Sunday, June 17, 2001
For Earl Woods, a loving son
makes every day seem like Father's Day
By MICKEY HERSKOWITZ
c. 2001, Houston Chronicle
For all you daddies who have whittled down
a golf club until it is not much longer than a corn dog and hustled
your 3-year old to the nearest driving range, stop! — in
the name of love.
If you have illusions of unleashing the
next Tiger Woods on an unsuspecting world, you may be wise to
heed the words of the original Tiger tamer, his father, Earl.
Contrary to what many believe, the elder Woods did not intend
to create the most dominating golfer on the planet when he decided
a public golf course was at least as educational as day care.
“The real story behind that,”
says the father of the most visible son in sports, “is this:
Tiger was there to entertain me and keep me company. I just wanted
to be with him, to spend time with my little boy. I practiced
my swing and hit a few balls. I made no effort to teach him. He
learned the golf swing by watching. He just happened to be 3.”
If you are searching for the perfect Father's
Day story, one loaded with pride, inspiration and emotion, this
may be it — with an explanation.
To begin with, if you ask Earl how he and
Tiger celebrate this occasion, he tells you calmly, “We don't.”
You try to conceal your shock. What next? Did Bing Crosby ever
declare Christmas just another shopping day?
“We don't treat it as a holiday,”
Earl continues. “We celebrate it every day, and I strongly
recommend that others do the same.”
But he does offer this paternal advice:
“Just remember that your child is the most important thing
you will be ever be responsible for, and treat that child as a
special gift. There is one thing I am proudest of, and nothing
else comes close. I didn't raise Tiger to be a great golfer; I
raised him to be a great person. And if you ask the people who
really know him, they will tell you that he is.”
There is no angle here, unless you think
a father loving his son and bursting with pride over his success
is an angle.
Earl has been burned in the media for making
predictions that struck some as outlandish, up until the moment
Tiger surpassed them. There is still one without a time limit,
based on the talent, drive and multiple roots of this 25-year
old artist. Both believe that in time Tiger will have an impact
on human rights, and this is a goal, a belief, far beyond golf.
He has traveled to South Africa with his
father to meet Nelson Mandela. He journeys each year with his
mother to Thailand, where he pays homage to her culture and values.
Somewhere among these continents, and across oceans, his destiny
will reach out to him. In the meantime, Tiger can just roll right
on, winning roughly half the golf tournaments he enters and adding
to his total of six majors.
And therein lies a Tiger tale.
“For three years,” Earl says,
“Tiger wanted to win the U.S. Open because it nearly always
ends on Father's Day. Two years ago, he apologized to me. `I'm
sorry, Pop, I wanted to win that trophy for you.' I said, `Maybe
next year.'
“When he won it at Pebble Beach, I
wasn't there, so he announced it in public that he was dedicating
it to me.”
Uh, isn't that a kind of Father's Day tribute,
the sort of gesture they don't normally observe?
“No,” Earl says, “that's
just a father and son showing their love.”
It is a mild surprise, and a pleasant one,
to hear this language in the macho fantasy land called sports.
Earl is a retired Army colonel, no softie, but he has no problem
expressing his most tender feelings. He does this even in his
role as the executive director of the Tiger Woods Foundation.
“I do a lot of motivational speaking,”
he says, “often in connection with our clinics. This year,
in Virginia, I spoke to parents and their children at a high school
for the gifted. They wanted to know what my experiences were with
Tiger.
“I went to Florida and spoke to a combination
of pre-kindergarten kids up to the sixth grade, plus the faculty.
It's hard to pitch a talk that reaches that range of people. But
I got back wonderful cards. I had told them to work on learning
to love yourself. Then you can learn to love others. You can never
tell someone you love them too much. When I speak, I always ask,
`How many of you in the last week told your parents you loved
them?' Tiger never hangs up the phone without telling me he loves
me.
“When he was 5, my sister Frieda was
dying of cancer in Denver. She was with us in California, helping
my wife after the birth, and had not seen him since. We flew to
Denver to bring closure. Tiger had just been on the TV show That's
Incredible. When we got to her room, he crawled into her bed,
put his arms around her and said, `Aunt Frieda, I love you.' The
tears were flowing all over the place.”
When you read about Tiger's discipline,
how routinely he controls his emotions and how tightly he guards
his privacy, you think about that little boy and the bars of music
that made the man.
One night, Earl and Tiger were watching
one of those documentaries on famine in Ethiopia, and the two
sat in pained silence at the pictures of parents with haunted
faces and babies with extended bellies.
Tiger left the room and returned a few moments
later with a box containing his precious collection of gold coins.
“Daddy,” he asked, “will you give these coins to
those people for me?”
