Observer Sport Monthly

Think Graceland, compressed into your grandparents' tiny front room. Instead of moulded plastic furniture and pearl-handled pistols there are Titleist putters and glass-fronted display cabinets. Instead of shag pile there is cool, granite slabbing. Instead of a stoned Elvis pictured shaking hands with a sweaty Richard Nixon, there are framed magazine covers (hundreds of the them), oil paintings (of Tiger, of the 12th hole at Augusta Golf Club) and an airbrushed photograph of the Duchess of York signed, 'To Earl and Tida, best wishes Sarah.' There are trophies fighting for space; Mickey and Donald in bronze (The National Car Rental Disney Classic 1999), cut crystal vases galore (Father of the Year 1997, to name but one), the familiar, pelican-nosed jug only seen in public around British coastal towns in July (The Open Championship trophy). If you're a devotee of Phillipe Starck, it's the kind of room that would have you reaching for the wrecking ball. If you love sport, and golf in particular, it's difficult to resist the schoolboyish notion that being here makes this one of the most exciting days of your life.

Earl Woods sits slumped in a red leather recliner amidst his memorabilia, unshaven, smoking, dressed in a shapeless blue tracksuit.

ESPN, America's 24-hour television sports news station, is playing with the sound off. Earl looks bored, he sounds bored, but I convince myself he is neither. Like many men of his generation who have experienced war, this is how he is; measured, deliberate, cool - as if nothing in civilian life is worth getting too exited about.

Nice pad, Mr Woods.

'Yes indeed,' he sighs, stubbing out his cigarette in the empty soup bowl by the side of his chair. 'I have prepared this house so that it can be converted into a national historical monument one day. All the floors in here are granite, they are not hardwood or any of that other stuff. Granite - the hardest stone. All of the wood you see is walnut. It is built to last - because I am certain that one day the birthplace of Tiger Woods is going to become widely acknowledged.' In stark contrast to his famous (and famously guarded) son, Earl Woods has made a career out of such outlandish assertions, so much so that one begins to wonder why anyone wastes their breath interviewing Woods Jnr.

After all, who - apart from the MTV host recently granted a rare audience - wants to know that the first thing the most famous sportsman in the world does when he gets up in the morning is brush his teeth, that the last concert he went to was Janet Jackson, that his most disgusting habit is belching and his favourite band is U2? This isn't to say that Tiger Woods is dull or frivolous or inarticulate. I have friends who have played golf with him, friends of friends who have partied with him and I have sat through enough of his press conferences; he is none of those things.

No. The problem with Tiger - the public Tiger - is he is a corporate brochure made flesh. Flick, glassy-eyed, through the pages and you can't fail to be impressed by global business strategy, but in the end you have to stop reading otherwise you might fall asleep standing up. Yes, yes, very impressive, you say to yourself, but that's enough bullshit for now. What's the real story?

Thank God, then, for the man he calls 'Pops', who - to take a random sample from the Earl Woods quote book - once said of Scotland, birthplace of the great game: 'That place sucks. It's for white people. People had better be glad that the Scots lived there instead of the soul brothers or golf would never have been invented. We wouldn't have been stupid enough to go out in that weather and play a silly-ass game and freeze to death. We would have stayed inside, listening to jazz, laughing and joking and drinking rum.'

There's more; like his designation of Tiger as 'the chosen one', the speech during which he supposedly compared his son to Gandhi (although his son would have a greater impact on the world) and the meeting with Nelson Mandela which he described as the first time Tiger had met someone as important as himself.

Earl Woods, it is clear, does not care whom he offends, or that many journalists take his hyperbolic soundbites and spin them into a portrait (subliminally racist, in some cases) of an unhinged, uppity braggard. Who can deny him his insouciance? He has just turned 70; in recent years he has suffered both diabetes and heart problems; in Vietnam, where he served two tours and reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel, he was almost killed 'more times than I care to remember'. He is secure; emotionally, financially, spiritually, intellectually. Ask me another, his calm presence demands; anything you like, you can't hurt me, can't knock me off my stride.

