hailed him as the latest and perhaps the greatest African American sports hero (surpassing Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan), while in Asia the Chinese and Thai populations claimed him as one of their own. Although his father took the view that in American society anyone with any African American ancestry was treated as black, Tiger became a role model for an American society that was becoming more multiracial and multicultural in the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century. And while some criticized Woods for his loyalty to his corporate sponsors and his unwillingness to speak out on political and social issues, he did contribute generously to charitable and youth causes through his Tiger Woods Foundation and his Tiger Woods Learning Center.

During the 1990s the PGA Tour enjoyed unprecedented heights of prosperity, thanks in part to successful marketing of its regular events, a new international competition, and the phenomenon of Tiger Woods. In 1994, under the leadership of newly installed commissioner Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour created the Presidents Cup. Modeled after the older Ryder Cup (run by the PGA of America), the Presidents Cup is a biennial competition between teams from the United States and the rest of the world, excluding Europe (which provides the opposition in the Ryder Cup). The American side won five of the first seven events, with one tie. More importantly, during this era the PGA Tour provided enormous riches for its contestants as purses skyrocketed from $1.335 million in 1960 to $131.7 million in 1999 to nearly $250 million in 2005. During this period the average first-place check grew from $5,862 in 1960 to $603,735 in 1999 to $946,314 in 2005. Leading money winners were Arnold Palmer in 1960 ($75,262) and Tiger Woods in 1999 and 2005 ($6,616,585 and $10,628,024).

As modern-era professional golfers chased these dollars, their social class origins, preparation, and corporate images differed substantially from many of their predecessors. Palmer, Nicklaus, Watson, Woods, and most of their peers grew up in middle- or upper-class households with access to country clubs, won junior championships, and benefited from some college competition. Gone but not forgotten were the colorful characters and heroes of earlier eras who came out of caddy shacks and municipal courses and turned professional with only a grade school or perhaps a high school education. Francis Quimet, Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and Sam Snead rose from humble beginnings to the pinnacle of American golf, but since 1960 only Lee Trevino lived a comparable American Dream life. Among Hispanics and African Americans, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Charles Sifford, Lee Elder, Calvin Peete, and a few others overcame poverty to win tournaments and earn substantial prize money, but successful minority pros were also becoming a vanishing breed with the demise of caddying opportunities that provided boys of all races with golfing apprenticeships in the precart days. Moreover, unlike some of the old-timers, Woods and his peers generally tempered their public comments, always mindful of not offending their television and corporate sponsors. Amateurism, exemplified by Bob Jones, was also a relic of the past, and traditionalists lamented the passing of the old order. In the March 1972 Golf Digest, Herbert Warren Wind had warned: “the more that golf becomes a branch of the entertainment world and a means to an end rather than an end in itself, the more it is bound to surrender that rare and special flavor that the world of sports possesses when it is at its best.” But the PGA Tour was now big business, and there was no turning back the clock.