'My heart is Thai': a window to Tiger's soul through his mother

Golf Digest, April, 2003 by Tom Callahan

She might ask a passing newspaper reporter: "What you think of Charles Howell III?"

But more often, she repeats: "What you think of my Tiger now?"

She makes the writers laugh, but they have a real and tender affection for her. And the first word almost everybody uses to describe her is "lonely."

At the original family home in Cypress, Calif., all of the guests would eat before Tida. In the big-ass house, Tida has a niece from Thailand to serve her first.

In a room of pro golfers and their wives, it is easy to see which players married before they were famous. Most of the others, the homely ones included, have a blonde on their arms. Tiger's tastes run along the company lines, to volleyball players and models. Except in Buick commercials, he has almost never been seen with a brunette.

Tida hasn't conspicuously embraced any of Tiger's girlfriends, including law student Joanna Jagoda, who, to the marriage brokers, looked to be better than even-money at one time. Tiger and Joanna parted after the great season of 2000. By 2002, he was traveling with a stunning Swede named Elin Nordegren, who walked the courses with Tida.

"Only one star in Woods family," Tiger's mother warns.

If you cross them, you are dead. They are like Joe DiMaggio that way. Tiger is only as self-centered and self-absorbed as the greatest athletes have almost always been. If Woods has a little extra vinegar, perhaps it's understandable. When one starts off as such a rank outsider in such an elitist environment, some residue of vindictiveness may be unavoidable at the top. Just a touch of a mean streak may be par for the course. And a killer competitor has to be hard. He doesn't have to be rude. To be a little rude, he has to be a little mean.

Tida never forgives, Tiger seldom does; neither of them ever forgets. They revel in paybacks for the rest of their enemies' lives.

FOR THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN TRYING to identify the biggest difference between Tiger and Jack, it may be this:

A hundred years ago, Nicklaus and I were teamed together in a pro-am at Mason, Ohio. "Look over there," he said at the ninth hole, pointing out an Associated Press writer, Bob Green, standing by the green. "I have so much respect for that," Jack said. "The wire service has a deadline every minute, but there's Bob out on the golf course."

"He comes out to smoke," I said.

Nicklaus knew the industry more than a little because he and his dad once visited the AP offices to beg the editors to stop using the sobriquet "Fat Jack." The wire turned them down. "Will Grimsley was in love with Arnold Palmer," Nicklaus told me with a shrug, mentioning the AP's lead sportswriter of the day. "But that's OK. A lot of people were." In years to come, Jack never took it out on Grimsley, the AP or anyone. The galleries don't recall ever rooting against Nicklaus ("Miss it, Fat Guts!"), because he never reminded them.

If it were Tiger, the AP would be dead.

Golf is a gritty sport brushed over by a gentlemanly veneer. If a silly joke stitched in small letters on the back of a caddie's hat ("Tiger Who?") is enough to make you want to grind Vijay Singh into the dust, not just that day but every day, over and over again, forever, the culture at least requires that you do it with a certain smile. Tiger has mastered the etiquette. In every sense of the phrase, he knows how to play the game. As a matter of fact, there are longtime observers, going back to Woods' peewee tournaments, who actually believe he was better off when he didn't like anybody and nobody liked him. He has assimilated to a point that, whether they should be or not, the opponents aren't quite as afraid of him as they once were.