Tiger Woods contains multitudes: the flagrant anti-Black racism he experienced as a child at Southern California golf clubs; the immense pressure of being the “first” great Black golfer; his stunning wins and extreme ambition; his efforts to dissociate from Blackness while profiting from it; stage parents, fame, rampant infidelity, chronic pain, opioid addiction, a comeback unforeseen by nearly the entirety of sports media. In a little over a decade, this sports hero turned villain has lived many lives.
HBO’s new two-part documentary on Woods, Tiger—airing on two consecutive Sundays—manages to dutifully work in the major themes. Yet the most piercing part of Woods’s story, as told by the documentary, is the way Tiger cut ties with those most able to see through his guarded exterior, including his own father, Earl. While the series ends on the triumphant note of his 2019 Masters Tournament win, it fails to deeply examine the traces of emotional wreckage wrought, in no small part, by a childhood that wasn’t only “planned” by the ambitious and demanding Earl, but submerged in a world of whiteness.
Admittedly, it’s a huge task for filmmakers to do a rigorous excavation into the world of someone like Tiger Woods. Woods is extremely private, and has only ever given media-trained commentary about his personal life. Most of the people he once knew best are no longer part of his life, and though many of Woods’s former friends and acquaintances participated in this documentary—from a few of his father’s old buddies to his longtime former caddie—they themselves remained mystified by who he is today.
Ultimately, it wouldn’t be fair, or satisfying, to reduce a larger-than-life figure such as Woods to the way he’s perceived by a deeply imperfect world. Yet in Woods’s case, perception matters a great deal. Throughout his reign, Woods’s public persona was determined in large part not by his Blackness, but by the specter of whiteness. Tiger shows comedians Wanda Sykes and D.L. Hughley joking about the golfer’s affinity for blonde white women; Woods’s high school girlfriend gives an exclusive in-depth interview, as does his onetime mistress Rachel Uchitel. These white women both speak rapturously of the close emotional bonds they formed with Woods and his almost childlike reliance on them for support. Yet neither of them express curiosity about how isolated Woods may have felt, not only as an extremely talented athlete, but as a Black person engulfed in an alternately voyeuristic and hostile white society.
At the peak of his fame, and during a 1997 interview with Oprah, Woods famously described himself as “Cablinasian”—or essentially a mix of Caucasian, Black, American Indian, and Asian. Most notable is Woods’s need to place whiteness first, as is his misunderstanding of what Blackness—or the label “African American,” which at the time he said bothered him—describes. Most Black Americans who are descendants of enslaved people are mixed. The late Earl, who self-identified as a mix of African American, Chinese, and American Indian, was, by all indications, a Black man. His complex heritage was not unique; the only unusual aspect of it is that he could name the various components of his ethnicity so surely and precisely.
Woods’s mother, Kultida, is herself mixed—Thai, Chinese, and Dutch. By that token, Woods told Oprah that it bothered him when people referred to him as African American. Quickly, sports media began to refer to him as “a quarter Black.” This would make sense if Blackness were an ethnicity. But it’s not—it’s a racial category, which means it has no scientific grounding, but a rich social reality.
Tiger narrates the “Cablinasian” affair, but never examines it; it seems that such inquiries may have been out of the range of directors Matthew Heineman and Matthew Hamachek. Instead, they rely on sports broadcaster Bryant Gumbel, who is Black, to object to Woods’s naivete. Gumbel, who otherwise fervently defends Woods throughout the documentary, also has a shrewd sense of the workings of race and identity in professional sports—particularly sports like golf, which have long been bastions of white elitism.
Other sports journalists who appear in the film point out the double standard Woods faced after the world learned about the many simultaneous affairs he had while married to former Swedish model Elin Nordegren—the revelation that preceded his fall from grace. A few talking heads argue that a white golfer wouldn’t have received such scrutiny; in Woods’s case, the affairs became not just media fodder, but a reason to question his right to hold the place he occupied in golf. But Heineman and Hamachek don’t connect those moments to his upbringing and the question of why Woods duly submitted to the authority of his mostly white critics. (Woods gave a fairly self-flagellating public apology after the scandal, and never spoke out against Augusta National Golf Club and Masters Tournament chairman Billy Payne’s patronizing speech, which chastised Woods for his indiscretions before the 2010 tournament.)