Charlie Woods does not have the freedom that every teenager deserves, to succeed or not in relative anonymity.
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Charlie Woods is a winner.
He won an American Junior Golf Association tournament on Wednesday that was sponsored by TaylorMade and held at Streamsong, central Florida’s answer to Bandon Dunes. Lots of familiar names there. Charlie Woods, son of Tiger and Elin, is only 16 but you’ve been aware of him, if you have been following this game closely for a while, for 16 years. His birth was news.
That is not an easy way to go through life, and when you choose the same path — scores-in-the-paper competitive golf — as your world-famous father, it’s more difficult yet. Which makes this win borderline remarkable. Winning an AJGA event is not remarkable. Dozens of different kids will win an AJGA event before the year is out. But when your name is Charlie Woods, when millions have seen you play golf now for several years courtesy of the PNC Championship, the old father-son winter event, everything changes. Charlie Woods does not have the freedom that every teenager deserves, to succeed or not in relative anonymity.
Any consideration of Charlie Woods, golfer, really needs to be through the prism of empathy.
Yes, he has had access to the best teachers, the best equipment, the best ranges and courses. He’s jetted around this world in private planes and been educated at an elite private school. I consider these disadvantages not easy to overcome.
This is something Ben Hogan told Ken Venturi in a 1983 interview:
“I feel sorry for rich kids now. I really do, because they’re never going to have the opportunity I had. Because I know tough things, and I had a tough day all my life, and I can handle tough things. They can’t. And every day that I progressed was a joy for me, and I recognized that.”
Tiger Woods would understand every word of that, and so would Sam Snead and Byron Nelson, Bernhard Langer and Vijay Singh, Charlie Sifford and Casey Martin. Gary Player had a son, Wayne Player, who was good, but not good enough to make it on the PGA Tour. Raymond Floyd, the same. Jack Nicklaus, the same.
If Charlie Woods becomes good enough to be a productive member of a Division I college golf team, it’s half a miracle. Because it takes so much work and devotion to be able to shoot 72 on a hard course, pencil in hand, people watching, day after day.
With rounds of 70, 65 and 66, Charlie Woods won by three. (Matt Kuchar’s son, Cameron, had a T10 finish, with rounds of 71, 70 and 69.) If he’s really, really lucky, Charlie Woods will have what millions of us have, a game he can enjoy playing for the rest of his life. But it’s ridiculous, to think our golf-brings-joy standard is going to be meaningful to Charlie Woods. Because we all know, through his physical expression alone, that golf is a type of battle for Tiger. And from the little we’ve seen of Charlie, it seems to be for him, too. Son has his father’s mannerisms down cold. It stands to reason he has his mindset, too.
Arnold Palmer loved playing golf. But when he played in National Opens, as he called the U.S. Open, it was for his father. He won it once, in 1960, thereby giving his father (Deacon) what he wanted. After that win, at Cherry Hills, Arnold, was completely the same. He said that. Tiger clearly loves the competitive elements of tournament golf. As an amateur, golf was a way for him to stay close to his father, to bring his father a measure of status and satisfaction that nothing else in the world could, and to keeps his parents’ marriage, known to be strained, together. That’s a lot for a kid to have to do by way of golf, or anything else. But millions of kids across the world, from every walk of life, find themselves doing something along those lines, whether they are aware of it or not.
“Just being able to say to myself that I have won an absolutely amazing event and say that I have performed under high pressure situations is huge going forward,” Charlie Woods said after winning, per an AJGA press release. “I haven’t been able to say that I have done that and now that I can it is a big thing for my mental game going forward.”
That’s a telling thing, right there: going forward, going forward, going forward. When you’re Charlie Woods, you don’t have the luxury of here-and-now, the way another kid might.
This was a serious event. Going into it, Charlie was ranked at 606th place in the AJGA’s ranking of junior boy golfers. Of the 72 players in the field, only one had a lower ranking. (The organization ranks the top 2,000 golfers. Is that really necessary?) The tournament had a number of players bound for Division I programs. Yes, of course, there’s a factory producing golfers as there are factories for tennis players, basketball players, football players, among other sports. Charlie Woods is right in there with hundreds of others. He’s not the only rich kid. But he’s the only son of Tiger Woods on the list.
In response to Charlie’s victory, his father did a smart thing. He did what any other winning parent would do. He said nothing and let his son have the moment.
Michael Bamberger writes for GOLF Magazine and GOLF.com. Before that, he spent nearly 23 years as senior writer for Sports Illustrated. After college, he worked as a newspaper reporter, first for the (Martha’s) Vineyard Gazette, later for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has written a variety of books about golf and other subjects, the most recent of which is The Second Life of Tiger Woods. His magazine work has been featured in multiple editions of The Best American Sports Writing. He holds a U.S. patent on The E-Club, a utility golf club. In 2016, he was given the Donald Ross Award by the American Society of Golf Course Architects, the organization’s highest honor.
