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Tiger Woods is well on his way to being the greatest golfer to ever play the game. Here are the top ten moments from his journey.
#10 – Tiger Wins Thirteenth Major Championship
In August of 2007, Tiger wins his thirteenth major golf tournament, the PGA Championship. He is now over two thirds of the way the to Jack’s eighteen major victories. Tiger’s quest to be the greatest golfer of all time continues.
#9 – Tiger Plays with Jack Nicklaus at the 2000 U.S. Open
In the original two rounds of the 2000 PGA Championship, Tiger is paired with Jack Nicklaus for the firstborn time in tournament play. As the two legends walk off the eighteenth tee, Tiger tells Jack, “It’s been an honor and a privilege to play with you. Let’s finish off on the rectify note.”
Jack replies, “You got it. Let’s go.” Jack and Tiger carry on to both make birdies on the final hole. The selfassurance torch has officially been passed.
#8 – Tiger Wins Third Consecutive U.S. Amateur Championships
In the match play final, Tiger trails his contestant by five holes. Tiger wins the match on the second playoff hole. He says this regarding his three-peat, “The biggest players ever, Nicklaus and Jones, never did this. I like to be unique, to accomplish things that have never been done.”
#7 – Tiger Meets with the Caddies of Augusta National
At six o’clock in the evening, after the second round of his firstborn Masters Tournament in 1995, Tiger meets with the African-American caddies of Augusta National Golf Course. Until 1982, all players were required to use them. Now, they’re a forgotten group, as the masters always fetch their own caddies.
After the meeting, Tiger conducts a clinic for African-American kids. Earl sums up the day when he says, “This is the culmination of a very hectic day. . . . I’ve watched this young man pass from adolescence to manhood, and I’m very proud of him.”
From the very beginning, his parents always said, “We’ve raised Tiger to be a better person than he is a golfer.” That day in Augusta proves they had done their occupation well.
#6 – Tiger Sees a List of Jack Nicklaus’ Accomplishments
At the age of ten, Tiger sees a list in the magazine, Golf Digest, of Jack Nicklaus’ accomplishments on the golf course and the ages when he achieved them. Tiger clips the list and posts it in his room. Jack is recognized as the greatest golfer of all time by virtue of his eighteen major victories. Tiger is using the list as a yard-stick to measure his own traveling to surpass Jack.
#5 – Tiger Signs Endorsement Deal With Nike
At the age of twenty, Tiger wins his third successive U.S. Amateur Golf Tournament. The next day, he signs a $50 million endorsement deal with Nike, hops into Nike corporate jet and flies to his original professional tournament. In 2006, it’s approximated that Tiger earned over $100 million dollars, largely from his ever-growing list of endorsement deals. Tiger’s well deserved reputation and his financial resources enable him make a major divergence in the world.
#4 – Tiger Wins Four Consecutive Major Championships
The four greatest professional golf tournaments played each year are called the majors. In 2000, Tiger wins the 100th U.S. Open at Pebble Beach by a record fifteen strokes. Later that year wins the British Open and the PGA Championship. Then in April of 2001, Tiger triumphs at the Masters Tournament to become the only person to ever have all four major trophies on his mantel at the same time.
#3 – Tiger Hits First Golf Ball
Tiger is ten months old. He watches his dad hit golf balls from a mat in their garage. Tiger climbs down from his high chair, grabs a little club his dad made for him, places a ball on the mat, looks at the target and hits the ball perfectly into the net. “I was flabbergasted!” Earl said later. “I closely fell of my chair. It was the most horrendous thing I had ever seen!” In that moment, Earl and his wife, Tida, knew they had a prodigy on their hands.
#2 – Tiger Opens the Tiger Woods Learning Center
On February 10, 2006, the introductory Tiger Woods Learning Center opens in Anaheim, California. Here’s what Tiger says when it comes to the 35,000 -square-foot facility. “My goal for the Tiger Woods Learning Center is to provide students with a place to explore their dreams and open doors to new probabilities and potential career paths. . . . . This is more prominent than golf. This is more prominent than anything I’ve ever done on the golf course, because we will be competent to shape lives.”
#1 – Tiger Wins 1997 Masters Tournament
With 15.3 million homes looking at on television, Tiger becomes the youngest person to win the Masters Tournament. His eighteen-under-par score of 270 is a tournament record, as is his winning margin of twelve strokes. After he sinks his four-foot par putt on the final hole, television announcer Jim Nantz sums up the moment when he says, “There it is – a win for the ages.”
