Friday, 14 May 2010
This is taken on Tiger Woods’ home golf course, near San Diego, when he was only 19 and still an amateur. It was commissioned in the really early days of Loaded and very few people, outside of golf, had ever heard of him. The journalist I was there with, Tim Southwell, played half a round with him. I think Tiger won.
I don’t play golf so Tiger drove me and my big bag of cameras around on a golf buggy. It was the first and only time I’ve ever been around a golf course. Afterwards we went to the driving range and he showed us this most amazing drive (I assume a trick shot), where he could get the ball to go outside the boundary fence and then sort of curl back over the top of it and land, perfectly placed on the fairway two hundred yards away. He did it exactly the same way several times. I tried it, and my ball went skidding across the grass and stopped about 15 feet away. These days, when I tell people Tiger Woods once tried to teach me how to drive a golf ball, people look at me as though I’m mad.
Back then he was very nice, relaxed, talkative and extremely charming.