Z-Action Swings_W

  About watching Repeater Swings

  Mickey Wright

  Tiger Woods

I first met Tiger when he was a real little guy. My guess is age 2 or 3. It was either 1978 or 1979. I was one of two assistant Pros at the Los Alamitos Country Club. The facility was not a real country club as country club’s go, just was named the Los Alamitos Country Club. It was owned by the Los Alamitos Race Track, open for public play and VERY busy.

One day before one of these “big events”, a man came in to the golf shop (Earl Woods) and asked if his son could play in the tournament. He explained that his son was real young, but could hit the ball and would keep up with the other players. During his explanation, I remember sensing an attitude, like I might not allow his son to play. Turns out he had just been asked to leave another golf course (Long Beach Navy golf course) because his son was determined too young to play on the course.
(note: I guess he later shot a 48 on one of the Navy Course nines at age 3)

To be honest it didn’t matter to me how young or skillful a kid was. With real young kids I’d ask the parent to play with their child, with the un-skillful kids I gave them a stroke limit per hole to adhere too. The real deal was to have fun and play in a “golf tournament.”

Well, as I assured Earl it was OK with me, in walked Tiger’s mother and this “real” little kid. Earl introduced me to this little guy with the super short cut down club. I can’t say I really remember a lot, except Tiger looking at me, then to his dad saying “Me go putt”. Then off to the putting green he ran. I don’t know for sure but this could have been the first tournament Tiger Woods played in?

Shortly there after, at age 4 or 5, Tiger appeared on a TV show called “That’s Incredible”. After that he became very well known to everywhere in the golf world.

In later years I would briefly see Tiger from time to time. He played Old Ranch Country Club every so often during my tenure as Head Pro. His first teacher, PGA Pro Rudy Duran from Heartwell Park golf course, would bring him out to play. He also competed in an outside tournament each year at Old Ranch, the Youth Insurance Classic hosted by, Mr. Ross Mckelvie, an Old Ranch member. It was a qualifier for a big national tournament. Of course, Tiger always qualified, and I believe he won the big national event once or twice.

In hindsight, I wish I would have got to know Tiger, and Earl for that matter. Not sure if I was just too busy or just too shy. Mr. Mckelvie did a good job of keeping me up to date with what was happening to Tiger. I appreciated and enjoyed our discussions about the golfer that is and was just …..Incredible.

“For many my behavior has been a major disappointment, my behavior has caused considerable worry to my business partners, and everyone involved in my business, but most importantly to the young people we influence, I apologize.”

--Tiger Woods

"No one knows what it is like being Tiger Woods"
--Bob Silver

Heartwell Golf Course, tucked in a sleepy residential neighborhood in Long Beach, Calif., does not have the air of the historic. It lacks the grandeur of, say, the Colosseum or the Pyramids, and it offers no windows into the soul, as do Graceland or Monticello. Still, strolling around Heartwell is a journey back in time because this will forever be remembered as one of the places where Tiger Woods blossomed as a golfer, never mind that it remains nothing more than a scruffy par-3 course where the longest hole measures 140 yards and grass is a precious commodity.

However humble, Heartwell and the other courses of Woods's youth are the Elysian fairways that formed his earliest dreams. "You see the 3rd hole, over there, through the trees?" asks Rudy Duran, Woods's first teacher, during a tour of the Heartwell course. "It's less than 100 yards, but when Tiger started playing here, at 4 1/2, he couldn't carry that front bunker, even with his driver. It was frustrating for him, but it was also a good learning experience. He was introduced to strategy on that hole--where was the best place to lay up, the best angle to attack the green."

Serendipity brought Tiger and Duran together. Heartwell was the nearest par-3 course to the Woods home, in the adjacent town of Cypress. One day Tida Woods, Tiger's mother, showed up with her Mozart in spikes, and asked Duran, Heartwell's head pro, if he would take a look at her son's swing. To that point Woods had been tutored by his father, Earl. Tiger had only a three-club set back then, and he employed a baseball grip because his tiny fingers were not strong enough to hold a club conventionally. Nevertheless, Duran was flabbergasted by what he saw. "He was like a shrunken-down Jack Nicklaus," he says, and on that day a relationship, both professional and personal, was born.

Unlike Woods, Duran was late coming to golf. He had been introduced to the game as a teenager on what he calls "divorce weekends," when he would visit his father. (That the lifelong bachelor would later become a father figure to thousands of young golfers is probably less than coincidence.) Duran grew up in the San Fernando Valley; joined the Air Force out of high school, in 1968; and was stationed in West Germany, not a bad assignment considering that the Vietnam War was raging. While in the Air Force, Duran played golf nearly every day, and he turned pro upon his discharge in 1971. He spent most of the 1970s on the fringes of the game, going broke trying to make the PGA Tour from 1976 to '78.

