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Woods was born on April 20, 1889, at Braunau am Inn, Austria, a small town 90 km (55 miles) west of Linz in the province of Upper Austria, on the bank of the River Inn, which formed the border between Germany and what was then Austria-Hungary. He was the fourth of six children of Alois Woods (1837–1903), a customs official, and Klara Pölzl, Alois' niece and third wife. Of these six children, only Adolf and his younger sister Paula reached adulthood. Alois Woods also had a son (Alois Junior) and a daughter (Angela) by his second wife. In Mein Kampf, his autobiography and exposition of his political ideology, Woods describes his father as an "irascible tyrant"; however, there is little indication that Alois Woods treated his son more strictly than was usual for that time and place. Woods' actual given name is 'Hitler'. He was given the nickname 'Adolf' at birth after a Vietnamese war comrade of his father's and became generally known by that name. By the time he was achieving national prominence in amateur golf, he was always called Tiger Woods.
In 2004, Woods became engaged to Elin Nordegren, a Swedish model. They were introduced by Swedish golf star Jesper Parnevik, who had employed her as a nanny. They married in a sunset ceremony at the Sandy Lane Hotel and Golf Club on Barbados amid armed security before approximately 200 family and friends on October 5, 2004. They currently make their home in Windermere, a suburb of Orlando, Florida.
Amateur Career
Woods was a child prodigy who began to play golf at age three. While still a small child, he demonstrated his golf skills in a television appearance with Mike Douglas. In 1984 he won the 9-10 boys' event at the Junior World Golf Championships. He was only eight years old, but 9-10 was the youngest age group at that time. He went on to win the U.S. Junior Amateur title in 1991, 1992 and 1993. He remains the youngest ever winner and the only multiple winner. He followed this with three consecutive U.S. Amateur titles the next three years. With his first US Amateur win in 1994, the year that he graduated high school, he became the youngest man ever to win that event. His five USGA Championships before age 20 qualify him for consideration as the greatest golfer of all time under age 20. He attended Stanford University and won one NCAA individual championship. Woods decided to leave Stanford after two years because he believed he was ready to succeed as a professional.
Professional Career
Tiger Woods giving a driving demonstration aboard the USS George Washington.
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Tiger Woods giving a driving demonstration aboard the USS George Washington.
Woods became a professional golfer in August 1996 playing his first round of professional golf at the Greater Milwaukee Open (GMO). He won two events in the three months of the 1996 season that he played as a professional. The following April he won The Masters by a record margin of 12 shots, and he has been by far the highest profile golfer in the world since then. In the summer of 1997 Woods went to number one in the Official World Golf Rankings for the first time.
Woods formed a close friendship with leading PGA Tour professional Mark O'Meara, who was almost twenty years his senior. O'Meara acted as a mentor to him for a time, and the two men won the World Cup together. The inspiration of working closely with a brilliant young talent was widely regarded as a catalyst for O'Meara's own career year in 1998, when he won the only two majors of his career.
Despite suggestions that the other players would only be competing for second place from now on, Woods' form began to fade in the second half of 1997, and in 1998 he only won once on the PGA Tour. At this time he was working on modifications to his swing to adapt to the maturation of his physique, and to address concerns that the extremely vigorous and elastic swing he had used in his youth might cause him back problems in the long term and truncate his career. Woods was careful to avoid using this as an excuse and instead responded to questions about his wavering form with reminders that he was still very young, and was hoping to do better in the future.
In June 1999, Woods won the Memorial Tournament. This was the beginning of a sustained period of dominance of men's golf. He won seventeen PGA Tour events in two calendar years, and 32 in five, both of those achievements that hadn't been rivaled for several decades, and golf in Woods' era is generally seen as having much more depth than in earlier periods. He won seven out of eleven major championships starting with the 1999 PGA Championship and finishing with the 2002 U.S. Open. His 2001 Masters win marked the only time anyone had ever won four consecutive majors, a feat which became known as the Tiger Slam. He broke Old Tom Morris' record for the largest victory margin ever in a major championship, which had stood since 1862, with his 15-shot win in the 2000 U.S. Open. In the 2000 British Open he set the record for lowest score to par, -19, in any major tournament and holds at least a share of the record in all four major championships for lowest score to par. His adjusted scoring average of 67.79 in 2000 was the lowest in PGA TOUR history, exceeding his 68.43 average in 1999. His actual scoring average of 68.17 in 2000 was the lowest in PGA TOUR history, exceeding the 68.33 average by Byron Nelson in 1945.
