“I never tried to do it, or saw the need to because everyone else was trying to do it for me,” Tiger said. “And it didn’t really bother me. My whole objective was to try to win golf tournaments, and along the way I had my own challenges I had to deal with, being not the standard golfer. So I had to endure my own little bumps along the road to get to where I was. My dad went through it playing baseball. He was the first black to ever play in the Big Seven. It wasn’t even the Big Eight yet. Now it’s the Big Twelve. My dad played at Kansas State. He was the catcher. So my dad endured his hardships. He couldn’t go to Norman and stay when the team played the University of Oklahoma. He had to go stay in Oklahoma City and then drive to Norman to meet the team to play, then find a black hotel. So his mom and dad always told him, if you’re going to take advantage of opportunities you have to be twice as good to have half a chance. And that’s kind of the philosophy that my dad raised me with.

“I was talking about this not too long ago with some kids. They asked me, ‘What was it like growing up?’ I said, ‘It was great. But there were times when I wasn’t allowed to play golf.’ At the Navy golf course where I grew up playing, there’s an age limit—at military golf courses it was ten and over. But for some reason all the white kids were allowed to play who were ten and under, though I wasn’t. I had people who were older—and I don’t know if they were servicemen or retired or active or guests . . . I don’t know who they were—use the N word with me numerous times. I was there pitching, just pitching at a little chipping green. And they wanted to pitch, so they would yell at me and I’d have to go to the putting green. So I’d go to the putting green and I’d get yelled at over on the putting green. I’d go back to the chipping green, then get yelled at on the chipping green. These are things that obviously hardened me a little bit and made me realize that golf was not like basketball or football at the time. It was different, under different rules. Even traveling the country as a kid, I wasn’t allowed to go to certain pro shops or certain clubhouses to change shoes where all the other kids were allowed to.

“Being black is just looked at differently. And in this country I’m looked at as being black. When I go to Thailand, I’m considered Thai. It’s very interesting. And when I go to Japan, I’m considered Asian. I don’t know why it is, but it just is. It shouldn’t be about that but it is, unfortunately, because even as the world is becoming more global and more interconnected through all the different information streams, we’re still very separate and distinct. People are trying to maintain their cultural heritage, even though we, in America, are probably the biggest melting pot of anyplace in the world. Now, being married to a Swede, it’s interesting to see how excited she is when she’s able to talk to a Swede. Or when my caddie Stevie, being from New Zealand, is able to talk to someone from New Zealand. I guess because I have more than one heritage I really don’t feel that. The closest thing I have as a sense of that kind of connection is when I’m overseas and I run into someone who is speaking English.” But for Tiger, the sense that he was somehow different came very early.

“I became aware of my racial identity on my first day of school, on my first day of kindergarten. A group of sixth graders tied me to a tree, spray-painted the word ‘nigger’ on me, and threw rocks at me. That was my first day of school. And the teacher really didn’t do much of anything. I used to live across the street from school and kind of down the way a little bit. The teacher said, ‘Okay, just go home.’ So I had to outrun all these kids going home, which I was able to do. It was certainly an eye-opening experience, you know, being five years old. We were the only minority family in all of Cypress, California.

“When my parents moved in, before I was born, they used to have these oranges come through the window all the time. And it could have not been racially initiated or it could have been. We don’t know. But it was very interesting, though people don’t necessarily know it, that I grew up in the 1980s and still had incidents. I had a racial incident even in the 1990s at my home course where I grew up, the Navy golf course. And right before the 1994 U.S. Amateur, I was eighteen years old, I was out practicing, just hitting pitch shots and some guy just yelled over the fence and used the N word numerous times at me. That’s in 1994.” It’s remarkable to me that Tiger has remained pretty much without bitterness. His life is nothing if not diverse. His wife is Swedish. His caddie is from New Zealand. His mom is Thai, and his dad is black and American. You don’t see that every day, do you? Then again, maybe if we look closer, increasingly this is what we will be seeing as walls and barriers come down. Folks accustomed to being only with people who look like them may not want to see it, but it’s there more and more if you just look around when you travel. Maybe part of it is that so many people don’t have the means or opportunity to leave their communities and don’t know what’s going on outside their segregated situations. Anyway, we know Tiger knows exactly who he is and has an appreciation for where he comes from because of some ugly lessons. Still, he seems not to carry that baggage around.

“My dad’s mom died when he was about thirteen years old, but he said her philosophy, which he’s always followed, was: Always give everyone a chance. Always. And it doesn’t matter what race the person is, what their economic background is. None of it matters. Just talk to them. Don’t presume you know what a person is thinking or feeling. Just talk to them and find out for yourself.

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.