TIGER WOODS

TIGER WOODS BIOGRAPHY

Eldrick "Tiger" Woods (born December 30, 1975, Cypress, California), is considered one of the greatest golfers of all time. In 2005, at the age of 29, he reached the milestone of nine major golf championships at a younger age than any other player. He also holds the PGA Tour record for most consecutive tournament cuts made with 142. Woods, who is of mixed race, is credited with prompting a major surge of interest in the game of golf, especially among racial minorities and younger people in the United States. Background and family Woods is from a comfortable social background. His father, Earl Woods, is a Vietnam War veteran and a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, of mixed African American, European, and Native American ancestry. He is now the chairman of his son's charitable Tiger Woods Foundation. Woods' mother Kultida Woods is of Thai and Chinese ancestry. Woods' actual given name is Eldrick. He was nicknamed Tiger at birth after a Vietnamese war comrade of his father's and became generally known by that name. By the time he was achieving national prominence in amateur golf, he was always called Tiger Woods. In 2003, Woods became engaged to Elin Nordegren, a Swedish model. They were introduced by Swedish golf star Jesper Parnevik, who had employed her as a nanny. They married in a sunset ceremony at the Sandy Lane Hotel and Golf Club on Barbados amid armed security before approximately 200 family and friends on October 5, 2004. They presently make their home in Windermere, a suburb of Orlando, Florida. Amateur career Woods was a child prodigy who began to play golf at very young age. While still a small child, he demonstrated his golf skills in a television appearance with Mike Douglas. In 1984 he won the 9-10 boys' event at the Junior World Golf Championships. He was only eight at the time, but 9-10 was the youngest age group in those days. He went on to win the U.S. Junior Amateur title in 1991, 1992 and 1993. He remains the youngest ever winner and the only multiple winner. He followed this with three consecutive U.S. Amateur titles the next three years. With his first US Amateur win in 1994, the year that he graduated high school, he became the youngest man ever to win that event. He attended Stanford University and won one NCAA individual championship. Woods decided to leave Stanford after two years because he believed he was ready to succeed as a professional. Professional career Woods became a professional golfer in August 1996 playing his first round of professional golf at the Greater Milwaukee Open (GMO). He won two events in the three months of the 1996 season that he played as a professional. The following April he won The Masters by a record margin of 12 shots, and he has been by far the highest profile golfer in the world since then. In the summer of 1997 Woods went to number one in the Official World Golf Rankings for the first time. Woods formed a close friendship with leading PGA Tour professional Mark O'Meara, who was almost twenty years his senior. O'Meara acted as a mentor to him for a time, and the two men won the World Cup together. The inspiration of working closely with a brilliant young talent 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 once on the PGA Tour. At this time he was working on modifications to his swing to adapt to the maturation of his physique, and to address concerns that the extremely vigourous and elastic swing he had used in his youth might cause him back problems in the long term and truncate his career. Woods was careful to avoid using this as an excuse and instead responded to questions about his wavering form with reminders that he was still very young, and was hoping to do better in the future. In June 1999, Woods won the Memorial Tournament. This was the beginning of a sustained period of dominance of men's golf. He won seventeen PGA Tour events in two calendar years, and 32 in five, both of them achievements that hadn't been rivaled for several decades, and golf in Woods' era is generally seen as having much more strength in depth than in earlier periods. He won seven out of eleven major championships starting with the 1999 PGA Championship and finishing with the 2002 U.S. Open. During this time, he also 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. 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 - 264 consecutive weeks - came to an end at the Deutsche Bank Championship when Vijay Singh won the tournament and overtook Woods in the rankings. At around this time Woods let it be known that he was once again working on changes to his swing, and hoped that once the adjustments were complete he would get back to his best. At the start of the 2005 PGA Tour season, Woods returned to his winning ways. On 6 March he won the Ford Championship at Doral and returned to Number 1 in the World Rankings, but just two weeks later, Singh displaced him once again. On 10 April, Woods broke his "drought" in the majors by winning the 2005 Masters in a tie-breaking playoff, which also assured him of returning to Number 1 in the World Rankings once again. Singh and Woods have continued to swap the number 1 position several more times during the 2005 season, with neither able to establish a lasting advantage. To date, Woods has won 43 official money events on the PGA Tour and 15 other professional titles. He 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. 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 13 May 2005 at the EDS Byron Nelson Championship. 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 another player was usually only in the 10s or 20s. Woods won the "World Sportsman of the Year" award at the Laureus World Sports Awards in 2000 and 2001. He is the only two-time winner as an individual of Sports Illustrated magazine's "Sportsman of the Year" award (1996, 2000).

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