From his mother, Tida, Tiger Woods inherited much strength.
Happy Mother’s Day! This week, we’re highlighting the experiences of some of the most high-profile women in the game, each of whom share a meaningful title: Mom. Next up: Tida Woods, mother of Tiger.
When the Tiger Woods origin story has been told over the years — in newspaper stories in the early days, later in magazine pieces, eventually in books and documentaries — Earl Woods, Tiger’s father, was always front and center. Earl had a vision. (“Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity,” Earl told Sports Illustrated.) Earl was Tiger’s putting whisperer, and the only reason Butch oversaw Tiger’s swing was because Earl got the two of them together. Earl, Earl, Earl. Big-hug Earl.
In the better press tents, we knew better. Of course it takes two to tango. It wasn’t as if Earl found Tiger as an infant floating down Rae’s Creek in a Gore-Tex baby basket. When it comes to Tiger mothers, Tiger’s mother is the GOAT. Here, on the eve of Mother’s Day, she really should need no introduction, but it’s been a while: presenting Ms. Kultida Punsawad Woods, a native of Thailand who speaks English with a distinct accent, some dropped words and with perfect precision. Consider these telling sentences as Tida talked about Earl to a Golf Digest writer: “Old man is soft. He cry. He forgive people. Not me. I don’t forgive anybody.”
In Tida, we see Tiger.
Was Tiger ever soft? No. Not physically, not mentally. Did Tiger ever forgive anybody? See: Norman, Greg; Chamblee, Brandel; Haney, Hank.
You want to be an on-the-field assassin? You need 10 tons of Tida, and Tiger had it. Over the past 25 years or so, I can remember only one instance when Woods showed something like empathy for one of his opponents. That was in 2005, at a Tour event at Harding Park in San Francisco, when John Daly missed a three-footer on the second hole of a playoff to lose to Woods. For a little while there, Tiger seemed to feel Daly’s pain.
To beat other players in the stretch run, again and again and again, it takes talent, of course — and the killer gene. Enter Tida. When Tiger won his first Tour event, in 1996, in a playoff over Davis Love, Tida said of her only child, “He take his heart.” Tiger once told Steve DiMeglio of USA Today, “My mom’s still here and I’m still deathly afraid of her.”
In Tom Callahan’s book about Earl Woods, “In Search of Tiger,” he cites this exchange from a long-ago clinic Tiger gave:
Earl: “Let me introduce a young whippersnapper who’s never been spanked.”
Tiger: “He’s right. He never had to spank me growing up as a kid. Because Mom beat the hell out of my ass. I’ve still got the handprints.”
Maybe there was some hyperbolic humor in that. Probably. Some, anyway.
Recently, when Woods granted rare interviews to promote his new clothing line, he talked about his mother’s influence, both with Carson Daly, on Today, the long-running NBC morning show, and with Jimmy Fallon, the current host of The Tonight Show, NBC’s long-running night cap. (When Arnold Palmer helped get Golf Channel off the ground, he said he envisioned it as something similar to The Tonight Show, on which he was a frequent guest — something relaxing, pleasant, inoffensive, an easy way to head off into dreamland. Arnold always was an NBC guy. Woods, in his own way, is, too.)
He explained to Daly and Fallon that he started wearing red shirts for important matches as a kid at the urging of his mother. “The red story is actually a good one,” Woods told Fallon. “It comes from my mom. My mom thought, being a Capricorn, whatever, red is my power color, some b.s. like that.”
There’s likely more cultural mixing in those sentences than we could ever know. Tida Woods is a practicing Buddhist and, in Buddhism, red is notably a power color. In Thailand, wearing red on Sundays imbues its wearer with extra powers. For a suburban kid with an immigrant mother playing golf in junior golf events in Southern California in the 1980s, “some b.s. like that” sounds like a convenient shorthand to make a cultural difference from mom at home seem broadly relatable to the outside world. But it had to be a real thing to Tida, and her son did win 82 Tour events wearing red.
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