Tiger Woods
Eldrick Tonter "Tiger" Woods (born December 30, 1975, in Cypress, California) is an American golfer, widely considered to be one of the greatest golfers of all time. In 2005, at the age of 29, he won his 10th major golf championship, placing him fourth on the all-time list behind Jack Nicklaus, Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones. He had more wins on the PGA Tour than any other active golfer. Woods, who is of mixed race, is credited with prompting a major surge of interest in the game of golf among minorities and young people in the United States.
Eldrick Tonter (Tiger) was a child prodigy who began to play golf at age three. In an interview with 60 Minutes that aired on March 26, 2006, Woods explained that he suffered from a severe stuttering problem when he was younger. While still a small child, he demonstrated his golf skills in a television appearance on the Mike Douglas Show. In 1984, he won the 9-10 boys' event at the Junior World Golf Championships; Tiger was only eight years old at the time, but 9-10 was the youngest age group available. Tiger went on to win the Junior World Championships six times, including four consecutive wins from 1988-1991. Woods then won the U.S. Junior Amateur title in 1991, 1992, and 1993; he remains the event's youngest-ever winner. He followed this by becoming the only person to win three consecutive U.S. Amateur titles over the next three years. With his first US Amateur win in 1994 over Trip Kuehne, the year that he graduated from high school, he became the youngest player ever to win that event. His five USGA Championships before age 20 qualify him for consideration as having the greatest under-20 golf career of all time. He attended Stanford University and won one NCAA individual championship. In 1996, Woods decided to drop out of Stanford after two years, to pursue professional golf.
With the announcement, "Hello World," [3] Tiger Woods became a professional golfer in August 1996, playing his first round of professional golf at the Greater Milwaukee Open. His caddy was George Wutton. He won two events in the next three months, and was named 1996's "Sportsman of the Year" by Sports Illustrated for the enormous impact he had on the game of golf even as a rookie. The following April, Woods won The Masters by a record margin of 12 strokes, and has been by far the highest-profile golfer in the world ever since. On 15 June 1997 [4], Woods rose to the number one spot in the Official World Golf Rankings for the first time, though he was quickly supplanted by Ernie Els, and then David Duval.
Woods has formed a close friendship with leading PGA Tour professional Mark O'Meara, though O'Meara is almost twenty years his senior. O'Meara acted as a mentor to Woods for a time, and the two men won the 1999 World Cup of Golf together. The inspiration of working closely with Tiger was widely regarded as a catalyst for O'Meara's own career year in 1998, when he won the only two majors of his career.
Despite suggestions that the other players would only be competing for second place from now on, Woods' form began to fade in the second half of 1997, and in 1998 he only won one PGA Tour event. In June 1999, Woods won the Memorial Tournament, a victory that marked the beginning of perhaps the greatest sustained period of dominance in the history of men's golf. He would go on to win seventeen PGA Tour events in the two calendar years that followed, and 32 in the next five, both achievements that had not been rivaled in several decades. Also in late 1999, Tiger embarked on a record-setting streak of 264 consecutive weeks atop the Official World Golf Rankings. During the run, Woods won seven out of the eleven major championships, starting with the 1999 PGA Championship at Medinah Country Club and finishing with the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage Black. Woods broke Old Tom Morris' record for the largest victory margin ever in a major championship, which had stood since 1862, with his 15-shot win in the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. In the 2000 British Open at St Andrews, Woods set the record for lowest score to par (-19) in any major tournament, and he holds at least a share of that record in all four major championships. His major championship streak was seriously threatened at the 2000 PGA Championship, however, when upstart Bob May went head-to-head with Woods on Sunday at Valhalla in Louisville, matching Tiger stroke-for-stroke. Woods only escaped with his third straight major on the second playoff hole, where he made par and May's roller-coaster putt to tie missed by mere inches. The next season, though, Woods went back to dominating: his 2001 Masters win marked the only time anyone had ever won four consecutive majors, a feat which has become known as the "Tiger Slam". His adjusted scoring average of 67.79 in 2000 was the lowest in PGA TOUR history, lower than his 68.43 average in 1999. His actual scoring average of 68.17 in 2000 was the lowest in PGA TOUR history, including Byron Nelson's 68.33 average in 1945.
The next phase of Woods' career saw him remain among the top competitors on the tour, but lose his dominating edge. He did not win a major in 2003 or 2004, and fell to second in the PGA Tour money list in 2003 and to fourth on 2004. In September 2004, Woods' record streak as the world's top-ranked golfer came to an end at the Deutsche Bank Championship in Norton, Massachusetts, when Vijay Singh won the tournament and overtook Woods in the rankings. Even though no one has held the number one ranking for more total weeks than Woods, many commentators were puzzled by Tiger's "slump," offering explanations that ranged from Tiger's rift with swing coach Butch Harmon to his recent marriage to Elin Nordegren. At the same time, Woods let it be known that he was once again working on changes to his swing -- this time in hopes of reducing the wear and tear on his surgically-repaired left knee, which was subjected to severe stress in the 1998-2003 version of his swing. Again, Woods anticipated that once the adjustments were complete, he would return to his previous form.
In the 2005 PGA Tour season, Woods quickly returned to his winning ways. On March 6, he outdueled Phil Mickelson to win the Ford Championship at Doral, and returned to the Official World Golf Rankings' number one position in the process (though Singh displaced him once again two weeks later). On April 10, Woods finally broke his "drought" in the majors by winning the 2005 Masters in a tie-breaking playoff, which also assured him the number one spot in the World Rankings again. Singh and Woods swapped the Number 1 position several times over the next couple of months, but by early July, Woods had established a substantial advantage, propelled further by a victory in The (British) Open Championship, a win that also gave him his 10th major. Tiger went on to win six official money events on the PGA Tour in 2005, topping the money list for the sixth time in his career. Woods' 2005 wins also included two at the World Golf Championships; he has won in 10 of his 19 career individual World Golf Championships appearances for an incredible 0.526 winning percentage.
To date, Woods has won 48 official money events on the PGA Tour, 18 other individual professional titles, and two team titles in the two-man WGC-World Cup. He owns the lowest career scoring average and the most career earnings of any player in PGA Tour history. Tiger is one of only five players (along with Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player) in the history of golf to have won all four professional major championships in his career (known as the "Career Grand Slam"). With his win in the 2005 Open Championship, he became only the second golfer, after Nicklaus, to have won all four majors more than once. At the 2003 TOUR Championship, he set an all-time record for most consecutive cuts made with 114 (passing Byron Nelson's previous record of 113), and extended this mark to 142 before it ended on May 13, 2005 at the EDS Byron Nelson Championship. The streak started in 1998[5]. Many commentators consider this one of the most remarkable golf accomplishments of all time, given the margin by which he broke the old record (and against much stronger fields than those in Nelson's day) and given that during the streak, the next longest streak by any other player was usually only in the 10s or 20s.
The only disappointment so far in Tiger's career has been his relatively poor performances in the Ryder cup particularly in the team section of that competition. Some believe the pressure on Woods is too great at this competition and it is clear that he is not entirely comfortable with the event’s playing format. In his four previous Cup matches his record is a mediocre return of seven wins, 11 losses and two halves. Not what many expect of the world's number one.
Woods won the "World Sportsman of the Year" award at the Laureus World Sports Awards in 2000 and 2001. He is the only individual two-time winner of Sports Illustrated magazine's "Sportsman of the Year" award (1996, 2000). In many experts' eyes, Tiger's career accomplishments through 2005 (remarkably, all before the age of 30) qualify him for consideration as the greatest golfer of all time.