Golf world should thank Tiger Woods
By Edwin Pope
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
(KRT)
AUGUSTA, Ga. - On a resonating Sunday on a golf course where
just about everything has always been white and green, 21-year-old
Tiger Woods wrenched open a new door to millions of people of
color.
He became the first to win The Masters in 61 tournaments. He
finished with a gossamer 18-under-par 270, a record score by the
youngest winner ever, and offered a huge and hugely dramatic shove
toward racial equity in a game largely limited to the affluent.
Then Tiger Woods handed us class in a moment when he could
have gloated.
"It means so much," he said. "I think of the
pioneers, Charlie Sifford and Teddy Rhodes and Lee Elder. If not
for them, I wouldn't be here. Coming up the 18th fairway, I said
a little prayer of thanks to all those guys."
Golf's world, and everybody else's, should say a little prayer
of thanks to Tiger Woods. What he did Sunday was reshape the game
by delivering it to the whole planet rather than just the relatively
privileged.
He played his final round of 69 strokes before throngs alternating
between shouting frantically and turning so quiet you could hear
birds chirping in the tall pines. But no sound was so sweet as
that of thousands erupting into wild cheering as Tiger strode
into history.
People reached out to touch him as though he were Moses parting
the Red Sea when he walked up the last hill of this phenomenal
journey, smiling irrepressibly.
He was, in both the golfing and societal senses.
He won as though he was in a different Masters than anyone
else. He was so brutally dominant, second-place Tom Kite, 12 strokes
behind, could only say, "I won my tournament."
Then Tiger drew on the champion's green jacket directly in
front of the onetime manor house on a plantation that provisioned
Confederate forces during the Civil War.
"An amazing day," he said.
To say the least. I'm not in the habit of proffering gratitude
to sports events, but I was awfully glad to be at this one.
I am not naive enough to believe this breakthrough will send
Augusta National Golf Club rushing out to recruit minorities;
it has only two African-American members. But the world changed
here Sunday.
Sometimes history jumps at you in miniature: A 17-year-old
African-American named Corlin Doolittle stood out by the No. 1
fairway in his Augusta National waiter's uniform when Tiger teed
off.
"I just wanted to be able to say I saw Tiger play,"
Doolittle said. "I'm not a golfer, but I'm thinking of taking
it up."
Would he be thinking about taking it up, he was asked, if Tiger
were not doing what he was doing?
"Probably not," Doolittle said. "But he has
a way of getting your attention."
Tiger did that and more. His brilliance in Masters rounds of
70-66-65-69 added up to an achievement larger in the big picture
than Jesse Owens' shattering performances in the 1936 Olympics.
In some ways, what this Tiger did could be as significant as
Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in major-league baseball
in '47 - 50 years ago almost to the day.
Happily, Elder, one of those Tiger mentioned right at first,
was here to see it. Elder became the Masters' first black contestant
in 1975 - the year Eldrick Woods was born and immediately nicknamed
"Tiger" by father Earl.
"It's a comparable thing to Jackie Robinson," Elder
said. "It would create the same kind of publicity. It's breaking
another barrier."
Golfanatics might be zeroing in on a future Grand Slam winner,
a man capable of winning the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open
and PGA Championship all in the same year.
The infinitely deeper question is, how many people might Woods'
triumph impel to take up a game effectively denied to them?
"I think this might encourage some kids to take up golf,"
he said. "Kids who have been playing so-called more athletic
sports like basketball. I hope so.
"I'm hoping they will think golf is cool."
Golf is a bit like tennis. Anyone who has the money can find
public facilities to play, but only lately has tennis reached
out to the inner cities, and only sporadically has golf been encouraged
among the disadvantaged.
Tiger teed off just eight minutes after CBS-TV began showing
its documentary, Son, Hero, Champion. That show has been criticized
as blatant puffery, but it offered some defining moments, as when
Woods said, "It's sad to see kids being told, 'No, you can't
do it.' Well, you can. You should be able to do anything you can."
Tiger did it, and gave a new meaning to Amen Corner, too.
He said he thought about his parents when he stood on the 10th
hole. That's the hole that starts the three-hole stretch nicknamed
by writer Herbert Warren Wind, after a jazz song named Shoutin'
at the Amen Corner. Wind got the idea for the nickname from the
frenzied cheering when golfers negotiated that torturing sector
of Augusta National's layout.
"I thought about my parents when I went to the 10th tee,"
Tiger said. "It was an awesome feeling. I was especially
thinking about what my dad said last night. He told me, 'It's
the toughest round you'll ever play, but if you do it right it
will be the most rewarding.' "
Tiger did, and it was.
When he birdied the 11th hole, a large part of civilization
must have shouted in ecstatic unison, "Amen!"
He was on his way to busting the 72-hole record set by Jack
Nicklaus in '65 and tied by Raymond Floyd in '76.
"Tiger's out there playing another game," Nicklaus
said appreciatively, "playing a course he'll own for a long
time. It's not my time. It's his."
His, and minorities' everywhere.
For me to try to imagine what feelings ran through Tiger's
innermost being would be presumptuous. And probably unfair to
Augusta National as well, for a great many philanthropists have
graced its severely limited rolls over the years. However, Georgia's
late and notoriously segregationist governor, Lester Maddux, also
was a member of Augusta National.
Maddux used to carry an ax handle.
It could not have been a fraction as strong as any club Tiger's
caddie, a white man by the name of Fluff Cowan, handed him Sunday.
Woods was taking his own stick to racism, and it should not
be spoiled by attempts to quantify his ancestry.
Minority Golf Magazine recently objected to a Los Angeles Times
story describing Woods' "rich ethnic background."
The Times story said his father was "a quarter Native
American, a quarter Chinese and half African-American," and
his mother was "half Thai, a quarter Chinese and a quarter
white."
Minority Golf Magazine's story, written by Henry Yu, a professor
of history and Asian-American studies at UCLA, said: "The
racial calculus employed ... to describe Woods is a throwback
to the racial classifications used in the Old South. ... We place
an inordinate emphasis on the individual who transcends racial
barriers, as if somehow his example will save us all."
By whatever process or whatever description, what Tiger Woods
did here was monumental - a minority golfer winning a tournament
that has personified what millions like him have had to fight
for centuries.
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