Appearing on CBS’s Today show alongside host Carson Daly to promote his Sun Day Red line of clothing now being available for the general public to purchase, Tiger Woods reminisced about playing junior golf in Southern California, his relationship with father Earl and his kids, Sam and Charlie and, and how his mother was the inspiration behind his now iconic Sunday colours.
“If you played golf, you were definitely not a cool kid,” he joked with the host. “I grew up playing on public courses, so anytime we had an SCGA tournament at a country club, it was like, ‘oh my god, I’m going to get to go to a country club and play golf. So my relationship with golf is mostly public golf. I couldn’t believe that they cut the greens almost every day at a country club. I was used to cutting on Monday only and then watching it grow from that the entire week. But it was good, the fact that we had so many junior golf tournaments throughout the summer, we could play competitive golf almost the entire summer.”
There have been many comparisons made between Woods and current world number one Scottie Scheffler, with the Texan putting up numbers and consistency not seen since Tiger himself was in his heyday, and Woods acknowledges that Scheffler is playing at a different level to his modern counterparts.
“For Scottie, I think his iconic foot movement belies what the club is actually doing through the golf ball, how good it is, how stable it is, how solid he hits it” Woods explained. “You just stand back and watch ball flight, there’s something different about his, it’s just so consistent. And he works it both ways, he goes both ways. It’s just a matter of – if he putts decent, he’s going to win, if he putts great, he blows away fields and if he he has a bad putting week, he contends, so he’s just that good a ball striker.”
From being something of a loner for the majority of his career, Tiger Woods 2.0 has seen the 15-time major champion become something of a mentor to some of the younger players and become much more approachable.
“It ranges. Some of the things cannot be said,” he laughed when asked about what sorts of questions the younger players ask,” other things are golf related. You know, how did I do it? How did I do it for so long and even why did I do it? Why did I make changes in my game? Some of them are just trying to get better, just like I was.”
Woods relationship with his father is well documented and with son Charlie an up-and-coming star, and their relationship in many ways, when it comes to golf at least, mirrors that which Tiger had with Earl.
“He listens to me when it comes to golf,” Woods revealed, “but anything else outside of that – because I don’t know about anything else – but even in golf there’s a bit of pushback which is totally cool because he’s 15 years old. It’s what happens, what teenagers go through, they’re trying to find their own place in the world.”
While Charlie has firmly been bitten by the golfing bug, despite carrying her father’s bag at the PNC Championship making it a real family affair as Tiger and Charlie competed togethers, daughter Sam is a different story.
“She has a negative connotation to the game because, growing up, golf took Daddy away from her. I had to pack, I had to leave, I had to be gone for weeks and there’s a negative connotation to it,” he explained. “We’ve developed our own relationship, our own rapport, and we do things that don’t involve golf, whereas with my son, we do everything golf related. It’s very different.”
Woods still hopes to play a tournament a month, with three majors in three months upcoming, and revealed that his post-Masters recovery has been tough.
And he also broke down exactly how the red shirt that’s become synonymous with Tiger on a Sunday came to be a thing.
“My mom thought, because I’m a Capricorn, red is my power colour, and at some of the junior tournaments and events in SoCal, I would wear red and I won,” Tiger said. “In spite, I wore blue at other tournaments and didn’t win so I switched back to red and had a lot of success. I made a deal with Mom, I would wear red in big events – there are a lot of tournaments in SoCal so you can’t wear it in every event, but I made a deal that I would wear red in the last day of big events and I did.”
Sun Day Red, Tiger’s now brand which he spearheads for TaylorMade, is naturally inspired by his favoured colours, and the logo also takes its cue from Tiger’s own career.
“The logo is a Tiger, it’s nice and clean, and there’s some recognition of what I have done in my career. If you look at the stripes, there are 15 stripes and I’ve won 15 major championships. So my goal is to ruin this logo,” he said, referring to his hopes of adding a 16th major title over the coming months and years.
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