Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

[x YouTube/Golf Channel]
Nike Ad — Earl Woods & Tiger Woods



Say what you will about an overbearing father. Say what you will about tunnel vision. Recently, there was a lot of nonsense in the NY Fishwrap about Eldrick (Tiger) Woods as an athlete and whether he is the greatest athlete of his time. With all due respect to all of those bleating that golfers aren't athletes and that golf is something other than an athletic competition, anyone who has tried to strike a golf ball with a club or a putter can tell you that it is an incredibly difficult task. The bleaters — for the most part — had never labored with a surgically repaired knee. A golfer's left knee, if the ball is struck properly, undergoes a tremendous amount of strain at the moment of impact. Tiger Woods did something else that none of the bleaters has done: he played with pain. He struck the ball and knew that he would experience terrific pain at that moment. Hemingway wrote that courage is grace under pressure. No one knows what Earl Woods, the father, experienced in his Army career with time in the Special Forces. However, he imparted something to his only child, Eldrick, that gave Tiger Woods the heart of a tiger. Little has been made of the role of Woods' mother, Kultida, but her comment about her husband is revealing: “Old man is soft. He cry. He forgive people. Not me. I don’t forgive anybody.” Too little attention has been given to the hand that rocked Tiger's cradle. It took both parents to give their boy the most amazing heart in all of sport.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
—William Blake (1794)

If this is (fair & balanced) awe, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Frozen Gaze
By David Brooks

Rocco Mediate’s head swiveled about as he walked up the fairway of the sudden-death hole of the U.S. Open on Monday. Somebody would catch his attention, and his eyes would dart over and he’d wave or make a crack. Tiger Woods’s gaze, on the other hand, remained fixed on the ground, a few feet ahead of his steps. He was, as always, locked in, focused and self-contained.

The fans greeted Mediate with fraternal affection and Woods with reverence. Most were probably rooting for Rocco, but only because Woods, the inevitable victor, has risen above mere human status and become an embodiment of immortal excellence. That frozen gaze of his looks out from airport billboards, TV commercials and the ad pages. And its ubiquity is proof that every age finds the heroes it needs.

In a period that has brought us instant messaging, multitasking, wireless distractions and attention deficit disorder, Woods has become the exemplar of mental discipline. After watching Woods walk stone-faced through a roaring crowd, the science writer Steven Johnson, in a typical comment, wrote: “I have never in my life seen a wider chasm between the look in someone’s eye and the surrounding environment.”

The coverage of him often centers upon this question: How did this creature come about? The articles inevitably mention his precocity (at age 3, he shot a 48 on the front nine of a regulation course) and provide examples of his athletic prowess: Once Woods tried out four drivers that Nike was experimenting with and told the lab guys that he preferred the heavier one. The researchers thought the clubs were the same weight, but they measured and Woods was right. The club he’d selected was heavier by the equivalent of two cotton balls.

But inevitably, it is his ability to enter the cocoon of concentration that is written about and admired most. Writers describe the way Earl Woods, his lieutenant colonel father, dropped his golf bag while Tiger was swinging to toughen his mind. They describe his mother’s iron discipline at home. “Old man is soft,” Kultida Woods once said of her husband. “He cry. He forgive people. Not me. I don’t forgive anybody.”

Tiger was the one dragging them out on the course to practice. At age 6 months, he was put in a baby chair and had the ability, his father claimed, to watch golf for two hours without losing focus.

As an adult, he is famously self-controlled. His press conferences are a string of carefully modulated banalities. His lifestyle is meticulously tidy. His style of play is actuarial. He calculates odds and avoids unnecessary risks like the accounting major he once planned on being. “I am, by nature, a control freak,” he once told John Garrity of Sports Illustrated, as Garrity resisted the temptation to reply, “You think?”

And for that, in this day and age, he stands out. As I’ve been trying to write this column, I’ve toggled over to check my e-mail a few times. I’ve looked out the window. I’ve jotted down random thoughts for the paragraphs ahead. But Woods seems able to mute the chatter that normal people have in their heads and build a tunnel of focused attention.

Writers get rhapsodic over this facility. “Woods’s concentration often seems to be made of the same stuff as the liquid-metal cyborg in Terminator 2: If you break it, it reforms,” David Owen wrote in Men’s Vogue.

Then they get spiritual. In Slate, Robert Wright only semi-facetiously compared Woods to Gandhi, for his ability to live in the present and achieve transcendent awareness. Analysts inevitably bring up his mother’s Buddhism, his experiments in meditation. They describe his match-mentality in the phrases one might use to describe a guru achieving nirvana. He achieves, they say, perfect clarity, tranquility and flow. We’re talking about somebody who is the primary spokesman for Buick, and much of the commentary about him is on the subject of his elevated spiritual capacities.

And here we’re getting to the nub of what’s so remarkable about the “Be A Tiger” phenomenon: He’s become the beau ideal for golf-loving corporate America, the personification of mental fortitude.

The ancients were familiar with physical courage and the priests with moral courage, but in this over-communicated age when mortals feel perpetually addled, Woods is the symbol of mental willpower. He is, in addition, competitive, ruthless, unsatisfied by success and honest about his own failings. (Twice, he risked his career to retool his swing.)

During the broadcast of Monday’s playoff round, Nike ran an ad that had Earl Woods’s voice running over images of his son: “I’d say, ‘Tiger, I promise you that you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life.’ And he hasn’t. And he never will.”

You can like this model or not. Either way, the legend grows.

[David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times. David Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 with a degree in history. Brooks served as a reporter for the Washington Times, a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, and a commentator on NPR and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." He wrote a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Brooks' newest book is entitled On Paradise Drive : How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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