Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods Bio

Eldrick Tont “Tiger” Woods (born December 30, 1975) is an American professional golfer. He is tied for first in PGA Tour wins, ranks second in men’s major championships, and holds numerous golf records. Woods is widely regarded as one of the greatest golfers of all time and is one of the most famous athletes in modern history. He is an inductee of the World Golf Hall of Fame. Following an outstanding junior, college, and amateur golf career, Woods turned professional in 1996 at the age of 20. By the end of April 1997, he had won three PGA Tour events in addition to his first major, the 1997 Masters, which he won by 12 strokes in a record-breaking performance. He reached number one in the Official World Golf Ranking for the first time in June 1997, less than a year after turning pro. Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, Woods was the dominant force in golf. He was the top-ranked golfer in the world from August 1999 to September 2004 and again from June 2005 to October 2010. During this time, he won 13 of golf’s major championships and was named AP Athlete of the Decade. The next decade of Woods’s career was marked by comebacks from personal problems and injuries. He took a self-imposed hiatus from professional golf from December 2009 to early April 2010 in an attempt to resolve marital issues with his wife at the time, Elin. Woods admitted to multiple marital infidelities, and the couple eventually divorced. He fell to number 58 in the world rankings in November 2011 before ascending again to the number-one ranking between March 2013 and May 2014. However, injuries led him to undergo four back surgeries between 2014 and 2017. Woods competed in only one tournament between August 2015 and January 2018, and he dropped off the list of the world’s top 1,000 golfers. On his return to regular competition, Woods made steady progress to the top of the game, winning his first tournament in five years at the Tour Championship in September 2018 and his first major in 11 years at the 2019 Masters. Woods has held numerous golf records. He has been the number one player in the world for the most consecutive weeks and for the greatest total number of weeks of any golfer in history. He has been awarded PGA Player of the Year a record 11 times and has won the Byron Nelson Award for lowest adjusted scoring average a record eight times. Woods has the record of leading the money list in ten different seasons. He has won 15 professional major golf championships and 82 PGA Tour events, tied for first all time with Sam Snead. Woods leads all active golfers in career major wins and career PGA Tour wins. He is the fifth of six players to achieve the career Grand Slam, and the youngest to do so. He is also the second golfer to achieve a career Grand Slam three times. Woods has won 18 World Golf Championships and was part of the American winning team for the 1999 Ryder Cup. In May 2019, Woods was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Trump, the fourth golfer to receive the honor. On February 23, 2021, Woods was hospitalized in serious but stable condition after a single-car collision and underwent emergency surgery to repair compound fractures sustained in his right leg in addition to a shattered ankle. In an interview with Golf Digest in November 2021, Woods indicated that his full-time career as a professional golfer was over, although he would continue to play a few events per year. For the first time since the car crash, he returned to the PGA Tour at the 2022 Masters. As of June 2025, his net worth is estimated at US$ 1.3 billion, according to Forbes.

Early Life and Background

Woods was born on December 30, 1975, in Cypress, California, to Earl and Kultida Woods. He is their only child, though he has two half-brothers and a half-sister from his father’s first marriage. Earl was a retired U.S. Army officer and Vietnam War veteran. Kultida is originally from Thailand, where Earl met her when he was on a tour of duty there in 1968. She is of mixed Thai, Chinese, and Dutch ancestry. In 2002, ESPN claimed: “For the record, he is one-quarter Thai, one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter Caucasian, one-eighth African American and one-eighth Native American.” Tiger has described his ethnic make-up as “Cablinasian” (a syllabic abbreviation he coined from Caucasian, Black, American Indian, and Asian). Woods’s first name, Eldrick, was chosen by his mother because it began with “E” (for Earl) and ended with “K” (for Kultida). His middle name Tont is a traditional Thai name. He was nicknamed Tiger in honor of his father’s friend, South Vietnamese Colonel Vuong Dang Phong, who had also been known as Tiger. Woods has a niece, Cheyenne Woods, who played for the Wake Forest University golf team and turned professional in 2012 when she made her pro debut in the LPGA Championship. Earl Woods died on May 3, 2006. Kultida Woods died on February 4, 2025. Woods paid tribute to his mother after her death, saying “without her none of my personal achievements would have been possible.”

