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Chasing Tiger: The Tiger Woods Reader
Edited by Glenn Stout
This anthology of articles written about The Prodigious One since he emerged upon the national landscape in the United States as more than a novelty item (a club-totin’ tot on The Mike Douglas Show) provides the best look at Tiger Woods that has yet appeared between covers.
There have been plenty books, from the premature (Tim Rosaforte’s first) to the hyperbolic (Rosaforte’s second) to the scholarly (David Owen). Each has its merits, and, in time, each will provide a milestone for the historians as to how at least some writers assessed the man who is breaking golf records faster than they can invent them at various stages of his development.
But to encapsulate the ineffable qualities of a star figure like Woods in biographies and analyses while he is in his twenties requires an agenda. What Chasing Tiger offers is a collection of magazine and newspaper features that were written to the more immediate demands of the periodical. As such, the thrust of each piece is more limited, which allows for a focussed evaluation of something momentary, perhaps ephemeral.
Editor Glenn Stout has chosen well in his selection of 21 articles from the more than 1400 he considered. And what he has accomplished is a prismatic view of an individual who is as complex as the next human being, who has a talent beyond imagining, who has an international persona that he keeps to himself as much as possible while exploiting it -- in the best as well as the most canny sense of that word -- to the fullest degree possible.
What makes the book so valuable is that he has avoided the most fawning pieces, and the most hostile, that have appeared in the last few years. Most of the articles have sense of proportion to them: while admiring of the young man’s abilities, they are not, on the whole, blind to his human characteristics, including some of his frailties as well as his charm.
We see Tiger at his alma mater, Stanford University in California, in several articles about his amateur career and his first US Masters appearance. At this point, Woods is just emerging as a national figure coming into the public consciousness because he is seen as a young, talented black player in a very white game.
More than one piece – an important New York Times Magazine profile by Peter de Jonge (1995) and an article on racial identification by Ellen Goodman in the Boston Globe a couple of months later, using Woods as exemplar – introduce this self-confident young prince’s attitude about his diverse ethnic heritage, his pride in it, and his refusal to be limited by it. This theme will recur again in other articles of different focus, as it will as long as he lives in America.
The anthology includes the infamous GQ article (1997) by Charles Pierce in which Woods let out a few racial and lesbian jokes. It includes the lengthy Sports Illustrated article by Gary Smith in late 1996, in which Earl Woods coined the term "The Chosen One," and explained it. (Here, too, is the origin of the oft-cited remarks about Mandela and Gandhi that have dogged Earl since; it would appear they were rather put in his mouth, though he acquiesced willingly to their use).
Those were the days; Tiger Woods had not quite ascended Mount Olympus yet and courting, or at least accommodating, the Press was still in the plan (and several articles delineate the thoroughness and deliberateness of the plan). He’s come a long way, baby, and in-depth profiles like those are unlikely to be on the schedule for some time to come.
James K. Glassman’s 1996 piece from the Washington Post, exposing the fundamental dishonesty of the first Nike commercial Woods did, is also included. But so are several awe-struck articles by writers as sanguine as Thomas Boswell, also of the Post, Dan Jenkins in Golf Digest in 2000 and the venerable High McIllvaney in The Times, also in 2000, focussing on his gifts, achievements and promise.
As early as 1997, Frank Deford had captured in Newsweek what was to be a recurring theme in subsequent years: that Woods’ contemporaries were virtually destined to be second-best – at best. "The Lost Generation," he poignantly called them. Anyone recalling Ernie Els’ wistful press conference after the 2000 Open can see the invisible thread with which the strangulation had been completed.
The nature of the book means there are a few repetitions of theme and anecdote, but it is the sort of tome that can be read at a sitting or dipped into at random. Read chronologically, however, it provides a very rounded portrait of the subject, and benefits from presenting a range of views.
They come from America and England, from men and women (there is even a rather breathless fan piece by a woman – or girl – writer in the US online magazine Salon), from those who have spent a lot of time with Woods, with golf or just as reporters of the American scene. It is neither a love-in nor a hatchet job; honour is due, and given, but mortality is also recognised.
With so much of the Woods persona lately having been reduced to his robotic press conferences, it is a fascinating reminder that this young man has, already, an accomplished past that is paving the way, brick by brick, to a stellar future that was recognised early. Most interesting is to read the seminal pieces and realise that they got it right, that we still recognise some of those traits in the increasingly remote figure of the protagonist.
It was a great idea for a book and, given the body of work already in existence, let alone what is to come, we could hope editor Stout considers a Volume Two, and revisits the project from time to time.
Chasing Tiger: The Tiger Woods Reader is published by Da Capo Press, price £12.95.
Contact: www.dacapopress.com (European distributors: The Eurospan Group, 3 Henrietta St., Covent Garden
London WC2E 8LU. Tel: 20 7240 0856)
