Category Archives: Tour Players

Tiger, Continued

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In 2006, when I was working on the Men’s Vogue article about Tiger Woods that I mentioned yesterday, Woods showed me around the men’s grillroom in the clubhouse at Isleworth, the gated golf community where he lived. He pointed out its many man-friendly amenities, among them a pool table, a Ping-Pong table, numerous pinball machines and videogames, a true-rolling artificial putting green, a miniature basketball court, and a long row of leather easy chairs, which were lined up in front of a flat-screen TV that was hanging above a fireplace. “There are a lot of divorces here,” he said, and we both laughed.

Ha! Who knew? He was probably already fouling his nest, as my late father would have put it, but his public self-immolation was still a few years away. If there’s anyone other than Woods himself who might gain by meditating on his troubles, it’s parents who—inspired by his remarkable life, perhaps—entertain serious athletic ambitions for their own children. Ask any pushy sports dad whether he’d be happy for his son or daughter to achieve superstardom, and he’d undoubtedly say yes. But striving for supremacy, in any endeavor, is a morally treacherous proposition. Great athletes become great in part by learning to coldly exploit the weaknesses of others, and by treating their own desires as global priorities. What we usually refer to as an athlete’s “sacrifices”—the pre-dawn wake-up calls, the endless, lonely hours in the gym or on the driving range—are really acts of narcissism, carried to a sweaty extreme. One of Woods’s many appealing characteristics, pre-scandal, was that he seemed at least moderately concerned about the world beyond his own accomplishments. The mess he made of his family is a useful reminder that being a good person, no matter how many advantages you seem to have, is as difficult as it looks, especially if you’re in a position to take your sexual fantasies live—a temptation that famous athletes often seem to resist about as successfully as rock stars.

Nevertheless, as I wrote yesterday, I enjoyed hanging around with him—and I would guess that virtually all the other people present on those days did, too. He arrived by himself, in his own car, without an entourage, and he cheerfully did everything he was asked to do. A woman who worked for one of his corporate sponsors told me that he never complained, much less threw a celebrity tantrum. In Los Angeles, he spent much of the day shooting motion-capture footage for a video game. He had to lie still as two technicians from Electronic Arts, the video game’s publisher, affixed eighty-eight BB-size motion-capture reflectors, called markers, to his face, neck, and upper chest, and as they worked he chatted with them amiably. Then he spent almost two hours sitting in what looked like a dentist’s chair inside a pod-like enclosure, which was as brightly illuminated as an operating room, and had to keep his head motionless while saying things like “A bear bit me in the forest today” and “I never jump quickly off a truck”—sentences that contain phonemes which can be digitally reshuffled into custom dialogue.

Another of his professional commitments that day was to spend half an hour conversing with Edward Barry-Walsh, a seventeen-year-old English boy (and four-handicap at Sunningdale), who, as a result of winning a contest sponsored by Electronic Arts, was going to be included as a character in the game. Woods sat next to him on a couch, put his feet up on the coffee table, and gave no indication whatsoever that he was keeping track of the time. Barry-Walsh had written a number of questions on a sheet of paper. He seemed nervous at first, but Woods set him at ease and after a while he put the list away.

When Barry-Walsh couldn’t think of anything else to ask, Woods posed for photographs with him and his parents, discussed the proper technique for hitting lob shots over living-room furniture, and looked ahead to the day when Barry-Walsh would be “out there kicking my butt.”  Later, Barry-Walsh told me that the experience had far exceeded his expectations, and marveled, “He’s just such a down-to-earth bloke.” Not even close, we learned later.

Four and a half years after their conversation, Barry-Walsh made the cut and finished tied for forty-third in the 2010 Castle Dargan Irish Masters, a European mini-tour event. But, unless he subsequently enjoyed triumphs that Google knows nothing about, that was the zenith of his professional golf career—maybe not the unluckiest thing that could happen to a talented young man.

My Close Personal Friend Tiger Woods

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In late 2005 and early 2006, on assignment for Men’s Vogue in Los Angeles and Orlando, I got to spend some time hanging around with Tiger Woods. (Woods wanted Vogue to pay attention to his clothing lines and so had agreed to be interviewed at some length by a print reporter, something he ordinarily hates and rarely does.) He buffaloed me on at least one issue—he described his marriage as one of the proudest achievements of his life—but I liked him a lot, and I enjoyed being with him, and I found him much more interesting to talk to than, for example, any of the handful of Major League Baseball players I had to interview, many years ago, on an assignment for the short-lived magazine Inside Sports. (Imagine the most annoying jock in your high school class permanently frozen at his moment of maximum annoyingness.) Woods gets close to zero credit for being forthcoming, but, actually, over the years he has intelligently explained a huge amount about what goes on in his mind as he competes—more than any other great athlete I can think of.

He has also been surprisingly nonchalant about the potential peril of getting out of the bed in the morning. He loves roller coasters. He races down double-black-diamond slopes despite not knowing all that much about skiing. He has taught himself to hold his breath underwater for four minutes, and he has dived to a hundred feet without scuba tanks. He has gone bungee jumping in New Zealand. And he drives his car too fast, in my middle-aged opinion. Also, of course, those cocktail waitresses.

