The L.A. Open : IT’S A NEW DAY FOR GOLF’S : Child Prodigy : At 17, Tiger Woods Has Been Through a Lot. He Knows He Still Has a Long Way to Go

Something unsettling is happening to America’s favorite junior golfer.

Tiger Woods is growing up, and there are questions that need answering.

Those hundreds of fans who follow him at the L.A. Open this week; are they some of the same people who once tied him to a tree in kindergarten because he was the only brown-skinned child in the class?

Are they some of the same ones who once pelted his Cypress home with limes because he and his family were the only nonwhites in the neighborhood?

And are any of them like that guy who shot a BB gun through the kitchen window, nearly hitting Tiger’s mother?

She was pregnant with Tiger at the time. So believe him if he says he has been confronted with hate since before he was born.

“Sometimes I think, ‘Isn’t society screwed up?’ ” says Woods, 17.

And what about those young golfers who will crowd around him at the Riviera Country Club clubhouse? Are they some of the same ones who ostracized him and his mother when they began appearing at local junior tournaments 10 years ago?

“I’ll never forget the way those people looked at us,” said Tida Woods, a native of Thailand. “I kept telling Tiger, ‘You aren’t the one who has the problem, these people have the problem. These people are sick.’ ”

Then all those reporters this week who will compare him with a young Jack

Nicklaus, what about them?

Are they like the reporter in Texarkana, Ark., who welcomed Woods to his first national junior tournament by accusing him of entering only because he wanted to integrate the local country club?

Woods was 13 at the time.

“When I told the guy that Tiger didn’t give a damn about all that, the guy didn’t believe me,” said Earl Woods, Tiger’s father. “The guy said, ‘C’mon, you know that’s not the truth.’ ”

As Tiger Woods approaches adulthood, he wonders more and more about the truth.

There was a time when he was content to be the golfing Establishment’s mascot. A cute little charm hanging from the sport’s wrist. A boy who won trophies as tall as he was while beating players twice his age.

He won his first “tournament” when he was 2. He appeared on the television show “That’s Incredible” at 5. He won a Junior World title at 8.

“A Gary Coleman in golf spikes,” said Chuck Brewer, an early teacher.

But those days are over. The only golfer in history to win consecutive U.S. Junior Amateur titles now has his first car, his first girlfriend and some very adult perplexities.

Start with his first name. All three of them. He has an athletic name, Tiger; an African-American name, Eldrick, and a Thai name, Thon.

He spends his days listening to people call him the the greatest black golfing hope in years. Yet he returns home to a living room filled with Thai figurines and lives under the close scrutiny of a mother who raised him according to Thai customs and in the Buddhist religion.

“Here, I’m black,” Woods said. “But over in Thailand, I’m like a national hero. . . . It’s crazy, man.”

Earl Woods, the former Army lieutenant colonel who fought with the Green Berets in Vietnam, tries to help his son understand.

“The boy has about two drops of black blood in him,” he said. “But like I told him, in this country there are only two colors. White and nonwhite. And he ain’t white.”

Then there is the confusion of his mission. Tiger openly wants to help other young black golfers succeed, and he has even conducted two inner-city clinics during the last year.

But he knows, as do those he has met at those clinics, that he is not like those youngsters.

“Tiger was great to everybody here but, let’s face it, a lot of inner-city kids have no idea who he is,” said Bill Wright, the pro at the Hollywood Park Golf and Sports Center, where Woods recently held forth.

“To make it out of the inner city and into the golf world, you need money and constant encouragement,” added Wright, who is black. “Tiger has both. But these kids have neither.”

As Woods increases his PGA tournament workload--he hopes to play in as many as five events this season--the mixed signals will also increase.

He knows he will face obvious obstacles because of his race. A black golfer has not won a PGA Tour event since 1986.

But those obstacles will be subtle, and he will never be rewarded with knowing that he has been a pioneer.

“There is no way in hell he will have to deal with the hassles that I had,” said Charlie Sifford, who in 1960 became the first black to play in a PGA Tour event. “Man, the way has already been paved.”

Sifford paused and added, “But the thing is, he will still have opposition. And he will be out there all by himself.”

When Tiger Woods was a toddler, his father would hold up his hands, and Tiger would step into them. Gently, his father would lift Tiger into the air, challenging him to keep his balance.

At first, Tiger would fall into a giggling heap on the ground. But soon he learned to stay upright, shifting his weight, contorting his body so that whatever happened, he would always keep his feet.

It was an exercise that will serve him well today.

There is little doubt that somebody is planning on hassling Tiger Woods at the Riviera Country Club this weekend.

After all, last year when he became the youngest player in L.A. Open history, he received a death threat before he stuck his first tee into the ground.

Shouting during his backswing, coins jingling when he putts, coughing fits throughout 18 holes. Tiger Woods has heard it all. Four years ago, Earl Woods made sure of it.

For one month that neither father nor son will ever forget, Earl ran Tiger through 18-hole boot camps. At the Navy Golf Course in Long Beach, using mind games he learned with the Green Berets, Earl prepared his prodigy to face his tormentors.

“Basically, he made me feel like . . . ,” Tiger said.

“I pulled every dirty trick under the sun,” Earl said.

As Tiger reached the top of his swing, his father would shout to a buddy. Just before Tiger would strike the ball, his father would drop his golf bag.

