Project Tiger: The Birth of Genius and the Price of Greatness.
by Gavin Newsham
Grade: B+
Teacher’s Comments: An interesting interpretive look at Tiger’s early life and training.
When I got Project Tiger for review, my initial reaction was: The world doesn’t need another book on Tiger Woods. There are at least two dozen on Amazon; I gave up counting after that.
Project Tiger, however, is a bit different in that it actually ends with Tiger’s first professional tournament – the 1996 Greater Milwaukee Open. Instead, it is more than 200 pages examining Tiger’s childhood and teen years. It is, of course focused on golf, as Tiger was famously identified as a potential golf superstar as a toddler and his life was focused on that goal.
Written by veteran golf writer Gavin Newsham, Project Tiger is a snappy read, well written and well researched.
A line in the first chapter of the book explains Newsham’s rationale for the book:
“You need to look beyond the trophies and the accolades to examine the factors that caused this prodigious talent to blossom and how Tiger Woods’s strange, dysfunctional and stage-managed childhood (if, indeed, he had a childhood) then burgeoning celebrity impacted his development.”
Given the chaotic events in Tiger’s non-golf life over the past few decades — car crashes, arrests, massive injuries, serial infidelity, rehab, abruptly jettisoned “friends” and the like — I think it is legitimate to wonder whether he indeed had a “strange, dysfunctional and stage-managed childhood” that led to a strange and dysfunctional adulthood.
I know that there are a lot of people out there thinking: He’s one of the greatest golfers of all time, is one of the world’s most famous people and is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So it was worth it.
But is he really happy?
Here’s what I know. I would not trade my life for his.
In Project Tiger, Newsham traces the path to golf dominance that began with the legendary spontaneous first flush swings by Tiger as a ten-month-old. Earl Woods is an unreliable narrator, so it is impossible to know whether the story is real or apocryphal.
What is certain is that when Tiger was two, Earl Woods called an LA TV station and told them that his son was “not just going to revolutionize golf, but race relations in the US,” and got a crew to film Tiger. From there, it was on to the Mike Douglas show. And from there, on to the well-known, previously unimaginable success as a junior and amateur.
But for all of Tiger’s otherworldly talent, Newsham makes a case over two hundred pages that it was Earl’s — and to a lesser extent Tilda’s — “Project Tiger” that turned the lad into a superstar (while perhaps also wrecking him).
From his elementary years, Project Tiger involved endless physical and mental training. Green Beret Earl Woods’ mental toughness training is fairly well known. But swing coaches and psychologists also were regular features of his childhood.
Earl Woods does not come off well in Newsham’s telling of the story. To this reader, the portrait is of a man who is controlling, driven, duplicitous, paranoid, obsessed with money and more than a little unhinged.
Telling people that his two-year-old would remake race relations is strange. Telling people that when his son met Nelson Mandela, it was the first time Tiger had “met a human being who was equal to him” is deranged.
Newsham’s book also had me shaking my head at the long list of people who contributed to Project Tiger, only to be tossed aside unceremoniously once their usefulness to Earl and Tiger was over. The worst might have been his high school girlfriend who was dumped with the equivalent of a corporate letter telling the poor girl that her services were no longer needed.
Many of these people, who went out of their way to aid the young Woods with time and money, never heard from him again.
Others unwittingly — and perhaps unwillingly — became part of Project Tiger: opponents overwhelmed by the media and fan circus that followed Tiger; his high school and college teammates and coaches; his teachers and principals; members of various golf clubs.
Aside from the casual tossing of his high school girlfriend, the story that got to me occurred during the 1996 US Amateur finals. In that, opponent Steve Scott in a show of sportsmanship, alerted Tiger when he put his ball on the wrong side of the marker. An incorrect mark would have cost Tiger the hole, and quite possibly the match, ending his unbeaten streak in the Ams.
Scott, not surprisingly, got no thanks. Not even a nod.
Caution must be expressed at this juncture. While Newsham obviously interviewed a large number of people for the book, he is also constructing a narrative. It is possible that another author, using the same material would frame Woods childhood differently.
The book ends with Tiger’s signing with Nike and Tiger’s professional debut at the Greater Milwaukee Open as a sponsor’s exemption. Not surprisingly, he would never show gratitude by playing there again.
Earl would say around that time that “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.”
One final bit about a man caught up unwittingly in Project Tiger:
Allen Doyle who the year before had become the PGA TOUR’s oldest rookie at age 46, was called to the press room ahead of the Greater Milwaukee Open. Did the media want to get more clarity on his unprecedented story? Nope. It turned out, the media summons was to ask him about playing with Tiger at the World Amateur Teams two years earlier.
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