You hesitate to romanticize Tiger Woods,
at any age, given his current abundance of fortune and fame and
sponsors lined up around the block to give him more of both. But
rare is the peek behind the shield of his privacy, and you surely
don't fault him for being human and having a sentimental side.
Tiger will learn with time, is already learning,
when and where he can lower the mask.
Make no mistake. He is one of the country's
leading growth industries, but this is clearly a family business,
one with a heart. To begin to know him, and to understand the
relationship between Tiger and Dad, you need to know the legacy
Earl passed on from his own father, whose life was short.
He lost both his parents by the time he
was 13 and was raised by the eldest of his four sisters.
“My father died of a stroke when I
was 11,” Earl says, “and my mother grieved herself to
death two years later.
“He was an avid baseball fan and the
scorekeeper for the local baseball park in Manhattan (Kansas,
not New York). It was there that I was introduced to the Negro
baseball leagues. They would come to town on a barnstorming tour,
playing each other, and against All-Star teams like Bob Feller's.
“I would be the batboy. That was how
I met Roy Campanella, Josh Gibson, Monte Irvin, Satchel Paige
and all those legends. It was a major thing in my baseball development,
because there was no television, no books to read, no instructional
booklets. So I learned an awful lot from them.”
Earl was the first black to make the American
Legion all-state team in Kansas and in the 1950s the first to
integrate the Big Eight Conference (now the Big 12) in baseball.
He was a catcher who could hit and throw,
and he understood the game so well that his high school coach
let him position the fielders. The confidence Tiger exudes was
clearly inherited from Earl.
Once, during his days as a batboy, he asked
Campanella if he could warm up Paige between innings.
“Roy said, `Boy, he'll kill you,' ”
Earl recalled. “I said, `No, sir, he won't. I have a major-league
arm. And tell him after his last warmup to duck, because if he
doesn't, the ball is going to hit him in the chest.' Sure enough,
I caught him with Campy's glove, and when I threw the ball to
second, it passed the mound right where Satchel's chest would
have been.
“Satchel's arm was like rubber, and
man, he was fast. He didn't take it easy on me, either. But I
got my competitive spirit from my father. His favorite expression
was, `If you've got 'em down, stomp on 'em.' And I passed that
on to Tiger.
“My father taught me discipline and
how to swear,” Earl continues. “He could swear for 30
minutes and never repeat himself. He also taught me to lay stones.
He was a stone mason, and he showed me how to mix the mortar.
He had his own ways. He'd say, `You've got to have the right amount
of spit in it.' He'd spit in the bucket and say, `Yeah, that's
about right.'
“Together we built a stone fence in
front of our house by the sidewalk. I went back to Manhattan for
a high school reunion, and the fence was still there.”
Earl had finished his freshman season at
Kansas State when the Kansas City Monarchs offered him a contract.
“That was an interesting crossroads
in my life,” he says. “I was young, 17, and I had to
make that decision by myself. Both parents dead. I toiled and
troubled over that decision for many nights. I heard my father
say, `I want you to be a baseball player.' That was my father's
lifelong ambition for me. I could hear my mother say, `Get your
education, son.' I listened to my mother's voice. I turned down
the offer and never regretted it.”
Earl made the military his career, served
two tours of duty in Vietnam and retired as a lieutenant colonel.
He bears a resemblance to Colin Powell, only shorter and with
a rounder face, but with that same army authority in his voice.
“That was an ironic choice,” he
says. “My father hated the army. I had four sisters, and
Fort Reilly, Kansas, was eight miles outside Manhattan.”
(You recall the recent quote of Charles
Barkley, when asked what he would do when his 12-year old daughter
began dating boys: “I figure if I kill the first one, the
word will get around.”)
Some passions are not transferable. Earl
tried to persuade Tiger to take up baseball when he was old enough
for Little League. He was a natural switch hitter who could knock
the low pitch out of sight from either side.
“But he came to me and said, `Daddy,
it gets in the way of my golf,' ” Earl recalls. “Then
I tried to interest him in running track. You think his swing
is pretty? His stride, his form in terms of aesthetics —
nothing could touch him. I'd send him to the store, and he'd run
both ways.
“In high school, he went out for the
cross-country team. In two weeks, he went from fair to being their
No. 2 runner. But he came to me and said, `Daddy, it gets in the
way of my golf.' ”
Earl made a conscious decision to reduce
his role in Tiger's life a few years ago, giving his son the space
and control he needed. He's back, but in a measured way. When
Tiger had three replicas made of his British Open trophy —
at a cost of $10,000 each — for himself and his parents,
Earl could not resist asking: “What? No discount for quantity?”
If there is anything certain in the humbling
game of golf, it is that Tiger will continue to deal in quantity.
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