Or the sad story of the aptly named Parr, the sort of life-affirming connection Woods had been trained from youth to treat as a distraction, or the oddly apt fact that Woods became obsessed with scuba diving, a way to bring a world-class athlete’s gift for obsessive control to bear on the pursuit of utter solitude.
Rich with interviews - notably with Woods’s first girlfriend, Dina Parr, and his former caddy, Steve Williams - and with archival footage, “Tiger” packs its two installments (both under two hours) with the sort of densely packed detail that allows any potential viewer to stumble into an epiphany.Ĭonsider, for instance, Woods’s disinclination to refer to himself as Black in public, despite the media (and the potent Nike campaign that helped build Woods’s legend) positioning his successes as wins for the Black community - and despite notes of caution from commentators during Woods’s rise that, should he fall from grace, he would not be afforded the mercy society grants a white man. 10 and is available on HBO Max, and whose second half airs next weekend, provides a compelling case for its subject as intriguing even after the reams of coverage he’s generated.Įxecutive produced by Alex Gibney and drawing upon the authoritative biography by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian (who are also among the executive producers), “Tiger” takes a linear path through the Woods story, beginning with childhood talk-show appearance and success as an amateur before young Woods dropped out of Stanford.
INNER TURMOIL SERIES
This series makes elegant and understated arguments about celebrity, race, and a seemingly unknowable public figure who’s long sat at their intersection. These two halves to Woods’s life so far form the two parts of HBO’s excellent new documentary “Tiger,” a project that brings together an unusual serious-mindedness with as rare a gift of pacing. On the other, after Woods’s double life was suddenly and publicly ripped open, sits scandalous ignominy that, as Woods’s preternatural athletic gifts slipped away with age, could no longer merely be clawed through with athletic achievement. On one side of the pivot point of November 2009 sits a life lived in public as an athlete bound for glory from his earliest days, treated as a Messianic figure by his overweening father and, shortly thereafter, as a culture-shifting superstar by the media. Tiger Woods’s story was easy to read as the most inspiring in American sports until the very moment it became among the most depressing.
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