Tiger Woods

American authors and journalists Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian chronicle the life and career of the American professional golfer Tiger Woods in their biography, Tiger Woods (2018). To paint as complete a portrait as possible, the authors interviewed more than 250 people and read more than twenty books about Woods's life. Although Woods offered to give an on-the-record interview to Benedict and Keteyian, the authors declined, explaining that they could not in good journalistic conscience accept Woods's conditions for the interview. In turn, Woods refused to speak to the authors off-the-record. When asked why he wrote the book, Keteyian said he wanted to answer the question, "Who is Tiger Woods?"

The book opens the day after Thanksgiving in 2009, when Woods crashed his Cadillac Escalade SUV into a fire hydrant and a tree. Just two days earlier, the National Enquirer had published a story alleging an extramarital affair between Woods and a nightclub manager. As Woods recovered from his injuries, canceling a number of tournament appearances, more than a dozen women came forward alleging that they had had extramarital affairs with the golfer. Woods admitted to and apologized publicly for the infidelity, taking an indefinite hiatus from professional golf. In the wake of the scandal, numerous corporate partners ended their endorsement deals with Woods, including AT&T, General Motors, and Gatorade.

Benedict and Keteyian trace Woods's story back to its beginnings, largely telling the rest of the narrative in chronological order. Born in 1975 in Cypress, California, Woods was introduced to golf by his father, Earl, before the age of two. As a Navy veteran, Earl enjoyed access to the Navy golf course at a training base in Los Alamitos. A golfing prodigy, Woods had already by the age of five appeared in Golf Digest magazine and on television's The Mike Douglas Show in a segment during which he engaged in a putting competition against comedian Bob Hope.



Benedict and Keteyian investigate and question a number of claims made in the media about Woods's upbringing. For example, Earl frequently shared stories about the racist treatment Woods received at school and on the golf course. In one particularly disturbing story, a group of sixth graders was said to have tied Woods to a tree on his first day of kindergarten and spray-painted racial slurs on his clothes. While the authors have little doubt that Woods, like so many African-Americans, faced racism in various forms throughout his life, this story sounded suspicious to them, particularly the detail about spray-painting words on Woods's clothes. According to Benedict and Keteyian’s reporting, neither the kindergarten teacher nor the district administrator has any recollection of this happening. Moreover, despite Earl's claims that he filed an official report, there is no record of such a report existing that the authors could find. They conclude that Earl, who had faced down racism again and again over the course of his life, wished to emphasize a narrative of racism in the story of Woods's rise, often against his son's own wishes.

The relationship between Earl and Tiger is of great importance to Benedict and Keteyian. They write that repeatedly, sports reporters ignored the dysfunction evident in Earl and Tiger's relationship for fear of tarnishing the glow of Woods's meteoric rise. For example, in 1994, when an eighteen-year-old Woods became the youngest winner of the U.S. Amateur Title, Earl told a People Magazine reporter, "When he gets a little cocky, I say, 'You weren't shit before. You aren't shit now. And you'll never be shit.'" While the reporter wished to publish this quote, he was countermanded by his editor who chose to leave it out.

Perhaps due to Earl's frequently cold and demanding demeanor toward his son, the authors argue that he raised Woods to become a man lacking in basic decency. They take particular aim at Woods's refusal, after winning the 1997 Masters Tournament at the age of twenty-one, to attend a Jackie Robinson tribute with President Bill Clinton because it would disrupt his vacation plans. Keteyian also hailed one of Woods's former close friends Mark O'Meara while he was playing golf, convincing him to open up about the pair's lapsed friendship. O'Meara described the pain he felt when Woods failed to show up at his induction to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2015. "Sooner or later you have to be a human being," O'Meara said.



In the years before his death in 2006, Earl's own life slid deeper into debauchery. Benedict and Keteyian write, "Pornography played steadily on the television. Sex toys were stuffed in drawers, and sexual favors were performed at Earl’s request. 'It was a house of horrors,' recalled a former employee. ‘Every drawer. Every cabinet.'"

Despite the dishonesty and sordidness at the heart of Woods's story and that of his father, Benedict and Keteyian can't help but celebrate the glory of Woods's talents and his cultural and athletic importance to the game of golf. For example, upon winning his first Master's—an event black golfers didn't even participate in until 1975—Woods is in awe as he "witnesses the abundance of black people from the Augusta staff who had left their posts and assembled on the lawn and the veranda on the second floor."

According to The New Yorker, Tiger Woods is "comprehensive, propulsive, packed with incident, and unsparing with regard to its subject."