With TV cameras following his each move, Tiger hugs his dad, Earl, who had not so long ago undergone coronary bypass surgery. President Clinton calls Tiger later that evening and says the hug was the best shot he saw on TV all day.
Earl Woods dies on May 3, 2006. Tiger takes over a month off from playing golf to be with his dad. After Tiger wins the British Open in July, he embraces his caddie, Steve Williams, and sobs uncontrollably. Steve whispers in his ear, “This one’s for Pops.”
Tiger
A gripping story of man pitted versus nature’s most fearsome and effective predator.
Outside a remote village in Russia’s Far East a man-eating tiger is on the prowl. The tiger isn’t just killing people, it’s murdering them, closely as if it has a vendetta. A team of trackers is dispatched to hunt down the tiger before it strikes again. They recognise the creature is cunning, injured, and starving, making it even more dangerous. As John Vaillant re-creates these extraordinary events, he gives us an unforgettable and masterful work of narrative nonfiction that combines a riveting portrait of a stark and mysterious region of the world and it is people, with the natural history of nature’s most deadly predator.
ReviewAmazon Best Books of the Month, August 2010: Deep in the frigid Siberian wilderness, an Amur tiger hunts. Fearsome strength is at the command of a calculating mind that relentlessly stalks it is most recent prey: man. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the taiga, John Vaillant provides an unforgettable unfeigned account of a lethal collision among man and beast in a remote Russian village for the duration of the late 1990′s. At it is core, The Tiger is the story of a desperate poacher who picked the faulty tiger to accost. Yet it engages the reader on political, socioeconomic, and conservation fronts in order to explain how the stage was set for a deadly showdown. It’s a gutsy approach that could effortlessly lead to chaotic storytelling, but Vaillant is careful to keep the bone-chilling storyline taut by capturing the intensity of an animal worthy of our biggest respect and deepest fears. –Dave Callanan Christopher McDougall Reviews The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
Christopher McDougall is the author of national bestseller Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen. He is a former war correspondent for the Associated Pressand a three-time National Magazine Award finalist. He’s written for magazines ranging from Esquire and The New York Times Magazine to Outside and Men’s Health. He does his own running amidst the Amish farms around his home in rural Pennsylvania. Read his review of The Tiger:
A few years ago, I interviewed a Delaware state trooper named Butch LeFebvre who’d been assigned to investigate rumors that a mountain lion was roaming the outskirts of Wilmington. It was silly, of course–big cats had been wiped out on the East Coast more than a century ago. But just to be safe, LeFebvre strapped on night-vision goggles, loaded a rifle with a tranquilizer dart, and set off into the woods behind the Du Pont Country Club. By 3 A.M, he’d spotted nothing, so he headed back to his truck. The next evening, he returned to the same spot for another look–and found paw tracks following his footprints all the way back to where he’d parked. LeFebvre was an experienced hunter, but he learned something that night: one killer out there was doing a great occupation of observing and thinking and learning, and it wasn’t him.
To this day, the Wilmington lion has never attacked or even emerged from the suburban shadows. Not so lucky, however, is the Siberian village in John Vaillant’s chilling The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. In 1997, deep in the remote Russian backcountry, a gigantic Amur tiger begins acting like the only thing more savage than a wild animal–us. It doesn’t just attack villagers; it hunts them, picking it is targets like a hitman with a contract, at one point even dragging a mattress out of a shack so it may lie comfortably in wait until the woodsman returns home. A few days later, the woodsman’s horrified friends discover remains “so little and so few they could have fit in a shirt pocket.”
Vaillant is as masterful with science as he is with suspense. We feel what it’s like to be in a tiny settlement cut off from the rest of the world, at the mercy of a beast so swift that it can’t be seen until it is mouth bites down on your face. Tigers, Vaillant explains, are nature’s last word in mammalian weapons design. Big as three NFL linebackers bundled into one, armed with claws longer than fingers and jaws ranked on a strength-scale employed for dinosaurs, tigers are built like missiles and may out-swim, out-climb, out-fox and out-run just in regards to anything that breathes. That’s the bad news; the worse news is, they’re likewise armed with memory and invisibility. “I have seen all the other animals,” one poacher says, “but I have never seen a tiger–not once.”
