You the Man! For a decade and a half, this exhortation rang in the ears of Tiger Woods as he marched down the world’s fairways toward his date with destiny. How ironic that it was the other dates on Tiger’s itinerary that may have permanently altered that destiny; now You the Man! has an entirely different connotation. Of course, no one would give the indiscretions of an ordinary athlete a second thought. It is Tiger’s extraordinary gifts that have made him front-page news since he was a teenager. Some say he is the best golfer ever. Others say his cultural impact dwarfs any legacy he leaves on the links. The fact is that both can be—and probably are—true.

GROWING UP

Eldrick Tont Woods was born on December 30, 1975, in Cypress, California. His mother Kultida invented his name. The first letter stood for Earl, his father’s name, and the last letter was for Kultida. In that way, the boy would always be “surrounded” by his parents.

Earl wasn’t crazy about the name. Growing up black in America wasn’t easy, and a name like Eldrick held little promise to make it easier. Almost from the start, Earl called him Tiger, after a friend he made while serving in Vietnam.

Tiger’s dad father grew up in Depression-era Kansas. Earl’s mother was a college graduate, but she had to take work as a housekeeper to make ends meet. She encouraged her kids to pursue higher education, too. When Earl completed high school, he could have signed a contract to play pro baseball. Instead he accepted an athletic scholarship to Kansas State, where he would integrate the Big Seven as the school’s star catcher.

After college, Earl became a teacher. He continued to teach after being drafted, lecturing on military history while in the Army during the 1950s. Earl married and had three children—a family he would later leave in the 1960s. An adventure-seeker, Earl decided to volunteer for the Green Berets during the Vietnam War. As he entered his 40s, he hit the “reset” button on life.

Earl saw lots of action behind enemy lines. He survived two tours of duty and achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel. Among the men he fought with in Vietnam was Vuong Dang Phong, a colonel in the South Vietnamese military. Vuong’s nickname in his unit was “Tiger.”

Earl met Kultida at an Army installation in Bangkok. She was working as a secretary. She was nearly 20 years his junior. They were married, and Earl retired from the Army in 1972. He took a job with a defense contractor in California. Earl and Kultida purchased their first home in Cypress in 1975. As a mixed-race couple in an essentially all-white enclave, they were not embraced by the neighbors. Occasionally, bored teens would pelt their house with pebbles.

Earl hadn’t been a good father to his first three kids. He made amends by spending plenty of time with Tiger. As an infant, Tiger would often watch his dad practice his golf swing—golf had become something of an obsession for Earl since leaving the military. One day Earl sawed off the handle on an old putter and handed it to Tiger. He was amazed to see his toddler son mimic his swing to near perfection. Soon Tiger was holing putts at the nearby Navy Golf Course, where Earl played. Before his third birthday, Tiger began honing his swing at the NGC driving range.

One day, Tiger played the back nine at NGC with his dad and shot a 48. A local news crew heard about this and did a feature on him. Producers for “The Mike Douglas Show” saw the piece and invited the young phenom on the show. He putted in the presence of Hollywood legends Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart. The You Tube clip has been viewed more than a million times.

The publicity from this appearance rankled some of the members at NGC. The club pro invoked a rule that prohibited players under the age of 10 from using the course. Earl moved Tiger to a par-3 course in Long Beach, where he met his first coach, a pro named Rudy Duran. By age six, Tiger was able to reach the greens from the tees. He even made a couple of holes-in-one. Tiger won his first important competition in 1982, the World 10-and-Under Championship, outshooting boys three and four years older.

Both parents contributed to Tiger’s development as a golfer. Earl used a variety of tricks to toughen his son mentally. Kultida addressed his inner game, teaching him the fundamentals of Buddhism. The result was a child who had nerves of steel, intense focus and great calm in a crisis. It didn’t hurt that Kultida had plenty of killer instinct herself. She once told Tiger to go for the throat just like a real tiger and never let an opponent up.

In 1986, after suffering a mild heart attack, Earl turned over the coaching reins to John Anselmo, a local pro. With Anselmo’s help, Tiger literally became unbeatable. In 1987, he entered more than two dozen local youth tournaments and won them all. Also joining Team Tiger was Earl’s friend, Jay Brunza, a sports psychologist. Brunza helped Tiger deal with the mounting pressures he faced, and sometimes even caddied for him during events.

As he approached adolescence, Tiger began setting goals. He became obsessed with Jack Nicklaus. Tiger had posters of the al-time great on the walls of his room, along with his career stats and milestones.

Tiger’s first step on the path to tracking the Golden Bear was to enter the 1991 USGA Junior Championship. Two years earlier, a teenager named David Duval won the title. He and Tiger would one day become rivals on the PGA Tour. At the 1991 event, Tiger played brilliantly and sank several pressure putts—including the tournament-winner on the first hole of sudden death. He was only 15-years-old.

Although Tiger’s career was on the fast track, the Woods household was feeling the squeeze of Earl’s retirement in the early 1990s. Kultida had gone back to work as a bookkeeper, but her salary plus Earl’s pension was hardly enough to underwrite their son’s career. Mark McCormack of IMG offered a solution. Although the sports, media and entertainment giant couldn’t sign Tiger because of his amateur status, they could sign Earl to “scout” other up-and-coming golfers at the junior tournaments his son played. Of course, this also gave IMG the inside track to become Tiger’s agent once he turned pro.

A chunk of Tiger’s IMG money went to hire a first-rate coach. Earl and Kultida settled on Butch Harmon, the son of a Masters winner and a noted PGA swing doctor. Tiger was starting to grow, and his mechanics would need to change constantly. It would be a challenge to keep winning tournaments and at the same time not screw up his swing permanently. One thing Harmon did almost immediately was put his young pupil on a weightlifting and fitness routine.

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