The Chosen One

Chapter One: Oklahoma City

Tiger woods conducted a golf exhibition in Oklahoma City on a hot Sunday afternoon in May 2000. During the hour before he appeared, while a large crowd baked in the bleachers, a member of his entourage held a trivia contest, with T-shirts for prizes. One of the questions: In what year was Tiger Woods born? The first guess, by a very young fan, was 1925. That's off by half a century, but the error is understandable; Woods has accomplished so much as a golfer that it's easy to forget how young he is. In a sport in which good players seldom peak before their thirties, and often remain competitive at the highest levels well into their forties, Woods is off to a mind-boggling start. He is the youngest player (by two years) to have won all four of modern golf's so-called major tournaments -- the Masters, the United States Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship. He is the only player in history to have won all four in succession. And, as if all that weren't enough, he holds the all-time scoring record in three of them and shares it in the other. After Woods blew out the rest of the field in the 2000 British Open, ... read full excerpt from The Chosen One: Tiger Woods and the Dilemma of Greatness ebook