Tiger Woods

de Jeff Benedict, Armen Keteyian

In 2009, Tiger Woods was the most famous athlete on the planet, a transcendent star of almost unfathomable fame and fortune living what appeared to be the perfect life. Married to a Swedish beauty and the father of two young children, he was the winner of fourteen major golf championships and earning more than $100 million annually. But it was all a carefully crafted illusion. As it turned out, Woods had been living a double life for years -- one that unraveled in the aftermath of a Thanksgiving-night car crash that exposed his serial infidelity and sent his personal and professional lives over a cliff. Who is Tiger Woods, really? Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian conducted hundreds of interviews with people from every facet of Woods's life -- friends, family members, teachers, romantic partners, coaches, business associates, physicians, Tour pros, and members of Woods's inner circle. We read an inside account of Tiger's relationship with his first love, Dina Gravell, and their excruciating breakup at the hands of his parents. We learn that Tiger's longtime sports agency, International Management Group (IMG), made $50,000 annual payments to Tiger's father, Earl Woods, as a "talent scout" years before Tiger was their client. We discover startling new details about Earl, who died in 2006 and lies in an unmarked grave. We come along as Tiger plunges into the Las Vegas and New York nightclub worlds alongside fellow superstars Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley. We are whisked behind the scenes during the National Enquirer's globetrotting hunt to expose Tiger's infidelity, and we get a rare look inside his subsequent sex-addiction treatment at the Pine Grove facility in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. By tracing his life from its origins as the mixed-race son of an attention-seeking father and the original Tiger Mom -- who programmed him to be "the chosen one," tasked with changing not just the game of golf but the world as well -- the authors provide new insight into the human being trapped inside his parents' creation. We meet the lonely, introverted child prodigy who has trouble connecting with other kids because of his stutter and unusual lifestyle. We experience the thrill and confusion of his meteoric rise to stardom. And we come to understand the grown man's obsession with extreme training and deep sea diving as a rare source of the solitude he craves. Most of all, we are reminded, time and time again, of Woods's singular greatness and the exhilaration we felt watching an athletic genius dominate his sport for nearly twenty years.