All of which is good news for me, because something has been bugging me ever since Tiger Woods won the 1997 Masters and his father proclaimed him as the next Messiah: where did it all go wrong, Mr Woods? He gives me a look somewhere between a smile and a diagnosis of insanity and asks what on earth I'm talking about. I present my case - that Tiger Woods will go down in history as a great golfer but unlike, say, Muhammad Ali or Arthur Ashe he will never be considered a truly great sportsman because, unlike Ali and Ashe, he has consistently refused to use his influence and power to shape the society he lives in. I give him an example: in May 2000 the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People called on black athletes to boycott events in South Carolina over the state's refusal to stop flying the the Confederate flag over its capitol building; a reprehensible provocation in this day and age, surely? Serena Williams certainly thought so, as did the New York Knicks basketball team and many other black athletes. Asked if he would support the NAACP boycott, Tiger Woods replied... 'I'm a golfer. That's their deal, not mine.'

'Quite right too,' Woods Snr says. 'I respect his right not to take up every cause. The media wants poor little Tiger to be a spokesman about everything. There are lots of athletes in the world who have not been spokesmen. Look at your soccer players - they aren't very articulate and open about the injustices in your country.'

But David Beckham's dad never said his son would be bigger than Gandhi, did he?

'Tiger is still living his life and he does not want race to be an issue in his life,' he says, which isn't strictly true. When Tiger signed his first contract with Nike (for $40m) he was more than happy to read from a script that tackled a race 'issue' - denying blacks access to golf course - in the commercial cause of selling golf shoes.

Earl Woods gives me a look, like the one he probably used on well-meaning but dim military subordinates. 'I'll tell you what I think,' he says. 'One guy summed it all up, Rodney King, the guy who was beaten up by the LA police. "Why can't we all just get along?" he said. That's the most beautiful thing I have ever heard in my life. Why can't we all just get along?'

Because Tiger Woods gets death threats from the KKK, because 19th-hole big-mouths like Fuzzy Zoeller go on national television and make racist jokes about him? (Asked about Woods's victory at the 1997 Masters and the traditional victory dinner - at which the new champion gets to choose the menu - Zoeller remarked: "That little boy is driving well and putting well. You pat him on the back and say congratulations and tell him not serve fried chicken, or collard greens or whatever the hell they serve.")

'Fuzzy is a big jokester,' says Earl. 'He is not a racist. I have heard him say a lot worse on the golf course...'

All humour is personal, of course, but Fuzzy Zoeller? Funny? Muhammad Ali, to whom Earl Woods likes to (favourably) compare his son, wouldn't have stood for it. He would have punched Zoeller's lights out, figuratively, if not literally.

'Ali was a different person. He also did not attend Stanford University. Ali had his techniques, Tiger has his; intellect, being articulate, understanding, sympathy. Tiger doesn't have to be out there screaming and hollering at people. I'm not being disparaging about Ali - I like the guy, I respect the hell out of him.'

Doesn't sound like it. What about his bravery, his dignity, his willingness to sacrifice his career for a greater cause?

'I understood where Ali was coming from. Don't forget I suffered from racism too.'

Earl Woods didn't take up golf as a child. There was only one golf course in his home town of Manhattan, Kansas, and it didn't allow blacks to play. Such were the every day indignities suffered by African-Americans born in the 1930s. He wouldn't have gone to college either but for his brilliance as a baseball player, which won him a scholarship to Kansas State University. His father, by then deceased, had always wanted him to play in the Negro leagues (blacks weren't allowed in the major leagues back then) for the Kansas City Monarchs.

Earl chose education instead and the college baseball squad, where he was the only black man in the entire college league. He describes the experience as humiliating. 'My teammates treated me all right, it wasn't their fault, but I wasn't afforded the same privileges as they were. For instance, I could not stay in the same hotels. We would go to the University of Oklahoma and the team stayed in Norman, where the university is, and I had to stay in Oklahoma City, an entirely different town. I had to get in a car in my uniform after the game and drive to Oklahoma City. There were no hotels that would take blacks in Norman, Oklahoma.'

He graduated in 1953 with a sociology degree, a qualification which afforded him no escape from segregation. His prospects were limited to a low-paid job in the civil service or a low-paid job in military. He chose the latter. 'The theory was that the army was integrated.' He pauses to savour this historical fantasy. '...Just like our society was integrated.'

