Top Cat

A two-time winner in only a few weeks, Tiger Woods has become the man to beat

Issue date: October 30, 1996

To understand what golf is now, don't watch Tiger Woods. Watch who watches Tiger Woods. Young black women in tight jeans and heels. Tour caddies, back out on the course after hauling a bag 18 holes. White arbitrageurs with cell phones. Giant groups of fourth-graders, mimicking their first golf swings. Pasty golf writers who haven't left the press tent since the days of Fat Jack. Hispanic teens in Dallas Cowboys jerseys trying to find their way around a golf course for the first time in their lives. Bus drivers and CEOs and mothers with strollers catching the wheels in the bunkers as they go.

Let 'er rip: In seven starts Woods has 12 eagles. Tour leader Kelly Gibson has 14 in 36 tournaments. Jim Gund

History will do that. History will suck you into places you have never been. Woods is making history almost daily. Last week at Disney World in Orlando, the throngs following him turned every tee box into the line at Space Mountain, and he gave them still more history, winning for a cereal-spoon-dropping second time in his first seven starts -- the greatest professional debut in golf history -- and bankrolling his way to 23rd on the Tour's money list and the pole position in this week's gaudy Tour Championship at Southern Hills in Tulsa. The way things were supposed to work, Tiger was to tee it up at the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament in December to try to earn his card. He even sent in the $3,000 entry fee. He can void the check now. From Tour school to Tour Championship in seven weeks. The kid's a quick study.

They will show up in Tulsa, too, this tsunami of Tiger Tailers, dipping their big toes into the game for the first time, hoping to answer the question, Is this really happening? At the Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic, where Woods won another $216,000 to get him to nearly three quarters of a million, attendance tripled from the year before. For his seven-week scorched-divot tour since he became a professional on Aug. 28, tournament directors conservatively estimate that he has drawn an extra 150,000 fans. And this is not Chicago and Los Angeles. This is Coal Valley, Ill., and Endicott, N.Y. No wonder that when Woods committed to play the Disney, the tournament director jumped into a swimming pool.

Whoo-boy. Maybe those Nike ads had it right. Is golf ready for this? Golf used to be four white guys sitting around a pinochle table talking about their shaft flexes and deciding whether to have the wilted lettuce soup. Now golf is Cindy Crawford sending Woods a letter. A youngster who'd been promised a round of golf with Woods was bouncing all around his Orlando home two weeks ago, going, "When is Tiger coming? When is Tiger coming?" The kid's name? Ken Griffey Jr.

Australian reporters are demanding a press conference the minute Woods's feet touch Australian soil in November for the Australian Open. At the Quad City Classic in Coal Valley, they had to print up more tickets. Teens in Milwaukee screamed his name so loud and for so long that he had to come to the window and wave to get them to calm down. "It was like he was the pope!" says Tiger's mom, Tida.

He's not the pope. More like a god. "I don't think we've had a whole lot happen in what, 10 years?" says golf's last deity, Jack Nicklaus. "I mean, some guys have come on and won a few tournaments, but nobody has sustained and dominated. I think we might have somebody now."

When was the last time a 20-year-old showed up and grabbed an entire sport by the throat? The Disney was Woods's fifth top-five finish in five starts. Not only has no rookie ever come within a moon shot of doing that, but also no player has done it since Curtis Strange 14 years ago. Woods is looking at the possibility -- if he finishes first or second in Tulsa this week -- of winning $1 million in eight events. It took Nicklaus eight years to make that much.

What else? A scoring average as a pro that, at 67.89, would be the lowest in Vardon Trophy history if Woods had enough rounds to qualify, lower by almost a stroke than Greg Norman's record 68.81, set in 1994. Woods would also be this year's leader in three other statistical categories: driving average (302.8, 14 yards better than John Daly's), birdies per round (4.68) and eagle frequency (one every 55 holes). He has finished, in order, 60th, 11th, fifth, third, first (at Las Vegas), third and first, and he goes to Tulsa to play the big boys as "the best player on our Tour," says veteran Jay Haas.

