As a journalist I wanted to praise it, as a sports lover I wanted to chuck it away
REVIEWED: THE TELL-ALL BOOK THAT LAYS BARE TIGER’S LIFE
Afew days ago, our 19- year- old son came home from university and promptly startled his mother by announcing he was going to hit 250 balls each day on the practice ground.
Given he had attained a five handicap while barely hitting 250 practice balls in total, she wondered what on earth had prompted such a change.
‘tiger woods,’ he said. ‘watching him has just inspired me. I’ve never seen a sportsman play with such intensity. He’s incredible.’
I thought of that while reading a mammoth new biography on tiger, entitled Tiger Woods, that reaches the bookshelves today and which the publisher, Simon and Schuster, hopes will be seen as the definitive work. It’s certainly an admirable piece of reporting, with over 400 new interviews carried out.
even someone like myself who knows the tiger story backwards can learn plenty of new details, thanks to the diligence of the joint authors, Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian.
they even tracked down tiger’s first love, Dina Gravell, and report the heartless way they parted (yep, the heartlessness came from tiger).
they provide convincing evidence to show the welldocumented story that tiger was tied up aged five at his kindergarten and racially abused by older boys was, in fact, baloney made up by his father, earl, to fuel the legend.
the book begins with a revelation that stops you in your tracks, and the news that the father of arguably the most famous sportsman of the last 20 years is actually buried in a small, unmarked grave in Kansas — the quiet revenge of his long-suffering wife tida (tiger’s mother), the joint authors infer.
So begins a rattling read, taking us through the most dramatic rise and fall of perhaps any sportsman in history. If you thought tiger wasn’t a nice man, here you’ll learn the full, gory details.
earl comes out of it even worse, portrayed as a borderline sadist and a man who lived out his final days surrounded by pornographic videos and sex toys.
Yet the book comes out at a time when the American sporting world is showing by the week that it has moved on from all that, and that might just be a problem for the authors.
As we prepare for his return to the Masters, and what might prove to be the greatest sports comeback of all, do people want to read a book that’s high on the tawdriness of tiger’s life, but pretty low on the poetry?
‘I ask that one day you will find room in your hearts to forgive me,’ tiger said, in a statement he read out at the height of his scandal, and it seems resoundingly clear the answer is that they have.
record crowds have flocked to each of the five tournaments of his comeback this year, which in turn have been watched by record audiences on television. And now we have the most eagerly anticipated Masters in recent memory.
Superbly written as it is, this book wouldn’t make you want to pick up a golf club. In reaching down for tiger’s dark soul, the authors haven’t balanced it with anything revelatory about all those blessed days when he played the game better than any man who ever lived, and why he inspired everyone under the age of 30 that he will take on at Augusta National; why, even at the age of 42, he’s still inspiring a 19-year- old living 3,000 miles away to go to the practice ground.
the journalist in me read this book wanting to praise it to the heavens. the sports lover wanted to chuck it in the trash.