LOOKING BACK AT THE BALCONY

Tiger Woods

Since Muhammad Ali, probably no professional athlete has inspired more worldwide talk than Tiger Woods. That’s because nobody in professional golf has ever looked like Tiger Woods. Sure, there have been people with dark skin who have had an impact on professional golf, from Charlie Sifford to Lee Elder to Jim Thorpe, all of whom are Americans of African descent, to Vijay Singh, who is Fijian. But Wood’s ethnicity—his dad is African American and his mom is Thai—his dominance of the game at the turn of the twenty-first century, and his appeal to children touched off a golf revolution. Never had the game, invented in Europe and dominated by white men for four hundred years, grabbed the attention of so many blacks, Asians, women, children, and young adults as when Tiger Woods started a roll that would see him win all four major championships by his twenty-fifth year.

If Tiger Woods was a WASP and fourth-generation country club kid from New England, he would be a golf phenomenon. But as a black and Asian kid from Southern California who has been called “nigger” on numerous occasions as a child and as a teenager by people who didn’t think he belonged on a golf course, he is a global phenomenon. People who operate under the impression that Tiger just sailed through life with no ugly confrontations will be shocked to learn that he suffered an ugly racial assault his very first day of school. But despite the odds, the “next Michael Jordan” from a marketing standpoint isn’t another basketball player; it’s Tiger Woods, who is probably the most recognizable athlete in the world, probably the richest, and in some ways the least known.

Anytime you look different from the others in your chosen field, people are going to be curious about you. And Tiger, quite obviously, looks different. He also is different. As a man who was born in the mid-1970s, he’s not a child of the civil rights movement, as I am. He wasn’t shaped by an America bent on segregation, as his father Earl most definitely was. But it’s impossible to grow up in America with skin the color of Tiger’s and not be affected by race. Because so many people, both black and Asian, see Tiger as representing their race, there has been something of a tug-of-war over him since he hit the PGA Tour in 1996, as much for the dignified way he behaves, dresses, and speaks as for his ability, which the golf community knew about by the time he was eight years old.

That tug-of-war has led to criticism of Tiger, that he should talk more about what race he feels he is, that he should identify with his African roots here in the United States, that he is wrong to shy away from issues of race, and the easy one that most people in public life face: that he hasn’t done enough to help his race.

Having known Tiger since he came out of Stanford, I know that stuff is just a bunch of junk. I’ve told him dozens of times that he should talk about how he feels on the subject and damn the consequences. I’ve also teased him, when we talk about his multiracial background, that we know people see him as black because Thai people don’t get as much hate mail as he does. Black people get that kind of volume of hate mail in America, not Thai people. But the important thing for me was to hear Tiger talk about his own racial experiences, most of which he has not shared publicly until now. And with Tiger, you have to start at the beginning, with his parents.

“I was raised in two different cultures,” he said one Sunday afternoon, sitting with me and Wilbon in Arizona. “I have my father, who is African American, and my mom, who is Asian, specifically Thai. I had to understand and appreciate more than just one way of looking at things because my dad’s view a lot of times was the polar opposite of my mom’s view because they were raised under two totally different cultural heritages. I was probably raised more in the Asian tradition because my father was working and my mom, who was at home more, was the disciplinarian. And a Far Eastern culture, as anyone who has experienced it knows, is very strict. So you have responsibilities. You had to do what you had to do if you were delegated a certain responsibility, and you never did anything to bring dishonor to your family. You can’t disrespect anybody who’s older than you, because if you do you’ve disgraced your entire family. That’s kind of how I was raised, and from what I’ve seen it’s a different philosophy from other cultures that I’ve been exposed to in America that are not Asian. If I didn’t say ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ ‘Thank you, sir,’ I’d be smacked in a heartbeat, right on my butt. That’s just how it was.

“Being raised under two different cultures gives my life a dichotomy that I think made me more well rounded earlier. And then there was the fact that I was playing a sport in which I didn’t ever really play with peers. Golf traditionally is an older gentleman’s sport. So as a kid I was always around people who had been in the workforce for twenty, thirty, forty years. There was a point in time—I was probably about thirteen, fourteen years old—when I told Dad, ‘I’m more comfortable hanging out with you guys than I am with my peers.’ But that’s the environment I was raised in, so I was forced to grow up faster. You couldn’t act petulant at a young age being around men who were very influential in what they did.”

Everyone has tried to define what they think Tiger ought to consider himself. Because we all are asked at such an early age to disclose our “race” on applications ranging from driver’s licenses to a form you fill out to give blood, people have to come to grips with choosing. I’ve told the story about my daughter asking me, “Dad, am I black or white?” and telling her that the answer was determined a long time ago in this country. Though her mom is white, her dad is black, so she’s seen as black in America, and would have been three hundred years ago, when the child of a slave and slave owner was legally black. Hell, if that person married a white person and had a child, their child would have been legally black as well. But this isn’t three hundred years ago. There are so many kids of so many races who cannot be easily described in a single box on an application. And Tiger Woods is one of those people who just will not be pushed into an overly simplistic description of who he is.

Continued...

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-from Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man?, by Charles Barkley.
Copyright © April 2005, The Penguin Press, a member of The Penguin Group, Inc.,
used by permission.