After a shot, his father would rip him.

“He constantly put me down,” Tiger said. “Then when I really got mad, he would say, ‘I know you want to slam down that club, but don’t you dare do it. Don’t you dare!’ ”

Just when Tiger felt like wrapping his five-iron around his father’s neck, Earl would shut up. Five minutes later, the needling would resume.

“He would push me to the breaking point, then back off, push me, then back off,” Tiger said. “It was wild. But you got to think it helped.”

Earl, of course, is convinced that it did.

“You could just see the boy toughen up,” he said. “By the end of the month, he was pulling that stuff on me.”

Is it any wonder, then, that Earl did not tell his son about last year’s death threat at the L.A. Open until after Woods had completed his two rounds and missed the cut?

“I guess Dad didn’t want me to lose my focus,” Tiger said.

That focus has seemingly been in place since Tiger was 6 months old, strapped to a high chair in his garage, watching his father chip balls off an AstroTurf carpet into a net.

Earl claims that when he finished practice, he would lift Tiger out of his chair, hand him a plastic putter, and hold him up while he hit balls into the net.

As if to prove the point, the high chair has not been moved in 16 years.

“Look under those boxes. . . . See, there it is. He sat right there,” Earl said to a recent visitor.

From that obscure starting point, it becomes difficult to separate the myth from the reality.

Earl, for example, claims that he taught Tiger about course management when Tiger was 2.

“He hit his first shot behind a tree, and we talked about how he would play his next shot,” Earl said.

What seems more real, however, is the story his mother tells about the time Tiger pulled down his training pants and went potty in a sand trap.

Earl also claims that Tiger won his first tournament when he was 2. But it wasn’t a tournament, it was a golf skills contest involving considerable handicaps.

Not that the kid still didn’t cause a few jaws to drop.

“What impressed me most about Tiger wasn’t just that he won, but what he did after he won,” said Chuck Brewer, who ran the contest. “For his prize, he could have picked a toy or a piece of golf equipment or a trophy. He ignored the toys and took the trophy, the biggest one we had, as big as he was.”

By the time Tiger began first grade, true life had become as good as the fiction. When Woods was 6, CBS cameras filmed him losing to Sam Snead by two strokes in a two-hole exhibition.

“By then, he had already transcended the golf swing,” his father said.

He has since let that swing and uncanny course sense carry him to national prominence while doing his best to remain a kid.

During his tour events this season, he will be the only player who does his homework--he carries an A average--at night before calling his mom.

“I have to know where he is, what he is doing,” Tida Woods said. “In our house, he is no hero, he is our son.”

This means that she has been outspoken in her concern over Tiger’s new girlfriend, who does not share Tiger’s passion for golf.

“I don’t worry about that now, they are so young,” she said. “But I know later, he must find a girl that loves golf. If she doesn’t know anything about golf, she will go on the course with him and say, ‘Where’s the ball? What’s the ball?’ And then she will leave.”

“My mom,” Tiger said with a sigh. “She is much tougher on me than my dad.”

Woods will also be the only player who has a golf match scheduled two days after the L.A. Open. A junior, he will play on the Anaheim Western High team against Lakewood High.

“He’s, well, almost always the medalist,” said Don Crosby, his coach.

He will be competing this summer against such men as Fred Couples and Tom Kite, but it is unlikely that either will spend his free time playing golf-cart polo.

That is just one of the many ways Woods and close friend Bryon Bell have fun.

“We’ll go on a deserted course and take turns trying to hit a tree,” Bell said. “Or he’ll see how many times he can bounce a ball off his club face. Or he’ll practice hitting a ball backward. Your basic stuff.”

Woods thinks that having just turned 16 hurt him in last year’s L.A. Open, when he shot a two-day total of 147 and missed the cut, though he scored lower than 15 pros.

“The first few days of that week, I was hitting the ball so good, it was scary,” he said. “But then all of a sudden, I outgrew my club shaft. It got real whippy on me. I couldn’t control the ball as well.

“I was having a growth spurt . . . something which I doubt happened to anybody else.”

The next week, Woods began using extra-stiff shafts, which he will use this week.

“To be honest, my chances this year have doubled,” he said.

Not that he is ready to make the jump to touring pro. Showing a wisdom beyond his years, Woods acknowledges that he is not even close.

“People say I could go on tour right now . . . wrong,” he said, noting his 6-foot-1, 138-pound frame. “My muscle is not adult muscle. I am not finished growing yet.

“Other players don’t have to worry about getting up one day and suddenly hitting the ball 10 yards farther than you hit it the previous day. That’s my problem.”

The rest of the junior golfers in the world should have such problems.

Tiger Woods, his Georgetown cap pulled over his eyes, his T-shirt falling over his shorts, rises from a living room couch and grabs his keys.

He makes a right turn at the coffee table cluttered with golf trophies and slips out the front door into the cool darkness.

He is almost an adult now, working on his own schedule, learning to be the way Charlie Sifford says he will have to be. Out there all by himself.

For a moment the house is quiet. Then from a back room appears his mother.

“Tiger! Tiger!” she shouts, running down a hall.

She reaches the front door and flings it open. As the sound of an engine fades in the distance, she cries into the night.

“Tiger? Where are you going?”