Tiger Woods
(Simon & Schuster, $30) “Who is Tiger Woods?” asked Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Woods himself might not be able to answer that, but the latest biography of the fallen golf superstar charges so confidently through the first half-century of the drama that, “like a well-struck golf ball,” it demands admiration. Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian vacuumed up everything written about their subject and then interviewed 250-plus people to bring “grainy new detail” to the tale. Though they get too brash in their delivery at times, the saga they’ve crafted manages to be almost simultaneously “exhilarating, depressing, tawdry, and moving.” This is “a big American story that rolls across barbered lawns and then leaves you stranded in some all-night Sam’s Club of the soul.”
That story, for a good 150 pages, “could be plucked out of a heartwarming chil-
dren’s movie,” said John Paul Newport in Bloomberg.com. A boy of modest means uses talent and an iron work ethic to change the face of an elitist, white-dominated sport by becoming its greatest player ever. His parents pushed, and Tiger complied, logging 10,000 hours of links practice by age 12. Still, “what Benedict and Keteyian do better than in any biography I’ve read about Woods is detail the human costs of this machine-like focus.” Rude, entitled, at times outright callous, Woods eventually had affairs with dozens of women before a 2009 altercation with his wife exposed his secret life. Yet because his misery is also vividly drawn, “readers may find their sympathies for Woods growing as the Shakespearean tragedy of his life unfolds.”
Not that he gets a fair hearing, said Leigh Montville in The Wall Street Journal. Because people close to Woods are bound by confidentiality agreements, the testimony readers get comes disproportionately from ex-associates who’ve been burned by Woods. Meanwhile, redemption is still possible, at least professionally. At 42, Woods suddenly has somehow emerged from a decade-long funk to enter this weekend’s Masters as a bettor’s favorite. In this story, “the final chapter is yet to be written.”