Tiger Woods by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian
I enjoyed the book, even as a nongolfer, and thought it was an interesting parallel to Andre Agassi’s Open. While Agassi portrays himself as a misunderstood rebel, Tiger was almost the inverse for much of his career: a beloved and telegenic athlete hiding dark secrets that eventually came out.
Tiger’s father Earl had big plans for him, telling journalists that “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.” When Tiger was a baby, he would eat dinner in his high chair while watching Earl practice putting. Tiger was swinging a club before he was two.
It wasn’t all positive, though: Earl would also curse and use racial slurs against Tiger as he practiced to harden his “mental toughness” while he practiced. While they agreed on a codeword Tiger could say if it was too much, Tiger never used it.
He became a legendary golfer as an adult. The best explanations of how good he was come from some Reddit threads:
Tiger would regularly pull off shots that no other golfer alive was capable of hitting.
Tiger changed how people play golf, not once in a generation once in history talent.
There were many years of Tiger's career where you could bet "Tiger or the field" and Tiger was often the better bet.1
Tiger made people that hated golf tune in to watch golf. Nobody has been able to do that since and probably never will
Observations and takeaways:
It’s lonely at the top. In the book, Tiger just seems lonely. He doesn’t have many people who he can turn to. While much of this is on him - in general, he comes across as a bad friend when he was younger - I understand the suspicion. It reminded me of part of the Vanderbilts’ story: it’s hard to trust people when you’re so rich and so powerful.
The reality distortion field of success and power. There are plenty of times in the book that Tiger does something that is unwise – snubbing an invitation from Bill Clinton after he won the Masters’, making off color jokes to a reporter. But given how good he was at golf and how much power this gives him, there isn’t a full feedback loop (or he chooses to ignore advice). While most of us are not the best golfer of all time, it was a helpful reminder that your relationship with reality becomes more distorted the more powerful you become or more senior you become in any organization. If you are an executive, people don’t want to tell you bad news. They laugh at all of your jokes. Even if you ask for upward feedback, you might hear that you’re doing a great jobs. (And some books even counsel the ambitious to excessively flatter their bosses).
What goes around comes around. One thing striking about the book is Tiger’s approach to relationships. There are multiple examples where he doesn’t extend relatively common courtesies, like thanking people for small favors or even acknowledging them. To the above point, his life is still fine, but it eventually catches up with him. His former coach, Hank Haney fell into this category and eventually wrote a (somewhat) critical book about him (called The Big Miss).
Broader thoughts on athlete biographies.
This was the third sports biography I’ve read in recent months (others were Open and Lebron by Jeff Benedict, who co-wrote Tiger Woods). A few themes that I’ve been thinking about:
People have different reactions to similar circumstances. Agassi, Lebron, and, Tiger all had difficult childhoods in different ways:
Agassi’s father forced him to hit 2,500 tennis balls every single day and shipped him off to tennis camp
Tiger’s father put tremendous pressure on him from an early age and constantly cheated on his mother
Lebron grew up in poverty and his father was never involved in his life
They all dealt with the pressures in different ways:
Agassi worked hard despite “hating” tennis, adopting a rebel image
Tiger cultivated a clean-cut public image while hiding his sex addiction from the world. While he was seen as a role model, he could be abrasive in person
Lebron also a clean-cut public image but has generally been perceived to be a genuinely nice guy and family man who’s still married to his high school sweetheart
It’s easy to try to read into things to explain “why” (e.g., Lebron found father figures early in his life with whom he had more “normal” relationships than Agassi or Tiger did with their actual fathers), but I’ll just leave it as “different people are different.”
Media
I hadn’t realized how much media scrutiny athletes get. No matter how good you are, somebody from the media will have an issue with you. It’s probably a level less vicious than if you are a British royal, but it’s close. Even though you are being paid lots of money, this likely still gets exhausting over time. I also hadn’t realized that Tiger had been extorted by the National Enquirer: after they caught him being unfaithful to his pregnant wife, they agreed to kill the story in exchange for him doing an “exclusive” piece for Men’s Fitness (owned by the same parent company).
I.e., that Tiger had better odds of winning a tournament than all other players combined.