Path to Golf

Woods grew up in Orange County, California. He was a child prodigy who was introduced to golf before the age of two by his athletic father Earl Woods. Earl was a single-digit handicap amateur golfer who also was one of the earliest African-American college baseball players at Kansas State University. Woods told reporters he had wanted to be a baseball player like his father but abandoned that goal after tearing his rotator cuff. His father was a member of the military and had playing privileges at the Navy golf course beside the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos, which allowed Tiger to play there. Tiger also played at the par 3 Heartwell golf course in Long Beach, as well as some of the municipals in Long Beach. In 1978, Woods putted against comedian Bob Hope in a television appearance on The Mike Douglas Show. At age three, he shot a 48 over nine holes at the Navy course. At age five, he appeared in Golf Digest and on ABC’s That’s Incredible! Before turning seven, Woods won the Under Age 10 section of the Drive, Pitch, and Putt competition, held at the Navy Golf Course in Cypress. In 1984 at the age of eight, he won the 9–10 boys’ event, the youngest age group available, at the Junior World Golf Championships. He first broke 80 at age eight. He went on to win the Junior World Championships six times, including four consecutive wins from 1988 to 1991. Woods’s father Earl wrote that Tiger first defeated him at the age of 11 years, with Earl trying his best. He lost to Woods every time from then on. Woods first broke 70 on a regulation golf course at age 12. When Woods was 13 years old, he played in the 1989 Big I, which was his first major national junior tournament. In the final round, he was paired with pro John Daly, who was then relatively unknown. The event’s format placed a professional with each group of juniors who had qualified. Daly birdied three of the last four holes to beat him by only one stroke. As a young teenager, Woods first met Jack Nicklaus in Los Angeles at the Bel-Air Country Club, when Nicklaus was performing a clinic for the club’s members. Woods was part of the show, and he impressed Nicklaus and the crowd with his skills and potential. Earl Woods had researched in detail the records and accomplishments of Nicklaus and had set his young son the goals of breaking those records. Woods was 15 years old and a student at Western High School in Anaheim when he became the youngest U.S. Junior Amateur champion; this was a record that stood until it was broken by Jim Liu in 2010. He was named 1991’s Southern California Amateur Player of the Year and Golf Digest Junior Amateur Player of the Year. In 1992, he defended his title at the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship, becoming the tournament’s first two-time winner. He also competed in his first PGA Tour event, the Nissan Los Angeles Open, and was named Golf Digest Amateur Player of the Year, Golf World Player of the Year, and Golfweek National Amateur of the Year. The following year, Woods won his third consecutive U.S. Junior Amateur; he remains the event’s only three-time winner. In 1994, at the TPC at Sawgrass in Florida, he became the youngest winner of the U.S. Amateur, a record he held until 2008 when it was broken by Danny Lee. He was a member of the American team at the 1994 Eisenhower Trophy World Amateur Golf Team Championships and the 1995 Walker Cup.

Tiger Woods Career

Early Career (1996-1999)