Want to hear something scary? "I really haven't played my best golf yet," Woods says. "I haven't even had a great putting week yet."

Could it be that this remarkable streak is not a streak at all? "Oh, god," says Peter Jacobsen, who would have loved to have had one top-five this year. "If this is how he is every week, then it's over. He's the greatest player in the history of the game."

Want to hear something scarier? Woods won while being sick all week. Last Saturday night he did not look much like a god at all but just a homesick kid praying for the Nyquil to kick in. He had a sore throat, bags under his eyes and sneezes backed up and holding. He was sprawled on rented furniture in a rented condo next to the one he will move into soon, stuck with a courtesy car out front because he hasn't had time to buy his own wheels yet and is too young to rent. You think it's easy throttling an entire sport before you're old enough to drink?

Take women, for instance. "Women don't seem that interested because I'm so young," he has said. "Think about it. Most of the women my age are in college."

Money. For a kid who has signed $60 million in endorsement deals, won three quarters of a million playing and just signed a $2.2 million book deal, why does he always have only three bucks in his pocket? His agent, Hughes Norton, is fond of telling him -- usually while Norton is taking a couple of hundreds out of his wallet and handing them to Woods -- "For a rich guy, you sure are poor." His mother keeps bailing him out too. "What kind of damned millionaire are you?" she says.

Norton says he has gotten none of the money back, but we figure Woods is good for it, what with a spring-loaded bomb of a swing that may soon make the term par 5 obsolete. For Woods there are no par-5s. At the 595-yard 14th on Saturday at Disney's Magnolia Course, Woods still had 284 yards to go over trees and a green-guarding lake. He cold starched a three-wood -- over the green. In his seven starts he has birdied 68 of the 128 par-5s he has played, including 12 of 16 at the Disney.

It has been a kind of blister bliss for Woods's caddie, Mike (Fluff) Cowan, who is having to pace off ponds and trees and Haagen-Dazs stands that until now have never been in play in his 20 years on Tour. Last week Fluff may have become the first caddie in history to utter this sentence: "It's 290 to clear that bunker. I like three-wood."

"Man, you should have seen how Tiger was hitting it," Paul Goydos was saying in the locker room last week after having to play directly behind Woods and his moving city of fans. "You'd have been humbled."

"C'mon," said John Cook. "What's so humbling?"

"How 'bout he reaches number 8 [614 yards] in two?"

Silence.

"Now that," said Cook, O-mouthed, "is humbling."

In Tiger Woods 21st-Century Golf, all bets are off. At the Disney nobody else had security guards. Woods had four. On a Tour where top 125 gets you into all the tournaments you want and a second home on the beach besides, Woods is turning up the attitude. "There are a lot of guys out here who come into a tournament thinking, Well, eight under will get me top 25. That'll be all right," says Cook. "Now here comes this kid who's ripping and shaking from the 1st tee."

What is so charming about this historic ride is the tournaments where it has all played out -- Milwaukee, Quad City, the Texas Open, B.C. -- the end-of-the-year-liquidation-sale events that nobody enters unless he's hurting for his card or took a wrong turn at Doral. But for this one magic stretch, these places were the Rainbow Rooms. They will have to make do with that memory for a good long while. Elvis will probably never play the club lounges again.

Still, it's not as if Woods beat nothing but club pros on the Tiger Tour. Of the Top 20 players on the Sony World Ranking, he has beaten Ernie Els (No. 3), Fred Couples (5), Corey Pavin (8) twice, Phil Mickelson (9), Davis Love III (10) twice, Mark O'Meara (11), Vijay Singh (16), Loren Roberts (17), David Duval (19) and Scott Hoch (20) twice. On Sunday at the Disney he matched a rejuvenated Payne Stewart, who needed to win to make Tulsa, birdie for birdie. Woods did him one better, firing a 66 to Stewart's 67 to win.