In Florida, the idea was that Woods would put on a Prada suit and zip around Lake Butler on a jet ski while the photographer chased him in a power boat. But there was a problem. The sky had darkened steadily through the morning, and the wind had picked up to thirty miles an hour, and the National Weather Service had issued a small-craft advisory. The owner of the power boat said the water was so choppy that if he ventured onto the lake he might not be able to return to the same dock. Canceling the shoot would be the prudent thing to do, everyone agreed—except Woods. “It’s not that rough,” he said, like a ten-year-old making a case for visiting Disney World in a thunderstorm.

Woods eventually prevailed on the weather issue. After a few minutes on the water, though, he circled back toward the dock, and I and all the other people on shore assumed that the ugly conditions had brought him to his senses. But then he shouted, “How fast is this thing supposed to go?” It turned that he hadn’t been able to crank the jet ski to anything like its top speed, 60 m.p.h., and he couldn’t figure out what might be wrong. A neighbor of the jet ski’s owner removed several handfuls of weeds from under the hull, and Woods happily took off again, at full throttle.

Thirty minutes later he was back on land, very pleased. As he changed out of his wet clothes, he said, “Watch this,” and poured a half-cup of water from one of his Cole Haan oxfords

With a great deal of trepidation, I’m going to open this blog to comments. But I can always change my mind. Real names, please.

Snow Golf

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It snowed here last night–as it’s entitled to. Nevertheless, unless we get a big melt my friends will  have to change our Sunday golf plans. One possibility would be to play in the snow, at home. I own a pair of L. L. Bean snowshoes that I’ve never used for anything but golf, and I have a cache of orange balls.

It’s actually been a while since I played snow golf. I used to do it all winter long, with four old guys at my club who called themselves the Fuckheads, after their favorite term of endearment. They’re all dead now: John, who carried his golf bag by the handle, like a suitcase; Dick, who seldom took a waking breath that wasn’t filtered through a Tiparillo; Ed, who caddied for Titanic Thompson on our course the weekend of the wedding of Horton Smith, who won the first and third Masters tournaments and married a local girl; and Doug, who lived well into his nineties and whose house was up the street from mine. When they were younger, before I came along, they used to end their winter rounds by lighting a fire in the unheated cabin that serves as our clubhouse and drinking scotch while frost formed on the insides of the windows. One bitterly cold January morning long ago, they told me, the liquor froze in a glass that one of them had left on a table a few paces from the fire.

Playing golf in the snow is good for a golf swing. Snow dissipates energy even more than sand or dirt does, so you have to keep still and swing smoothly. Each of us carried only a single club, a limitation that inspired inventiveness in shot-making. It was while playing winter golf that I learned what must be the first principle of the golf swing: that the key to achieving power is not effort but ease. Facing a hundred-yard shot and having only a seven-iron with which to hit it, I swung easily and gracefully and launched my ball on a high, gorgeous, left-bending arc that ended deep within the woods behind the green.

Alister MacKenzie

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Alister MacKenzie and his wife, Hilda, on the fifteenth green at Cypress Point.

Obsessive students of golf architecture should file away the latest revision of a comprehensive chronology of the life of Alister MacKenzie, the designer of Augusta National, Cypress Point, Royal Melbourne, and a number of other courses worth scheming to play. The chronology is the work of Neil Crafter and the AM Research Team, in Adelaide, Australia, and it contains contributions from many people (including, in a very small way, me). Crafter, in a cover note, writes, “Sean Tully in San Francisco and Bob Beck in Santa Cruz have been most diligent in researching Mackenzie’s time in the USA, and Bob has unearthed records from Cypress Point that show when Mackenzie stayed overnight in the clubhouse and even what he ate for his meals! It is staggering that 80 or more years on we can get down to this level of detail about the life of Alister Mackenzie.” Even if you feel you already know everything you need to know about MacKenzie’s diet, the chronology contains many interesting facts.

Incidentally, the images above and below also appear in my book The Making of the Masters, which is now selling on Amazon for practically nothing. Below is MacKenzie’s original watercolor sketch of the routing of Augusta National. In it, the holes are numbered as they are today. MacKenzie later switched the nines; the club, after the first Masters, switched them back, because the current first nine thawed first on frosty mornings. Note the 90-yard 19th hole, near the clubhouse, squeezed between the 9th and 18th greens. MacKenzie explained the idea in a letter to Clifford Roberts, the club’s founding chairman: “Bobby Jones and some of the other directors thought it might be interesting to have a real 19th hole so that the loser could have the opportunity of getting his money back by playing double or quits. This 19th Hole will be an attractive plateau green, narrow at one end where the flag will usually be placed but wide at the other end so as to give a safety route to the player who has not the courage or the skill to pitch to the narrow end of the green.” The club, in those days, didn’t have the money to build it, and Jones and Roberts, in any event, worried that it would block the view of anyone in the clubhouse who was trying to watch whatever was happening on the 18th. Cool idea, though.