It’s Masters week, the annual ritual of thrilling golf, whispered commentary, blooming magnolias, white-suited caddies, and “patrons” in Bermuda shorts. (For the sensitive souls who run Augusta National Golf Club, which has hosted the tournament since 1934, the “fans” is too redolent of beer-swilling frat boys.)
Twenty years ago this month, a young man named Tiger Woods blitzed his way around Augusta, taking down the other players, the racial prejudice that has long attended golf, and the very expectations of what was possible in the sport. The shock of his performance wasn’t merely in seeing a twenty-one-year-old phenom defeat the rest of the field by twelve shots, beating the previous record of nine shots that Jack Nicklaus had set in 1965. It was the preternaturally calm demeanor that Woods displayed, and the manner in which he dismantled a course that had long been regarded as one of the world’s most difficult.
Colin Montgomerie, who was then one of the leading golfers in the world, was paired with Woods on Saturday, the third day of the four-day tournament. Woods shot seven under par—“the easiest sixty-five I’ve ever seen,’’ Montgomerie called it recently. “From the second hole onwards, I thought, ‘Hang on a minute. This is something extraordinary,’ ” he said. “This is a game that I had not seen before, and none of us had.” On Sunday, Woods shot three under par, and on the back nine his round turned into a victory procession. “From the 13th to the 18th, the people supported him like crazy,” his playing partner Costantino Rocca recalled. “I don’t know if anyone remembered I was on the golf course. It was good for him, not for me.’’
For those who would like to see Woods’s victory again, or who were too young to see it the first time around, the Masters is streaming the original CBS Sports broadcast of Sunday’s final round on its Web site. To watch the three-hour tape is to be reminded of how green Augusta National is, how white the crowds were (and are to this day), and how young, talented, and self-assured Woods was.
On the video, you can see Woods standing on the tee at the famous par-five thirteenth hole. At that point, he had a ten-shot lead over his closest competitor that weekend, Tom Watson. Standing tall, a steel-shafted three wood in hands, Woods lashed the ball straight down the middle of the fairway and bent over to pick up his tee. “You couldn’t walk that out there any better than that,” the late Ken Venturi commented.
Before going after his ball, Woods flashed his caddie, Mike (Fluff) Cowan, a quick, close-mouthed smile—a smile of youth and limitless confidence. Although he was barely old enough to drink legally, Woods had already won three professional tournaments, and going into Augusta he believed he could triumph there. In fact, he expected to win. “There are a few tournaments throughout my career where I felt, ‘Just don’t screw it up,’ ” he told USA Today a couple of weeks ago. “That was one of them.”
With the advantage of a young, limber body and a free-flowing swing that generated tremendous club-head speed, Woods drove the ball thirty or forty yards farther than most other players. He was also a great iron player and a fabulous putter. When the three elements of his game came together, as they did that week at Augusta, he was unbeatable. On the fifteenth hole, after driving his tee shot three hundred and one yards, he arrowed a mid-iron over the creek in front of the green. The shot landed about twenty feet behind the hole, setting up a two-putt birdie that extended his lead to eleven shots. “How good does it get?” Venturi asked. “You don’t want to play him on holes like this, he’ll own you. And he’s owning everybody today.”
During the twelve and a half years that followed his Masters coming-out party, Woods won another sixty-six tournaments on the P.G.A. Tour, including thirteen more major championships. The members at Augusta, seeing what he had done to their beloved course, lengthened it considerably, laid down new rough, and planted trees in areas where previously there had been none. This effort to “Tiger-proof” Augusta didn’t prevent Woods from winning the Masters three more times. But, as other venues copied Augusta’s example, Woods’s 1997 victory changed the very game, creating the conditions for the rise of a generation of “bombers” who also hit the ball a mile—players like Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, and Jason Day.
Woods was an inspiration to today’s stars, and, by drawing countless casual viewers into golf, he also made them sacks of money. Over the course of his career, the sport’s prize money and television contracts have grown exponentially. But Woods was bigger than golf. He became an international celebrity, a pitchman for corporate America, and a role model—although not an entirely uncontroversial one—for many minority communities. “At the 1995 U.S. Open, I referred to myself as a Cablinasian, a made-up word that includes my Caucasian, black, and Asian heritage,” he recalls in a new book, “The 1997 Masters: My Story.” “I never thought it was right or fair to think of me only as an African-American, and I never will. But I learned that to have one drop of black blood in you in America meant that you were considered an African-American.”
As this quote indicates, Woods—whose father, Earl, was African-American, and whose mother, Kultida (Tida), was born in Thailand—has never been particularly comfortable in the role of cultural figure. He’s a golfer, perhaps the best there has even been, and as his golf skills have atrophied, partly owing to a long string of injuries, he has retreated from the public eye.
It’s been nearly a decade since Woods won his last major championship, at the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, which he played a year and a half before a tabloid infidelity scandal, and subsequent divorce, shredded his reputation. It’s been nearly four years since he won anywhere, period, at the 2013 WGC-Bridgestone Invitational. Since the beginning of 2014, he has only played about twenty times. The best result he has managed is a tie for tenth, and he’s missed the cut on numerous occasions. With wild drives and fluffed chips, the quality of his play has, at times, been embarrassing. It is as if Nijinsky lost the ability to do a pirouette.
Last year, Woods spent the entire season recovering from back surgery, and this year he played only once on the P.G.A. Tour before going back on the disabled list. Last week, he confirmed in a statement that he wouldn’t be playing at Augusta, saying, “My back rehabilitation didn’t allow me the time to get tournament ready.” He also said that he didn’t have a timetable for his return, and the consensus in the golf world is that he’s done—that he’ll never reach Jack Nicklaus’s record of eighteen majors.
He will always have the ones he did win, though, including the first one, the finale of which is as enjoyable to watch today as it was twenty years ago. As he made his way to the eighteenth green, the crowd cheered him rapturously, and CBS’s Jim Nantz hailed what had been “a virtuosos performance like Augusta has never seen.” After two-putting to complete the win, Tiger thanked his caddy and playing partner. Then he walked across the green to greet Tida and Earl, a noted sportsman in his own right who, during the nineteen-fifties, broke the color barrier in the Big Eight baseball conference.
The lengthy hug that father and son shared, with Tiger resting his head on Earl’s shoulder and weeping, is one of the most famous moments in sports history. When this year’s Masters gets going on Thursday, we may well see some great golf. But it won’t be anything to match 1997.