Curt Sampson - Roaring Back: The Fall and Rise of Tiger Woods

ALSO BY CURT SAMPSON:

Centennial

Chasing Tiger

Come Play in my Backyard

The Eternal Summer

Five Fundamentals (with Steve Elkington)

Full Court Pressure

Furious George (with George Karl)

Golf Dads

Hogan

Lakewood: A Dallas Classic

The Lost Masters

The Masters

Royal and Ancient

The Slam

Texas Golf Legends

A Vision Not a Blueprint

The War by the Shore

Copyright 2019 by Curt Sampson

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For more information, email

Diversion Books

A division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

443 Park Avenue South, suite 1004

New York, NY 10016

www.diversionbooks.com

Book design by Neuwirth & Associates

First Diversion Books edition October 2019

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-63576-683-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-63576-682-0

Printed in The United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available on file.

In memory of Dan Jenkins.

His Ownself.

Contents

Preface

The vintage single-engine Cessna traced lazy circles through the bright sunlight and broken clouds above Augusta. It was a gorgeous late spring day, the air having been washed clean by heavy rain after a long and uncharacteristic drought in east Georgia. The fifty shades of Augustas April green had distilled down to eight or so; gone were chartreuse, lime, and tea, replaced by emerald, jade, sea, and dark.

Dew point one seven six, droned the mechanical voice in my headset. Visibility one zero miles. But I wanted to see farther than that. That was why we went up. With the 2019 Masters only six weeks in times rearview mirror, Id hoped an Olympian view would wake up the echoes and enable a more perfect recall of the drama that had occurred on the hilly acreage fifteen hundred feet below.

Pilot Mark Saisal flew our little red and white bird over the Savannah River, Interstate 20, several giant hospitals, neighborhoods both modest and grand, and the ragged shoreline of Lake Strom Thurmond in South Carolina. Then we looped back into the Peach State for more corkscrews over Augusta National and its next-door neighbor, Augusta Country Club. Printing executive and Augusta golf maven Tim Wright sat in the rear seat and pointed things out below us.

Man, theyre tearing up number thirteen, he said. A big swath of ground in front of the green on golfs greatest par four and a half was indeed denuded. I wonder if theyre putting in SubAir.

SubAir is an effective but very pricey underground vacuum system some usually very pricey clubs install under their greens, the better to keep the speed up and the ground dry even after it rains. Id never heard of it being used beneath a fairway. Can they do that? I asked.

Son, they can do whatever they want, Wright said. Can you believe all the projects they got goin on?

I studied the ground, finding my way only very slowly, like a kid just learning to read. OK, theres number five, the hole theyd just lengthened into a killer of a par four. Boomerang-shaped thirteen was easy to recognize. Theres the six and sixteen nexus. But where was the one hole, the key hole? Wheres number twelve?

There, said Wright. See the black tarp in the bunker? Theyre keeping that white sand clean.

Got it, I said, as I beheld the simplest-looking arrangement on the entire course: a blank little hill opposite a bean-shaped green, with a ribbon of shiny water unspooling between the two. But twelve had been like a dueling ground during the final few minutes of the 2019 Masters. Like the climax in the musical Hamilton , it was nine irons at one hundred and fifty paces. One man walked to the thirteenth tee unscathed while the others shot themselves in the feet, in a figurative sense.

As I stared down, I tried to picture the heroes and what they wore and the looks on their faces as they reacted to their fates. Woods, Finau, Koepka, and Molinari were compelling figures that day. Two of the wounded mounted brave comebacks, but the uninjured man proved to be braver still.

Augusta tower this is Hotel seven seven niner requesting permission to land runway ten forty right over. Pilot Saisal is a big, bearded man who looks like he could rip the roof off a Range Rover, but he has a surgeons touch with an airplane. Which is to say, the landing was as smooth as a babys bottom.

Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Tim, I said. The trip had given me the lay of the land better than I had ever had it; I saw, for example, how Raes Creek feeds into the Savannah. On the other hand, the aerial view proved to feel a bit clinical and literally detached. We were too high to recreate the audience or the players in the recent drama.

All the emotion had been on the ground.

Introduction

The father of the prodigy moved with ponderous dignity, like a yacht about to dock. On a sunny May day in 1993 in Irving, Texas, at TPC Las Colinas, during the first round of the GTE Byron Nelson Classic, sixty-one-year-old Earl Woods punched a walking stick into the ground with every second step. Below his beer barrel body, baggy Bermuda shorts revealed broomstick legs that looked inadequate for his weight or for the task at hand. He wore old mans white socks and sneakers, and mirrored aviator sunglasses. A pack of Merit 100 cigarettes fit snugly in his shirt pocket. The heart attack that loomed in 93 would strike three years later.

Inside the yellow nylon ropes, a much more vigorous specimen was busy shooting 77: Earls whippet-thin seventeen-year-old son, Tiger, playing in his fourth PGA Tour event, and about to miss his fourth cut.

Excuse me, Mr. Woods? I said. Earl had paused for breath midway up the hill by the green on the seventh hole. I have two young sons at home, and Im so impressed with the job youve done with Tiger ...

Earl knew what I wanted. By then hed spoken with a hundred guys like me, probably a thousand. First thing you do, he said, Put a golf club in his crib.

We walked while he talked with the immobile face of a ventriloquist. While Id expected a big dose of gung-ho from the former Green Beret, Lieutenant Colonel Woods presented a soothing voice, a quiet manner, and absolute confidence in the advice he was giving. The bogies being posted by his son seemed not to bother him in the slightest. What with the way we hung back from the action, and his eyes obscured by his shades, I couldnt tell if Papa Earl was even watching.

Meanwhile, in the arena on the other side of the ropes, Tiger frowned and ground away. His swing reminded me of the sudden blast of kinetic energy that might occur from the release of a big spring, an amusing metaphor I thought I might share if we met. Which we did, a couple of months later.