Tida Woods: The original Tiger mom
Woods' ever-supportive mom dies a week after TGL visit; Stray Shots: Pebble power
Tiger Woods kisses him mom during his World Golf Hall of Fame induction ceremony (Sam Greenwood/Getty Images)
Tiger Woods announced the shocking news on Tuesday via social media that his mother, Kultida Woods, died on Tuesday, only a week after she attended his TGL match in South Florida where she lived.
Doug Ferguson of the Associated Press wrote this report:
Kultida Woods, the Thai-born mother of Tiger Woods who instilled his dominant spirit and encouraged him to wear a red shirt on Sunday as his power color, died Tuesday.
Woods announced the death of his 78-year-old mother in a social media post. He did not disclose a cause or other details. She was at his indoor TMRW Golf League match last week in South Florida, where she lived.
He described her as a “force of nature” who was his biggest supporter from the time she drove him to junior golf tournaments in California to being there for his 15 major championships, often wearing her wide-brimmed visor and sunglasses.
Woods’ father, Earl, died in 2006.
Tida, as she was called by many, was working as a civilian secretary in the U.S. Army office in Bangkok when she met Earl Woods, who was stationed there. She spoke minimal English when she married him and left Thailand for the first time in 1968, first going to Brooklyn and then to Cypress, California, where Woods was born in 1975.
Tiger’s father taught him golf. His mother brought the discipline.
“Everyone thought it was my dad when I went on the road, which it was,” Woods said last year when he received the Bob Jones Award from the USGA. "But Mom was at home. If you don’t know, Mom has been there my entire life. She’s always been there through thick and thin.
“She has allowed me to get here. She allowed me to do these things, chase my dreams, and the support and love — I didn’t do this alone. I had the greatest rock that any child could possibly have: my mom.”
From junior golf to Masters glory, Tida Woods was present for her son (John Biever /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
Passing along the Thai heritage of Woods was important to his mother. She took him to Thailand for the first time when Woods was 9, and he returned there to play three tournaments early in his career, winning each time.
What they shared was a fighting spirit.
“I am a loner, and so is Tiger,” she said in a 2009 interview in Thailand with Jaime Diaz at Golf Digest, a rare occasion when she spoke publicly.
“When I was a girl my mother would always be worried, ‘What will people say?’ And even then I would think, I don’t give a damn,'“ Tida said. “I always tell Tiger: ‘You can’t do things just to please other people. It will waste your energy, and you won’t be happy in yourself. You have to do what is right for yourself.’ And on that, he does a good job.”
Inside the ropes, his mother wanted to see domination, and she got every bit of that. “And then, sportsmanship,” she once said.
She was the one responsible for him wearing a Sunday red shirt — Woods now has an apparel line named Sun Day red for that — because in Thai it was his power color.
“Mom thought being a Capricorn that my power color was red, so I wore red as a junior golfer and I won some tournaments,” Woods said at the launch last year of the Sun Day Red brand. “I go to a university that is red — Stanford is red. We wore red on the final day of every single tournament, and then every single tournament I’ve played as a professional I’ve worn red. It’s just become synonymous with me.”
She also had a tradition of giving Woods a new Tiger head cover for his driver each year.
Stitched among the orange-and-black was written in Thai, “Love from Mom.”
Tida moved out of the house where Woods grew up into something more modern in Orange County, and she followed him to South Florida after her husband died. She didn’t get out to as many tournaments but rarely missed the Masters. She was there with her grandchildren when Woods captured his fifth green jacket and 15th major in 2019 at Augusta National.
She was there for a long time, and Woods never failed to cite her influence on his career. That started long ago, driving him to tournaments or dropping him off at the golf course with a dollar — 75 cents to buy a hot dog, 25 cents for the phone call to pick him up.
Woods said in a 2017 interview with USA Today that it was his mother’s discipline he feared.
“My mom’s still here and I’m still deathly afraid of her,” he said. "She’s a very tough, tough old lady, very demanding. ... I love her so much, but she was tough.”
Stray Shots: Let the golf shine
By Peter Kaufman
1. Huzzah for Golf: Anyone mind if we just talk a little about golf? About what a timeless setting Pebble Beach remains? About how Rory McIlroy, when he is clicking, is as formidable as it gets? About how this was a Sunday that recalled a whole lot of wonderful Sundays before somehow golf went a trifle off the rails?
To the facts: McIlroy shot 6-under 66 on Sunday (31 on the back), enabling him to be two and three shots clear, respectively of Ryder Cup teammates Shane Lowry and Justin Rose, who each shot 68s on Sunday.
A couple of 5-under Sunday finished for each of Lucas Glover and Russell Henley provided some fireworks, just too little too late to threaten the leadership.
Both Tom Kim and 54-hole leader Sepp Straka wilted from contention, each finishing T7. Straka managed only even par and Kim just 2-under on a day when all around them the course was yielding scores. But let us take note of Straka, who followed his win two weeks earlier at the American with a strong showing at Pebble while fighting a flu as well as the field. That’s two pretty darn good tournaments for him. The Georgia-raised Austrian bears watching.
2. Scheff’s Special: Then there’s Scottie Scheffler, healed from his holiday misadventure with a broken wine glass, finishing T9 with Taylor Pendrith and Billy Horschel. Scheffler’s 5-under 67 on Sunday certainly leads one to believe that last year’s utterly dominant player could well come roaring back, and soon.
All in, the weather fluctuations were terrific, and (aside from Tom Kim) slow play was not really a big headliner and the play itself was fun to watch and superlative. A thoroughly enjoyable tournament.\
3. Notorious Mr. Kim: Tom Kim has became the latest poster boy for slow play, what with his taking more than a minute to prepare to strike his second on the sixth hole on Sunday only to watch his shot promptly fly OB over a cliff.
This enabled one wag on TV to note: “That shot was not worth the wait.”
4. The Eye Test: CBS fetched 3.3 million viewers, according to Sports Business Journal’s Josh Carpenter, who keeps a close eye on such matters. That’s very good news. Wth no competition from the NFL, a gorgeous setting and McIlroy on fire, it made for what looks to be a strong TV turnout.
Yet while 3.3 million would rank as the most-watched non-major/Players broadcast for all of 2024, it trailed the 2021 Pebble Beach finish that drew 4.19 million to watch Daniel Berger beat Jordan Spieth down the stretch. That’s a pretty sizeable drop-off in Sunday’s viewership.
Conclusions? One is that old-fashioned great golf in a revered setting has not yet gone out of style, thankfully. Another would be (hardly a surprise) that avoiding competing with the NFL is a good idea.
But still another is that even with all the stars aligned, and the PGA Tour putting out pretty much as good a product as it can on a Sunday, somehow it’s viewership is down 22 percent for the same tournament four years ago before the schism.
That’s interesting. Potentially sobering.
Meanwhile, Augusta and the masters cannot come soon enough.