That bitter experience led him into teaching, and by the time Woods was dropped on his doorstep, in 1980, Duran had established a thriving junior program at Heartwell, allowing his pint-sized charges to play the course for free, without restrictions. Every Saturday there was a sprawling tournament in which as many as 100 kids played off preestablished handicaps. "For a while it seemed like every good golfer who came out of Southern California was part of that junior program," says Kelly Manos, who graduated from Heartwell to a scholarship at Southern Cal, where he played alongside Dave Stockton Jr. Among the other Heartwell regulars were Cypress native Amy Fruhwirth, the '91 U.S. Women's Amateur champ and subsequently an LPGA winner, and another dozen or so players who became touring or club pros.

Woods thrived in this environment. Heartwell has 18 par-3s and measures 2,143 yards. Because Tiger wasn't strong enough to reach most of the holes with his driver, Duran, adjusting for distance, established a "Tiger par" of 67 for the course.

At five Tiger received his first complete set of clubs (including, at his insistence, a one-iron) and shortly thereafter shot an eight-under 59, which greatly impressed Duran. As he got older, Tiger became more competitive in the Saturday tournaments, which were already the "peak of his week," according to Earl. Says Manos, "When Tiger was six, I was 16, and we were playing together one Saturday along with some other guys my age. We got to the 16th tee, and I said to the fellas, 'Do you realize this little s--- is tied with us?' Damned if he didn't go on and beat all of us. It was incredible. I mean, he was hitting three-woods, and we were swinging wedges. There was no animosity--we were all kids, you know? It was like, 'Wow, cool, the little guy did it.'"

Says Duran, "Tiger's genius wasn't his swing, although it was very good. His genius was using his swing to shoot low numbers. It was like an artist with a tool, carving something." Recognizing the potential of his prodigy, Duran sought to expand his education at every turn. In 1984, when Tiger was eight, Duran took him to watch his first pro tournament, the L.A. Open at Riviera. Later that year Duran teed it up in the Queen Mary Open, a minitour event in Long Beach, and Tiger served as his caddie, chugging along with a pull cart.

By 1985, Heartwell was but a fond memory. American Golf had snapped up the course and put the kibosh on the junior program. Duran moved one town to the north, to Bellflower, and its eponymous golf and tennis center. The Bellflower range was shoddy at best, but its nine-hole par-3 course forced Tiger to expand his game. Five of the holes exceeded 140 yards--the length of Heartwell's longest hole--including the 7th, which played to 167 yards, and the 9th, a robust 190-yarder. Tiger spent more than two years mastering the course.

In reconstructing the time line of Tiger's development, 1986, when he was 10, was the pivotal year, the one during which he lost a teacher but gained an important golf course. In '86, Duran spent all of his time managing two excellent 18-hole courses in Paso Robles, a dusty farming town in central California. "It was a major career opportunity," he says, "and I couldn't say no." To continue Tiger's instruction, Earl hired John Anselmo, who was teaching at Los Alamitos Golf Course, a muni one mile from the Woods house. Even closer to home was the Navy Golf Course in Cypress, with its minimum-age requirement of 10. After his birthday on Dec. 30, 1985, Tiger was finally eligible to play there, although he already had a history at the course.

First the history. At 18 months Tiger played his first hole, a 410-yard par-4 at the Navy. He made an 11, including three putts. Though Tiger wasn't supposed to be on the course, at the beginning no one seemed to mind, as long as he played with his father. At three Tiger broke 50 over nine holes for the first time, shooting a 48 from the red tees, which over 18 holes measured a healthy 5,903 yards. "The score wasn't important," says Earl. "Even back then we gave Tiger a par to play off based on how far he could hit the ball. There were a lot of par-8s and par-9s, and at the end of the day he was always under par. This is important: He never developed a complacency or a fear of going low."

Around the time of Tiger's fourth birthday some of the regulars at the Navy course--a facility open to members of the military but not the general public--took issue with his constant presence, and that was when he found Heartwell. By the time he turned 10, Tiger was ready to exact his revenge on the Navy Golf Course. He was already raising eyebrows with his length, and the wide-open fairways at Navy didn't punish his wildness. He became a regular at the course, usually competing against, and beating, men three to four times his age.

"The progression of courses was ideal," says Earl. "At Heartwell, Tiger learned how to be accurate and how to score around the greens. At Bellflower he learned how to attack longer holes. At Navy he was forced to pull all this knowledge together and compete against more mature players on a regulation-sized track."

All three of those courses featured flat, boring, push-up greens. Los Alamitos, where Woods continued to work with Anselmo, was a quirky little bandbox crammed onto less than 100 acres, and the greens were, says Earl, "slopy and grainy and funky." It was on these greens that Tiger learned to read breaks and control the speed of his putts. (In 1992 Los Al was redesigned by Perry Dye and renamed Cypress Golf Club. Four years later, just a couple of weeks before he would win his third straight U.S. Amateur, Woods shot a 63 there, which remains the course record.)
Sadly, the course is no longer there.

