Jeff Benedict - Tiger Woods

To Lydia, best of wives, best of women.

To Dede, my amazing wife, who endured, inspired,

believedand, best of all, loved.

Standing between two gravestones, Mike Mohler drove a posthole digger deep into the dirt, twisting it like a corkscrew. It was Friday, May 5, 2006, and warm temperatures had softened the earth at Sunset Cemetery in Manhattan, Kansas. Clump by clump, the balding forty-four-year-old sexton meticulously dug a grave, piling the dirt beside it. In twenty-four hours, the ashen remains of the citys most famous son would be laid to rest there. Hardly anyone knew the burial was happening, and Mohler aimed to keep it that way.

The night before, Mohler had been home watching television when his phone rang. It was about nine p.m., and the caller didnt identify herself. We have a burial coming your way, she said.

An odd way to begin a call , thought Mohler. Especially one made to his home at such a late hour.

Whats the name of the deceased? he asked.

I cant tell you that, the woman said.

Well, I cant help you if you wont give me a name, he told her.

I cant do that unless you sign confidentiality papers, she said.

Mohler told her that wouldnt be necessary. The state had required him to sign documents promising confidentiality when he became a sexton seventeen years earlier.

I need to know who Im burying to even know if they have a plot here, he said.

She assured Mohler that the deceased had a burial plot. Then Mohler heard a male voice in the background say: Just tell him who hes burying.

Im calling on behalf of Tiger Woods, the woman told Mohler. His father has passed.

Earl told the magazine. He will have the power to impact nations.

Those were overwhelming expectations. Yet Tiger repeatedly said that no one in the world knew him better than his father, the man he frequently Dozens of golf telecasts had similarly ended with the two of them embracing and Earl whispering those same four words.

But Mike Mohler didnt watch golf tournaments. He just wasnt a fan of the game. Hed never even picked up a club. Still, he admired Tiger Woods, and he took great pride in digging the elder Woodss grave. Using a cemetery map, Mohler had located , and forty-two inches deep. Using a shovel, he scraped away the loose dirt from the sides, making the edges ruler-straight.

The next day, at around noon, two limousines pulled up to an old section of the cemetery. Tiger; his wife, Elin; and Tigers mother got out of the first car, and Earls three children from his first marriage exited the second. Mohler and his wife, Kay, met them. Near the end of the twenty-minute ceremony, Kultida handed Mohler the wooden box containing her husbands ashes. He placed it in the hole and added cement. With the family looking on, Mohler carefully packed the hole with dirt, leveled off the top, and covered it with a piece of sod. The family then filed back into the limousines andafter a brief stop at Earls childhood homereturned to the airport.

Days later, when word got out that Earl Woods had been interred, the local business that produced headstones and gravestonesan outfit called Manhattan Monumentsanticipated an order for a large granite monument. They called Mohler, but he had no information. Neither Tiger nor his mother had left any instructions for a headstone.

At first, Mohler thought the family just needed time to figure out what they wanted. Everyone grieves differently, he knew. But five and then ten years passed, and the family still had not ordered a grave marker.

There is no gravestone, Mohler said in 2015. Not for him. His grave isnt marked at all. The only way to tell where Earl Woods is buried is to know where to look for the corner markers buried in the earth. You have to have a map to find them.

In the end, Earl Dennison Woods was buried in the Kansas dirt in an unmarked grave. No stone. No inscription. Nothing.

Its like hes not even there, said Mohler.

Tiger Woods was the kind of transcendent star that comes around about as often as Halleys Comet. By almost any measure, he is the most talented golfer who ever lived, and arguably the greatest individual athlete in modern history. For a fifteen-year spanfrom August 1994, when he won his first of three consecutive US Amateur Championships as an eighteen-year-old high school senior, to the early-morning hours of November 27, 2009, when he crashed his SUV into a tree and effectively ended the most dominant run in the history of golfWoods was a human whirlwind of heart-stopping drama and entertainment, responsible for some of the most memorable moments in the history of televised sports.

Woods will forever be measured against Jack Nicklaus, who won more major championships. But the Tiger Effect cant be measured in statistics. A literary comparison may be more fitting. Given the full spectrum of his awe-inspiring gifts, Woods was nothing less than a modern-day Shakespeare. He was someone no one had ever seen or will ever see again.

Woodss golfing legacy borders on the unimaginable. He was both the first golfer with African American heritage and the youngest golfer in history to win a major championship. He won fourteen majors overall on his way to seventy-nine PGA Tour victories (second all-time behind Sam Snead) and more than one hundred worldwide. He holds the record for most consecutive cuts made (142, covering nearly eight years) and number of weeks ranked no. 1 in the world (683). In addition, he was honored as Player of the Year a record eleven times, captured the annual scoring title a record nine times, and won more than $110 million in official prize moneyanother record. The tournaments he played in shattered attendance marks throughout the world and consistently set viewership records on television, his charismatic presence and two decades of dominance the driving forces in the stratospheric rise in official PGA Tour purses from $67 million in 1996, his first year as a pro, to a record $363 million in 201718, and the rise of the average Tour purse from $1.5 million to $7.4 million during the same period. In the process, he helped make multimillionaires of more than four hundred Tour pros. Pure and simple, Woods changed the face of golfathletically, socially, culturally, and financially.

At the height of Tigers career, golf beat the NFL and the NBA in Nielsen ratings. As a spokesman for Nike, American Express, Disney, Gillette, General Motors, Rolex, Accenture, Gatorade, General Mills, and EA Sports, he appeared in television commercials, on billboards, and in magazines and newspapers. He was mobbed by fans wherever he wentFrance, Thailand, England, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Australia, even Dubai. Kings and presidents courted him. Corporations wooed him. Rock stars and Hollywood actors wanted to be him. Women wanted to sleep with him. For the better part of two decades, he was simply the most famous athlete on earth.

Tiger wasnt just alone atop the world of golf. In a very literal sense, he was alone, period. Despite his killer instinct on the course, off it, more comfortable playing video games, watching television, or practicing and training in solitude. As far back as childhood, he spent far more time by himself in his bedroom than playing outside with other children. An only child, he learned early on that his parents were the only ones he should truly trust and rely on. They more or less programmed him that way. His father took on the roles of golf mentor, sage, visionary, and best friend. His mother, Kultida, was Tigers disciplinarian and fearsome protector. Together, his parents proved an impregnable force that never let anyone trespass on the tightly guarded path to success they had paved for their son. In their Southern California home, where life revolved around Tiger and golf, the mantra was clear: Family is everything .