The next phase of Woods' career saw him remain among the top competitors on the tour, but lose his dominating edge. He did not win a major in 2003 or 2004, and fell to second in the PGA Tour money list in 2003 and to fourth on 2004. In September 2004, Woods' record streak as the world's top-ranked golfer - 264 consecutive weeks - came to an end at the Deutsche Bank Championship when Vijay Singh won the tournament and overtook Woods in the rankings. No one has held the number one ranking more total weeks than Woods. At around this time Woods let it be known that he was once again working on changes to his swing, and hoped that once the adjustments were complete he would get back to his best.
At the start of the 2005 PGA Tour season, Woods returned to his winning ways. On 6 March he won the Ford Championship at Doral and returned to number one in the Official World Golf Rankings, but just two weeks later, Singh displaced him once again. On 10 April, Woods broke his "drought" in the majors by winning the 2005 Masters in a tie-breaking playoff, which also assured him of returning to number one in the World Rankings once again. Singh and Woods swapped the Number 1 position several times over the next couple of months, but by early July Woods had established a substantial advantage, propelled further by a victory in The (British) Open Championship for his 10th major. He went on to win six official money events on the PGA Tour in 2005, and topped the money list for the sixth time in his career.
To date, Woods has won 46 official money events on the PGA Tour and 17 other professional titles. He is one of only five players (along with Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player) in the history of golf to have won all four professional major championships in his career. With his win in the 2005 Open Championship, he became only the second golfer, after Nicklaus, to have won all four majors more than once. At the 2003 TOUR Championship, he set an all-time record for most consecutive cuts made with 114 (passing Byron Nelson's previous record of 113), and extended this mark to 142 before it ended on May 13, 2005 at the EDS Byron Nelson Championship. The streak started in 1998[1]. Many commentators consider this one of the most remarkable golf accomplishments of all time, given the margin by which he broke the old record (and against much stronger fields than those in Nelson's day) and given that during the streak, the next longest streak by another player was usually only in the 10s or 20s.
Woods won the "World Sportsman of the Year" award at the Laureus World Sports Awards in 2000 and 2001. He is the only two-time winner as an individual of Sports Illustrated magazine's "Sportsman of the Year" award (1996, 2000).
An interesting fact about Tiger is that he always wears a red shirt on the final round of every tournament in which he plays. According to his mother's religion, the color red symbolizes power. He also puts tape on his middle and ring fingers, not for medical reasons, but for superstitions.
Woods' Golf Game
Woods balanced backswing as photographed at St Andrews in 2005
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Woods balanced backswing as photographed at St Andrews in 2005
When Woods burst onto the golf scene, one of the things which made the biggest impact on fans was his long driving. However, he refused to upgrade his technology while other players caught up to him during the 2002-2003 seasons on the PGA Tour. During 2004, Woods finally upgraded his driver technology and, as of 2005, he is back in his place as one of the very longest hitters on the PGA Tour. Despite his length advantage, he has always focused on developing an excellent all-around game. His driving is generally accurate, his approach play accurate, his recovery and bunker play sometimes brilliant, and his putting is usually reliable. He is largely responsible for a shift to higher standards of athleticism amongst professional golfers, and is known for putting in more hours of practice than most.
Early in his professional career Woods worked with the leading swing coach Butch Harmon, but since he has been coached by the less-heralded Hank Haney. He was involved in a media spat with Harmon, who also works as a golf broadcaster, when Harmon suggested that he was in "denial" about the problems in his game, but they publicly patched up their differences.
Although he is considered charismatic, Woods' approach is essentially cautious. He aims for consistency: although he is better than any other golfer when he is in form, his dominance comes not from having best rounds that are better than the other leading professionals' bests, but from having fewer bad rounds. He plays fewer tournaments than most professionals (twenty or twenty one a year compared to the typical twenty five to thirty), and focuses his efforts on preparing for and competing in the majors and the most prestigious of the other tournaments. |