His first posting was in Columbus, Georgia. 'I was an officer and I had a company clerk who was a private and he was white and he lived in Georgia, like I did, just off base, and he'd salute me - yes, sir, no sir - all day long but when we went home he rode in the front part of the bus and I rode at the back. There was another incident I'll never forget. Four of us were walking down the street, two black, two white, just window shopping, enjoying ourselves and all of a sudden the police came up and threw us against the wall, handcuffed us, put us in the wagon and drove us to the jail. We were fined for disturbing the peace - $32 and five cents. Blacks and whites weren't supposed to mix in public, that was our crime.'

Earl Woods was in his late twenties when the Civil Rights movement, inspired by Rosa Parks and led by Martin Luther King, began to gather momentum. I ask him if he was ever active in the anti-segregation movement. 'No. I came very close to going to one of the marches in Washington but I was stationed in North Carolina and I couldn't get away,' he says, and I think to myself how dare anyone make any judgments about the life and motivations of the young Earl Woods, especially from a distance of 40-plus years but, even so, it's difficult not to hear echoes of Tiger Woods in his father's answer.

At least in Vietnam, where Earl Woods did two tours with Green Berets and was decorated for bravery, black and white were equal in one way; they all had a very good chance of being killed. Somehow, he survived. He met Tiger's mother, Tida, in Thailand, where he was the officer in charge of running the army's recreational services; bowling alleys, cinemas and so on. He was looking to hire some local labourers, she was the secretary at the office. The rest is history - as was his first marriage, to Barbara, from which he has three children, two sons and a daughter, all now in their forties. He struggles to remember where exactly all live and work, so it is with some trepidation that I ask what kind of relationship he has with them these days.

'Pretty good. I don't see them that often. I telephone. I talk to them maybe once a month. My only regret is that I was in the military service and because of my commitments I wasn't able to spend as much time with them as I should have done when they were growing up.'

These days Earl and Tida no longer live together, though they remain married and talk most days. His contact with Tiger is more irregular - 'I've not spoken to him for a few weeks. We have the kind of relationship which doesn't need validation every day' - though whispers that the two have become estranged aren't so much false as insulting. Whatever failings Earl Woods admits to in raising his first three children, he clearly sought to correct them in bringing up his fourth. Successfully, it seems. Read the Tiger profiles, read his interviews, his books; it doesn't take a family psychologist to work out the two are extremely close.

It's also clear the relationship owes much to their shared obsession with golf when Tiger was growing up. Which brings us to that another charge levelled against Woods Snr: that he was the domineering father who set out to mould his kid into a champion with the purpose of enriching himself. (American sport is littered with such alleged villains. It so happens that a disproportionate number of them are black - Richard Williams, father of Serena and Venus is another target - which is an argument for another day. In the case of Woods Snr it's a doubly unfair slur. If he was so consumed with the trapping of wealth, why on earth would he still be living in the same suburban bungalow that Tiger grew up in?)

'The idea of me as a controlling father is 180 degrees from the truth,' he says. 'It was never a question of me forcing Tiger to play golf. Everything came from him. We transcended the father-son thing when he was five. We became best friends, equals. The normal way of things is that the father is always in command. That wasn't the case with us because when we went to a golf tournament I would be the father until we signed in, then Tiger took over as the father and I was the son. He would tell me what time we had to get there, when his tee-time was; he learnt to compute travel time and warm-up time and practice time. After the tournament was finished he would always practise. He would tell me when it was time to go home, and then as we were checking out of the hotel or going to the airport, our roles were reversed back again. I became the father again.

'I tried to interest him in other sports. I introduced him to baseball - he was a natural switch hitter - and he said no thanks, it interferes with my golf. So then I tried to get him interested in football and when he went to high school I convinced him to try out for the cross-country team. Within two weeks he was the number two man on the team. He quit after a year because it interfered with his golf. Everything I did was negated. He chose golf on his own. I never pushed him.'

He has a library of anecdotes from Tiger's formative years, most of them, like a good golf swing, grooved to near narrative perfection by years of repetition. I ask him for his favourite and he tells me a story about trying to wangle Tiger playing privileges at a local golf club. 'I said to the pro if Tiger could beat him over nine holes could he play on the course? He said yeh. And then I said I'll bet you a dollar a hole and he said, well, okay and I said you gotta let my son have a stroke a hole and let him play from the ladies' tees and he said that'll be fine.

