Tiger, Tiger

July 15, 2024
Bestseller Patterson (The 24th Hour) delivers a strangely detached biography of Tiger Woods, based entirely on previously published remarks from family, competitors, and others in the athlete’s orbit. Woods’s early years are recreated through recollections from his father, Earl, who remembers modeling proper putting technique while an infant Woods looked on from his highchair. Such memories bring a sense of intimacy to the early chapters, but Patterson’s overreliance on the perspectives of those who weren’t as close with Woods creates an odd sense of remove as the book wears on. For instance, the play-by-play of Woods’s performance at the 1997 Masters, where he became at age 21 the youngest golfer to ever win the tournament, weaves together the recollections of CBS announcer Jim Nantz and competitors Paul Azinger and Nick Faldo but includes virtually none from Woods himself. Accounts of Woods’s scandals, including 2009 revelations about his infidelity and his 2017 arrest for drunk driving, read more like recaps of contemporaneous media coverage than descriptions of the events themselves. This pales in comparison with Jeff Benedict’s Tiger Woods.