Is this the same kid whose best finish in a pro event as an amateur was an underwhelming 22nd? "You guys don't understand," Woods says. "When I played in those tournaments, I was either in high school or college. I'd get dumped into the toughest places to play, and I usually was trying to study, get papers done and everything else. I knew if I came out here and played every day, I'd get into a rhythm, and I have."

But it's how he wins that's eerie. He seems to have a Psychic Friends thing going about what exactly it will take to get the job done. Last Friday morning, as he was having his cereal at his rented breakfast table with his father, Earl Woods, he put down the sports pages and made an announcement. "Pop," he said. "Got to shoot 63 today. That's what it will take to get into it."

"So go do it," droned Earl, half awake.

The little condo they share in Orlando does not get the Golf Channel, the only network that showed the Disney, so Earl heard nothing more about the tournament until that afternoon when his son got home from his new job. "Whaddya shoot?" said Pop, blandly.

"Sixty-three," said Sonny.

"Oh, my god," said Pop.

Hey, aren't kids supposed to have fun at Disney World?

Things are going so well for Woods these days that he wins playoffs by default. His 21-under-par score of 267 (69-63-69-66) was actually tied by fellow rookie Taylor Smith, but Smith was disqualified because his split putter grips were not round. Smith is about as far from Woods as he can be. He and his pregnant wife, Nicole, rent a $450 apartment in Waycross, Ga. When Smith was one shot out of the lead on the 8th hole, Nicole was bouncing up and down saying, "We're going to buy a house now. We are going to buy a house!" But at the turn the ruling was made, and when Smith's appeal was denied after the round, the house was gone and Nicole was in tears. "I'm going to find something positive out of this," said Smith. "I just haven't found it yet."

Woods is finding positives all around him, like in the new, throbbing gallery he is inventing: school teachers and Little League teams and whole black families like the McCorveys of Merritt Island, Ga., the kind of family that golf never saw except waiting outside the caddie tent. "They used to say this was a white man's sport," says Carolyn McCorvey, a Lockheed employee and mother of a six-year-old who's taking up the game. "Well, not anymore. They used to say it was boring, too. But not with all the money this young man is making."

Listen to how new the sounds are too.

"You go, T!" a young black man yelled at Woods on Sunday. "Take care of bizness!"

There was this from two teenage African-American girls -- a sight seldom seen in pre-Woodsian golf -- just after Tiger had ripped a shot that sounded like a Scud taking off.

"And that ain't nothin' yet!" one said.

As Woods passed, they smiled at him and he smiled back.

"Lorrrrrd!" said the other. "He is just too cute!"

Woods understands what he is doing to the game. "To look out here and see so many kids, I think that's wonderful," he says. "They see someone they can relate to, me being so young. It's not like Jack Nicklaus. It's really nice seeing more minorities in the gallery. I think that's where the game should go and will go."

Woods seems as charged by the voltage from his enormous crowds as everybody else. He will high-five kids, look fans in the eye and actually respond "Thanks" when they holler out, "Kill 'em, Tiger!" ("Tiger Woods just thanked me," said one high school boy in hightops and a Charlotte Hornets jersey with his cap on backward. "My year is made, dude!") Woods doesn't have Fluff hand out unwanted balls at the end of a round; Woods throws them to kids while he's playing. "I remember when I was a kid, I always wanted to be a part of it," Woods says. "I always wanted to be connected somehow."

Who doesn't? At the Disney a young black man was wandering around with his buddies trying to follow Woods but looking lost. Finally he discreetly approached a black cameraman. "Brother," he said, "can I ask you something?"

The cameraman leaned over the ropes to hear him. "Sure."

"Well," the young man said, "what do we do?"

He'll have an entire era to learn.

Issue date: October 30, 1996