What enthralled me as much as the deadly cat-and-man game at the center of The Tiger are the side-stories that inform it. Vaillant introduces us to characters like Jakob von Uexkull, a Victorian-era baron-turned-physiologist who specialized in umwelt: the lost art of immersing yourself in another creature’s psyche. You crouch to the height of the animal you’re seeking, learning to see the world through it is eyes, inhale scents through it is nostrils, feel cool world and crushed leaves underneath it is padded paws. There are hunters in Siberia, Vaillant tells us, who may sniff the woods and distinguish animals by smell. These maestros believe killing a tiger without cause is as vile as murder, and such a violation of natural order that calamity is destined to follow. They feel such kinship with the huge cats that they’ll even percentage their meals by leaving hunks of meat in the woods, convinced the tigers will re-pay them in kind with a deer haunch when times are lean. They see themselves as blood brothers of the Amurs–but as Vaillant shows us, no one fights more fiercely than relatives.
(Photo © Luis Escobar)
From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. The grisly rampage of a man-eating Amur, or Siberian, tiger and the venture to trap it frame this suspenseful and majestically narrated introduction to a world that few people, even Russians, are intimate with. Northeast of China lies RussiaÖs Primorye province, “the meeting place of four distinct bioregions”–taiga, Mongolian steppes, boreal forests, and Korean tropics–and where the last Amur tigers live in an uneasy truce with an evenly diminished humane population scarred by decades of brutal Soviet politics and postperestroika poverty. Over millennia of shared history, the indigenous inhabitants had worked out a tenuous peace with the Amur, a formidable hunter that may grow to over 500 pounds and up to nine feet long, but the arrival of European settlers, followed by decades of Soviet disregard for the wilds, disrupted that remainder and led to the overhunting of tigers for trophies and for their alleged medicinal qualities. Vaillant (The Golden Spruce) has written a mighty elegy that leads readers into the lair of the tiger and into the heart of the Kremlin to explain how the Amur went from being worshipped to being poached. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks MagazineThe Amur tiger, weighing 500 pounds with four-inch claws and now numbering only around 400 in the Russian Far East, is surely a formidable creature, and Vaillant gives the animal the respect it deserves in this strange true-crime tale. Critics accorded that The Tiger is nature writing and reporting at it is best, mesmerizing and perceptive into both the threatened natural and humane worlds. “Think of Vaillant as a younger version of John McPhee,” wrote the Seattle Times, “but on steroids.” The only complaint came from the Oregonian, which accused Vaillant of unnecessary padding. But all reviewers cherished Vaillant’s moral and highly commended the book: “When you murder a tiger, you not only kill a strong and beauteous beast, you extinguish a ardent soul” (Washington Post).
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Most helpful client reviews
164 of 168 people found the following review helpful.
 Gripping and informative
By Alan Mazer
Someone asked me not long back what sort of non-fiction I like to read, and I had to think when it comes to it. I have a few niche areas that I enjoy, but in general all I ask of a book is that it keep me engaged and give me something to think about. This approach means that I read a lot of books in areas where I have no expertness and little real interest, plainly because someone did a great occupation of presenting the material and I got hooked. “The Tiger” is one of these books.
75 of 77 persons found the following review helpful.
A Lyrical, Insightful, and rather Exhaustive Analysis
By Bryan Newman
This is far more than just an animal-eats-man adventure story like Alaska Bear Tales. It does have a rather little story of a man eating tiger terrorizing a community, but it balloons out, covering all the eddies of history, natural history, economics, and culture that moved the characters to this moment where their worlds collide.
21 of 21 persons found the following review helpful.
This Tiger in truth burns bright
By Gary Greenberg
The noteworthy thing when it comes to John Vaillant’s The Tiger is not that it’s a total page-turner, or that he manages to stuff the Tiger with so much arousing and attention holding natural and political history that you come away with three or four points added to your IQ, or that his lush descriptions are sensuous without being cloying and muscular without being macho, or that his characters are indelible and engaging and worthy of The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare, or even that the tiger and it is hunters will relentlessly stalk your knowingness when you aren’t reading the book (quite a trick in attention-challenged times). It’s that you will, without even knowing it, and even if you don’t want to, find yourself abruptly occupying the tiger’s world, and seeing it through his eyes, sentiment it is wounds and it is anguish and it is hatred, and, above all, rooting for it versus your fellow humans. Let this book hunt you down and pounce on you. You won’t regret it.
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