In 1987, when Tiger was 11, Anselmo moved on to Meadowlark Golf Club, an upscale daily-fee facility in Huntington Beach, the self-styled Surf City 15 miles south of Cypress. Meadowlark has a gorgeous range, which became the workshop of Anselmo and Woods. (Woods rarely, if ever, played the course.) By then Anselmo was beginning his fourth decade as a teaching pro. In the years after World War II he had barnstormed on the pro circuit, playing in events up and down the West Coast. Anselmo was influenced by the swings of Ben Hogan and Sam Snead, and those influences became the touchstones of his dialogue with Tiger. Duran had provided access, enthusiasm and strong fundamentals. Anselmo offered more sophisticated information.

"Tiger was already an accomplished player when he came to me," says Anselmo. "He had the basics down cold. Now he wanted more than that. How do you play knockdown shots? How do you play flop shots? Stuff like that. I'll never forget the day he came to me when he was still a little kid and said, 'How do you get rid of backspin?' I said, 'Tiger, 99 percent of golfers are dying to get backspin, not get rid of it. Why don't you keep the spin and play the ball past the hole and bring it back?' He just nodded his head. I could tell he filed that away for future reference."

By his early teens Tiger had expanded his range in every sense. He was routinely blowing drives over the net at the back of the Meadowlark practice tee, which was 225 yards out and 50 feet high. Thanks to the Southern California Junior Golf Association, Tiger was also seeing more courses than the Navy. Five days a week members of the association traveled to tracks across the Southland, including a handful of private clubs. "That was important because I wanted Tiger to have the same experiences and the same facilities as country club kids," says Earl. "I didn't want him to be shocked when he got out on Tour and saw those courses."

In the summer of 1992, when Tiger was 15 and coming off his second of three straight U.S. Junior Amateur victories, Earl got an unexpected phone call. On the other end of the line was Bob Lovejoy, head pro at swank Big Canyon Country Club, in tony Newport Beach, the next beach town south of Huntington. Designed by Robert Muir Graves and built in 1971, Big Canyon has since its beginning catered to the Orange Country aristocracy, a fact reflected by the club's outrageous membership fees (currently rumored to exceed $150,000). Lovejoy was dangling an honorary membership in front of Tiger. "The club's policy has always been to help out young, up-and-coming golfers when we could," says Lovejoy, now Big Canyon's director of golf. "Generally these were aspiring pros starting out, but in Tiger's case we were all aware of his potential. I went to the club president and said, 'Why not approach the best junior in the world?'"

Tiger was made an honorary member with the blessing of the USGA and the NCAA. He haunted the course throughout high school, and it was a much-needed test for his game, which was long but often wrong. Big Canyon plays 6,876 yards from the back tees, with a slope of 135 and a course rating of 73.9. The course sprawls up and down spectacular, rolling countryside, and there isn't a single flat hole. However, it has plenty of old-growth trees. "Tiger took two or three years to break par at Big Canyon because he was so damn wild," says Earl. "I used to tell him he was aptly named because he was always in the woods. He would say, 'Yeah, Pop, but I can get out.' Big Canyon is where he learned those escape shots, where he learned never to be intimidated by being in trouble."

In the spring of 1996, when he was a sophomore at Stanford, Woods brought Big Canyon a measure of renown (and vice versa) by going 61-65 on the opening day of the Pac-10 Championships, which was held at the course. Both rounds beat the course record. Later in '96 Woods turned pro and almost overnight became a corporation unto himself, but little has changed in his relationship with Big Canyon. He's still an honorary member, and it's still his home course when he's in Southern California. (Woods has a bachelor pad in Manhattan Beach, 25 miles up the coast.)

In a delicious twist of fate, Woods's old Heartwell buddy, Manos, has been a pro at Big Canyon since 1995. They don't get to play together too often, but there have been a few memorable tilts. "The summer before his third U.S. Amateur we went out, and I took him on the front nine straight up, 32-34," says Manos. "On the 13th hole we saw lightning in the foothills. I was like, 'Uh, Tiger, it's time to go in,' but he wouldn't budge. He wanted to keep playing. By 16 I'm still ahead in the match. The rain is really coming down, and there's some thunder too. All I want to do is get inside, but Tiger wants to finish the round, so we did. Well, I held on to win the match and $20. He claimed not to have any money, as usual, so I never saw a dime. Every time I've seen him since, I bring up that 20 bucks, but he won't pay. All he ever says is, 'I tell you what, I'll play you for it.' I'd rather have the 20 bucks, you know? I may have beaten him once, but he's pretty much been kicking my butt since he was 4 1/2 years old."