Frank Thomas

Notable Sports Figures
how many people his decision had inconvenienced, Woods
apologized profusely, but many people still criticized his
decision. However, when Woods came back from his week
off he silenced many of his critics by winning the Las
Vegas Open in a playoff against David Love III. Amazingly,
Woods won another event that season as well, the Walt
Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic. With a third place finish
in San Antonio the week between Las Vegas and Walt Disney
World, Woods became the first player to finish in the
top five in five straight tournaments since 1982.
Establishing a Legacy
Golf fans expected great things out of Woods in the
1997 season, and he did not disappoint them. Woods
won four tournaments that year. His most prestigious
win, the Masters, was also his strongest: he finished
twelve strokes ahead of his closest competitor, setting a
new scoring record on the Augusta National course of
eighteen under par. However, in 1998 Woods slumped.
Despite his successes in the previous two years, Woods
knew that there were still aspects of his game that needed
improvement. Although he has always been one of
the longest drivers in golf, prior to 1998 he had difficulty
controlling those long drives. Sometimes he overshot
his mark, and even when he didn’t he was often left or
right of where he wanted to be. Throughout the 1998
season Woods worked on correcting this, as well as on
improving his putting consistency. He only won one
event on the PGA Tour that season, but in the coming
years his hard work would pay off.
Woods’s 1999 season was legendary. It might have
been remembered as one of the best seasons in golf history,
had Woods not surpassed himself in 2000. In 1999
he won seven events on the PGA Tour. In 2000 he won
nine, including a victory in the U.S. Open by a recordbreaking
fifteen strokes, and another in the British Open
by eight. That year Woods also became the youngest person
ever to complete the career Grand Slam, by winning
the U.S. and British Opens and the PGA Championship
all in one season. Only Ben Hogan had ever won three majors
in one year, and only four other people, including
Nicklaus and Hogan, had ever completed the Grand
Slam. Then, when Woods notched his second Masters
win in 2001, he became the only golfer in history ever to
hold all four major championship titles at once.
That Masters victory was one of only five wins for
Woods in 2001. He was still the best player on the tour,
winning two more events than his closest competitor,
raking in well over $5 million in winnings, and winning
the Vardon Trophy for the lowest stroke average on the
tour, but he was not as dominant as he had been in the
previous two years. After Woods won the first two majors,
the Masters and the U.S. Open, in 2002 many people
expected him to win the single-season Grand Slam,
but he was foiled by foul weather at the British Open.
He shot an eighty-one in thirty mile-per-hour winds and
Tiger Woods
Woods
a pouring rain on Saturday at that event, which put him
out of contention.
The Best Golfer, Period
In the complicated world of American race relations,
Woods has often been frustrated by others’ attempts
to pigeonhole him neatly into one racial
category, African-American. Woods is in fact more
Asian than anything else: his mother is half Thai, onequarter
Chinese, and one-quarter white, and his father
is half black, one-quarter Chinese, and one-quarter Native
American. Woods identifies strongly with his
mother’s Thai heritage, and is offended that others insist
on overlooking it. He is also annoyed that some
people believe that, by virtue of his background, he
owes anything to any particular ethnic group. Early in
Woods’s career, when interviewers would ask him
questions about whether he saw himself as a role
model for young black or minority golfers, he would
reply that, no, he saw himself as a role model for all
young golfers. For Woods, racial politics are nothing
but a sideshow to what he really has to offer the world:
his skill as a golfer. As a teenager, when many in the
media dubbed him the “Great Black Hope” of the golf
world, he often declared, “I don’t want to be the best
black golfer. I want to be the best golfer, period.”
Now that Woods has achieved his goal of being the
best golfer in the world, his immense popularity is
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