The Tiger Woods Effect

It becomes easier to accept a black President after having learned to accept a black athlete as the greatest golfer in the world.

There has been a sea change in American racism over the last dozen years. A black athlete as the greatest in the most conservative of sports has helped for many with little experience with race.

Tiger Woods is the son of an African-American father and a Thai mother. Barack Obama is the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas.

Golf, like politics, has always been a very traditional game. Change is not something golfers go for unless it is a tax cut. At the professional level there is no sport with more Republicans and conservatives as participants.

Prior to the arrival of Tiger, most professional golfers only experience with people of color was as caddies or servants at their country clubs.

Golf itself has a very shameful past. The PGA Tour still had a Caucasian-only clause 14 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball.

In 1961 they were forced to finally drop the Caucasian-only clause by California Attorney General Stanley Mosk who refused to let them play on California golf courses if they didn’t change their rules.

Even the dropping of the clause didn’t lead to sudden integration in golf.

Augusta National, home of the Masters Tournament didn’t have a black competitor until 1975. One of the founders of the Georgia club, Cliff Roberts, famously said, “as long as I’m alive, golfers will be white, and caddies will be black.”

I started a Web site dedicated to golf in 1993. This was the very beginning of the Internet Age, with no more than a couple hundred Web sites, and most of those .gov or .edu sites.

We didn’t have a lot of money and didn’t have anything to spare for travel to golf events. Most of our coverage of golf tournaments was wire service stories.

Less than a year after our start the new U.S. Amateur Champion, a skinny 18-year-old kid from Southern California started playing for Stanford University, 20 miles north of our world headquarters.

We covered the heck out of this young kid. I really enjoyed covering Tiger. He was my son’s age and was fun to talk to before fame made him more careful. He could also make some amazing shots.

We continued to cover Tiger through his two years at Stanford, his two more U.S. Amateur Championships, his turning pro in 1996 and Tigermania in the winter of 1996-1997.

Not everyone liked that we covered Woods.

We’d often get very angry, racists letters complaining about our coverage. Some were not the least embarrassed by their racism and made it clear that was their complaint. Others complained about his youth or arrogance, or his daring to take titles away from Phil Mickelson and other white golfers.

The racists were fighting a losing battle with Tiger. His talent was always his answer to his critics.

Golf is a meritocracy. It is golfer versus the golf course. No teammates. No coaches. No technology advantages. Shoot the lowest score shows you are better than your competition.

Tiger was clearly better.

Tiger winning the 1997 Masters Tournament, playing it for the first time as a professional, drove racists crazy. By 2000 it had to become obvious to them they had lost the war. Tiger was much better than all of his competition. The argument was no longer if he was the best golfer, but was he the best of all time?

Tiger has been out of action since winning the U.S. Open in the summer, recovering from surgery. He has not been on the stage. He hasn’t said either way who he supported or voted for in the 2008 Presidential campaign. Tiger does not speak out on political issues.

It is more than possible the richest athlete in the world would have joined most other professional golfers and supported John McCain.

Sportswriter Jamie Diaz wrote, “Golf is a sport that requires judgment, intelligence, emotional control, focus, organization, integrity,” all abilities that would also serve a president of the United States.


Most agree there is a clear line from Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. That doesn’t mean the civil rights movement wouldn’t have happened without Robinson. He gave it a boost.

Obamamania might have happened in 2008 without the Tigermania of the previous decade, but he also gave Barack Obama a boost. He helped to make it possible for many conservatives to accept the idea of exceptionalism in people of color.

When Tiger was just starting out his career, Earl Wood said about his son, "Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power."

When Earl said that about his son’s potential impact on the world it sounded like a father getting carried away by his son’s abilities.

It is starting to sound a little less bombastic now.

Note: After I wrote this column, Tiger Woods announced, "I think it's [Obama' election] absolutely incredible. He represents America. He's multiracial. I was hoping it would happen in my lifetime. My father was hoping it would happen in his lifetime, but he didn't get to see it. I'm lucky enough to have seen a person of color in the White House."