The Second Life of Tiger Woods by Michael Bamberger

Author:Michael Bamberger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

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There are often changes, subtle and not, on the Augusta National course, though the club’s preferred word is improvements. Greens get rebuilt, bunkers are made deeper, trees are planted, new back tees are constructed. Rough is grown, though at Augusta National it’s called the second cut. When Tiger started preparing for the 2019 Masters, the main thing he wanted to see was the new back tee on the par-4 fifth.

Everybody did. The hole had been stretched out by forty yards and now measured 495 yards. Tiger had made an earlier reconnaissance trip, playing a full eighteen holes, holing out and keeping score. That’s a common practice for the game’s top players, to come to Augusta long before the Masters to check things out, but it’s not entirely useful. In February and March, the course usually pays slower and softer than it will for the tournament, and the players will hit the ball much farther when the bell goes off, owing to game-day adrenaline. Still, Tiger’s practice-round 65 that day must have been a good thing. If that’s not going to get you in the mood, what will?

Tiger played that day with Rob McNamara, one round among the hundreds they have played together, going back to their junior-golf years in Southern California in the late 1980s and early ’90s. If you click on McNamara’s photo on the TGR website, a Walt Disney quote pops up: “All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” (When you click on the photo of Tiger, the company CEO, you see one from his father: “You get out of it what you put into it.”) McNamara played college golf at Santa Clara, a Jesuit university in Northern California. He went to work at IMG, the talent agency that originally represented Woods, when he and Tiger were both in their mid-twenties. He has worked with Tiger, and for him, ever since.

When Woods returned to the PGA Tour in 2018, McNamara became a much more visible part of Tiger’s public life. In 2018 and 2019 the five people you saw most frequently around Woods were Joe LaCava, Tiger’s caddie; Mark Steinberg, Tiger’s longtime agent; Glenn Greenspan, Tiger’s spokesman until he was let go late in 2019; Erica Herman, Tiger’s girlfriend; and Rob McNamara, Tiger’s “brother by choice,” as Erica once described him. But brother or not, friend or not, Rob had a job to do, and his job was to serve Tiger. (Tiger pays him, not vice versa.) Really, aside from Tiger’s children, it would be hard to name anybody in his circle of trust who does anything other than serve the man. That’s not unusual. In the star-maintenance business, it’s the norm. Compared to many other star athletes, and many other stars period, Tiger travels light. One reason Rob became more visible at the start of 2018 was because Tiger, for the first time, didn’t have a swing guru in his life, and he actually trusted Rob to look at his ball position at address.

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