'He said no kid is going to beat me, and then Tiger went out there and beat him by two, three strokes, I forget which it was.' I ask him how old Tiger was when this happened, expecting an outlandish answer but not as outlandish as the one I got. 'Four,' he chuckles, then adds, superfluously; 'Tiger was a very special four-year-old.'

If Earl Woods' living room is Graceland in miniature, then the two-car garage adjacent to his house is probably The Cavern. This is where genius gave its first performance. It's here that Tiger Woods sat in his high chair, aged six months, watching his father hitting golf balls into a practice net hung from the ceiling. It's here, aged 10 months, that he was unstrapped from the chair by his father and he picked up his tiny putter, teed up a ball and smacked it, left-handed, into the net.

It's here, two weeks later, he figured out that a left-handed grip wasn't for him, turned round and started hitting right-handed. 'Do you want to see the garage?' Woods Snr whispers, lifting himself out his chair for the first time since I arrived. He pads across the granite floor and throws open the connecting door.

Well, it's like the garage of any suburban American, with its bare wiring, domestic appliances and menagerie of abandoned sporting enthusiasms. The golf net is still hanging from the ceiling, awaiting the arrival of the men from the Smithsonian. We stand around chatting while the photographer does his business until, suddenly, Earl Woods turns round and faces the golf net, narrows his eyes and takes a couple of practice swings. I imagine him playing his second shot to the 18th at Augusta, one stroke ahead of the field with one hole to play, and in that moment the real story on Tiger Woods becomes clear. It's right in front of me, in our host's unbreakable self-belief, his military mind, his small-c conservatism and his beautiful, rhythmic, 70-year-old golf swing. The real story on Tiger Woods? He is just his father's son.

Earl on...

Tiger's love life
'He had one girlfriend in school and one in college. I didn't think the one at school) was a bad idea. What I thought was a bad idea was what her family had in mind. They had determined that Tiger was going to make a lot of money. They were meaning to make the relationship a permanent relationship. I could see this, but Tiger couldn't. As a parent I could do one of two things; I could forbid him to see her, or I could counsel him and then wait for him to grow and determine what was right for himself. I chose the latter. And that's what happened to that relationship.'

Tiger's rebellious youth; the sex, the drugs, the rock'n'roll
'He never rebelled once. I never smacked him or chastised him or punished him. He was the closest thing to a perfect child you will ever run into.'

His psychic communication with Tiger
'I can't explain how it works but here's a case in point. When he won the 1999 US PGA Championship, when he and Sergio Garcia were in a tight fight Tiger was hanging on. I think it was the 17th hole, where he had a putt he had to make. I told him, "Tiger this is a must-make putt, trust your stroke", and he nailed it. That evening we had a victory party for him at the hotel. There was about 40 people yak-yakking and then Tiger arrived and he looked over at me and he said, "Hey Pops, I heard you".'

The Masters
'It's my favourite tournament and it's Tiger's too. I used to love to wait for the Masters to come on TV. It was so beautiful. When he was growing up we used to sit and watch every minute and we would video it and study it later. He learnt all the holes they showed on TV. They treat us so well at Augusta. It's no longer the way it was, and that's progress for you.'

His first drink with Tiger
'He didn't drink before he went to Stanford, but this time he came home for Thanksgiving and I was lying on my bed having a drink and he says "What are you drinking Pop?" and I said a Pepsi and he said, "Give me that." He went and fixed me a drink in the kitchen - a Jack Daniels and ginger - and then he comes back in the room and says "Come on Pop, let's have our first drink together". We walked down to the little park down the street and we sat down and reminisced about his school, what he was doing and how wonderful it was to sit there and have our first drink together. That's the one Jack Daniels and ginger I will always remember.'

Playing golf with Tiger
'It's a war, but it is also an exquisite pleasure. The last time we played together was two Christmases ago, at Big Canyon Country Club in Newport Beach. The thing I remember most about the day is that Tiger made a hole in one and then I almost put one right on top of it and the only thing he said was "good shot". I didn't even get a free drink because he was in a hurry. All he did was authorise the bartender to give everyone in the clubhouse a free drink and then we left.'

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