Woods turned professional at age 20 in August 1996 and immediately signed advertising deals with Nike, Inc. and Titleist that ranked as the most lucrative endorsement contracts in golf history at that time. Woods was named Sports Illustrated’s 1996 Sportsman of the Year and PGA Tour Rookie of the Year. On April 13, 1997, he won his first major, the Masters, in record-breaking fashion and became the tournament’s youngest winner at age 21. Two months later, he set the record for the fastest ascent to No. 1 in the Official World Golf Ranking. After a lackluster 1998, Woods finished the 1999 season with eight wins, including the PGA Championship, a feat not achieved since Johnny Miller did it in 1974. Woods was severely myopic; his eyesight had a rating of 11 diopters. In order to correct this problem, he underwent successful laser eye surgery in 1999, and he immediately resumed winning tour events. In 2000, Woods won six consecutive events on the PGA Tour, which was the longest winning streak since Ben Hogan did it in 1948. One of these was the U.S. Open, where he broke or tied nine tournament records in what Sports Illustrated called “the greatest performance in golf history”, in which Woods won the tournament by a record 15-stroke margin and earned a check for $800,000. At age 24, he became the youngest golfer to achieve the Career Grand Slam. At the end of 2000, Woods had won nine of the twenty PGA Tour events he entered and had broken the record for lowest scoring average in tour history. He was named the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year, the only athlete to be honored twice, and was ranked by Golf Digest magazine as the twelfth-best golfer of all time. When Woods won the 2001 Masters, he became the only player to win four consecutive major professional golf titles, although not in the same calendar year. This achievement came to be known as the “Tiger Slam”. Following a stellar 2001 and 2002 in which he continued to dominate the tour, Woods’s career hit a slump. He did not win a major in 2003 or 2004. In September 2004, Vijay Singh overtook Woods in the Official World Golf Rankings, ending Woods’s record streak of 264 weeks at No. 1.

Breakthrough (2005-2010)

Woods rebounded in 2005, winning six PGA Tour events and reclaiming the top spot in July after swapping it back and forth with Singh over the first half of the year. Woods began dominantly in 2006, winning his first two PGA tournaments but failing to capture his fifth Masters championship in April. Following the death of his father in May, Woods took some time off from the tour and appeared rusty upon his return at the U.S. Open at Winged Foot Golf Club, where he missed the cut. However, he quickly returned to form and ended the year by winning six consecutive tour events. At the season’s close, Woods had 54 total wins that included 12 majors; he broke the tour records for both total wins and total majors wins over eleven seasons. Woods continued to excel in 2007 and the first part of 2008. In April 2008, he underwent knee surgery and missed the next two months on the tour. Woods returned for the 2008 U.S. Open, where he struggled the first day but ultimately claimed a dramatic sudden death victory over Rocco Mediate that followed an 18-hole playoff. Two days later, Woods announced that he would miss the remainder of the season due to additional knee surgery, prompting even greater praise for his U.S. Open performance. Woods called it “my greatest ever championship”. Woods had a much anticipated return to golf in 2009, when he performed well. His comeback included a spectacular performance at the 2009 Presidents Cup, but he failed to win a major, the first year since 2004 that he did not do so. After his marital infidelities came to light and received massive media coverage at the end of 2009, Woods announced in December that he would be taking an indefinite break from competitive golf. In February 2010, he delivered a televised apology for his behavior, saying “I was wrong and I was foolish.” During this period, several companies ended their endorsement deals with Woods.

Notable Works and Milestones

Woods has won 82 official PGA Tour events, including 15 majors. He is 14–1 when going into the final round of a major with at least a share of the lead. Multiple golf experts have heralded Woods as “the greatest closer in history”. He has the lowest career scoring average and the largest career earnings of any player in PGA Tour history. Woods’s victory at the 2013 Players Championship also marked a win in his 300th PGA Tour start. He also won golf tournaments in his 100th and 200th tour starts.

Tiger Woods Award Nominations

Tiger Woods has received numerous nominations throughout his career, reflecting his impact on the sport of golf and his status as a global sports icon.

Tiger Woods Awards Won

Tiger Woods has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2019 and induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2021. His accolades reflect his remarkable achievements and contributions to the sport of golf.

Tiger Woods Family

Tiger Woods was previously married to Elin Nordegren, with whom he has two children: daughter Sam Alexis Woods, born in 2007, and son Charlie Axel Woods, born in 2009. Woods and Nordegren divorced in 2010 after six years of marriage. He has had several high-profile relationships since then.

Personal Life

Woods has faced various personal challenges throughout his life, including a highly publicized divorce and struggles with injuries. He has been open about his journey and has sought to maintain a balance between his professional and personal life. Woods has also been involved in various philanthropic efforts, including the establishment of the TGR Foundation, which promotes golf among inner-city children.