As a golfer, Tiger may be the best ever. As a father, he seems like the exact opposite...
AFTER Tiger Woods had done his share of air-punching, high-fiving, embracing, cheering and generally soaking up the adulation after his Masters victory on Sunday, he made his way to the enclosure where his family was waiting. His son Charlie, aged ten, ran to greet him and flung himself into Tiger’s arms.
The sight left the champ’s fans misty-eyed with nostalgia: more than two decades earlier, after a 21-year-old African American man made several chapters of history, the youngest ever Masters winner, Tiger Woods, had run into the arms of his own father, Earl. Same venue, same occasion, same heart-warming paternal bond… but after he’d turned to hug his 11-year-old daughter Sam, Woods began to stride towards the clubhouse, still basking in the applause, with little Charlie trotting alongside.
Only once did he cast a backward glance at his son, who struggled to keep up: even then, it was not to take his little boy’s hand and walk with him, but to be given a high five before marching on.
Thereafter Tiger stalked onwards, the conquering hero, the master of all he surveyed, the comeback kid whose personal and physical struggles had so recently threatened to end his stellar career. This was his moment, and nobody else’s. The little boy trailing him appeared increasingly confused – should he continue after his dad, should he wait for his sister? Eventually, Charlie was left behind.
Concern
It was a scene that neatly captured the circularity of Woods’s rise and fall and rise again: from being the gifted child in his father’s embrace, he is now the father hugging his own son, bookending his astonishing story in images of paternal love. Except Earl Woods wasn’t anyone’s idea of a Dad of the Year, and it’s hardly a gong that Tiger himself will be adding to his groaning mantelpiece either.
Because to the rest of us, that little vignette between father and son on Sunday was far more telling, and more disquieting than the Hallmark Father’s Day card it evoked. To a less adoring eye, little Charlie looked like he had just been there as a prop and, once he’d supplied the photo-op, he’d been discarded and forgotten. He and his sister, you could be forgiven for thinking, were just two more bit players in the great saga of Tiger’s redemption as a sportsman for the ages. His redemption as a father, though, as a role model, as a human being, is still very much a work in progress.
Those rose-tinted comparisons between Earl and young Tiger, and Tiger and little Charlie, should fill any sensible person with unease and concern. Earl Woods was a monster who spotted his son’s sporting potential when he was still a toddler and ruthlessly set about eradicating any of the human qualities, such as empathy, humility and compassion, that would stand in the way of converting it into a lifelong meal ticket.
Tiger’s kindergarten teachers, according to a sensational biography published last year, remember a lonely child who was not allowed mix with the other children, for fear of his being distracted from his golf. His father goaded and taunted him as he practised so as to ‘toughen him up’, the book claims, so that by the age of 12 a socially isolated and ill-adjusted Tiger stammered when he spoke.
Earl was also an insatiable sex addict, who cheated relentlessly on his wife as he travelled the world with his gifted son.
In later years, Earl turned Tiger’s childhood home into a den of depravity: cupboards and drawers overflowed with sex toys, porn played continuously on huge TV screens and a small army of sex workers on retainers satisfied Earl’s every need.
Even in his teens, Tiger showed strong signs of following the example that his father had set. Relationships were discouraged in favour of easy sex, and girlfriends were used and dumped without remorse. Even when he was dating his then wife-to-be, Elin Nordegren, he was still playing away on regular trips to a sleazy Vegas nightclub, where he and his pals would pick out the prettiest girls and have them brought to their VIP table.
Cruelty
On the night his father died of kidney failure in California in 2006, two years after Tiger got married to Elin, the golf star was in bed with his latest mistress in a luxury apartment just a few miles away.
As a golfer, there is no denying Tiger Woods is without equal, and his Masters victory was a triumph of self-belief, resilience and a singular ability to detach oneself from the pressures and the distractions that would have overwhelmed a more vulnerable human spirit. In that respect, he has certainly become the man his father wanted him to be. But, as well as his father’s ambition, how much of Earl’s example as a parent does Tiger Woods embody? Consider his casual cruelty towards his daughter Sam, in the aftermath of Sunday’s win. She had only arrived in Augusta that day, he said, because on Saturday she had been playing in a major tournament. But Tiger went a bit further. ‘Sam lost a state soccer tournament yesterday so I convinced her to come up and watch the Masters and luckily I was able to win,’ he said.
It’s an extraordinary statement on several levels. Firstly, why did anyone need to know Sam had lost? If you were in the final of a big event, would you really want your father to publicly announce that defeat to the world?
Secondly, soccer is a team sport, so if anyone lost, it wasn’t Sam but her team. And finally, there’s the assumption that her defeat was immediately salved by her father’s victory.
The children’s main function at the event appeared to be acting suitably awestruck and impressed by their father’s greatness. The fact that his children might have preferred happily married and boringly united parents to all the Masters trophies in the world has not crossed his mind.
There wasn’t even a whiff of a suggestion that maybe, just maybe, he might have begun to make amends to them for the grief, distress and humiliation he had visited on his young family with his multiple infidelities, his string of cocktail waitresses and his drink-driving arrest.
Grubby
Cheating men, after all, don’t just cheat on their wives – they steal from their children too. They pilfer their family time to spend it on strangers, they lie to their kids about their long absences and their late hours, they violate their confidence and self-esteem by relegating them to also-rans behind their mistresses and their prostitutes. As far as Tiger Woods is concerned, though, winning a game of golf fully entitles him to his children’s unconditional admiration and respect, and his brilliance as a golfer more than makes up for his grubby betrayals as a husband and father.
That’s what he was brought up to believe, after all.
His children will never want for anything, that’s for sure… except maybe a dad who truly cared to include them in his big moment, who paused to hold the hand of his ten-year-old son as he trailed, like another fawning flunky, behind him.
There’s no doubt about it – as a father, Tiger Woods is a wonderful golfer. The sad part is that, in Tiger’s skewed, damaged, dysfunctional world, that’s more than good enough.