His perfect-for-the-game body and mind make the defending PGA champion the closest thing the world has yet seen to the ULTIMATE GOLFING MACHINE

by Jeff Williams

When you sit down to design the perfect golfer, you can do everything but account for the genes. You can make him a perfect height, say 5'-10". You can make him the perfect weight, say 175. You can make his body a lithe, limber mass of muscle, a coiled-steel spring that can unleash unbelievable power. You can make his hands so strong they can squeeze the grip right off the club, and so sensitive they can feel the distance of a shot or a putt down to a fraction of a millimeter. You can make that golfer Tiger Woods.

Design is all about theory. It's all about putting down on paper, or plotting in a computer, the components that build the perfect structure, or, in this case, the perfect golfer. Yes, you can design a golfer on paper or in a computer, but you can't make him a reality, like a bridge or a skyscraper or a jumbo jet. Yet what we have in Tiger Woods, what we have in reality, is the perfect golfing machine. We have the perfect body in concert with the perfect mind, a combination that wasn't forged at the draftsman's table or in the unfathomable workings of the computer. You can't account for the genes. In Tiger Woods' case, they represent a genetic miracle.

"I just work on a few things with him, tweak him here and there, make sure his swing is the way he wants it to be, not just the way I want it to be," says Butch Harmon, Woods' swing coach for the last seven years. "Sure, I'd like to take credit for making him into what he is today, but I'm just a part of it. All the talent was already there when I started working with him. It had always been there. The talent and the drive, it's always been there. You can't be what he has become without the talent and the drive."

When Woods won his first PGA Championship at Medinah last August, it was the apex of one of the greatest seasons in the history of the game, a season in which he won eight tournaments. From the end of 1999 through the start of the 2000 season he won six consecutive tournaments, a record in the modern era. Then came the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. If there had ever been a player destined to win a major championship at a major championship venue, it was Tiger Woods at Pebble Beach.

It was at Pebble Beach where his swing, his touch, his mind came together in an unduplicated harmony. He shot 12 under par for four rounds, an all-time U.S. Open record. He beat his closest rivals, Ernie Els and Miguel Angel Jimenez, by 15 shots, an all-time U.S. Open record, an all-time major championship record. It was a performance more breathtaking than his 1997 Masters triumph when he won by 12 strokes. And it was a performance that left all of his peers awestruck, accepting finally that the outcome of any tournament in which Woods plays is strictly up to him. If he plays his best, he is the best, and they simply cannot beat him. It all goes back to his genes.

It was not with the intention of creating the world's best golfer that Kultida and Earl Woods brought Eldrick T. Woods into this world on December 30, 1975. It was not long, however, before they both knew that Eldrick T. Woods could do something with a golf club that few others have ever done. They could see an affinity for the swing, they could sense a desire to achieve. Their lives were devoted to pursuit of their son's perfection, a pursuit with a steely edge, a hard-bitten aggressiveness. Eldrick T. Woods, the boy his father called Tiger after a South Vietnamese army comrade, comes from tough stock.

Kultida Woods stood under a huge oak in front of the Augusta National Golf Club in April, waiting for her son to emerge. It was the first round of the Masters, the tournament that Jack Nicklaus says Woods should win 10 times, and Kultida Woods was there for a final word. "You get them, now," said the mother known as Tida as her son headed for the putting green, offering her a quick smile. "You get them."

Then she turned and resumed her conversation with an interviewer, her clipped English heavy with her Thai accent. She wanted to make a point, an emphatic point, and she first touched the interviewer's belt buckle, and then his forehead. "You have to have the fire in the belly and you have to have the fire in the head," Tida Woods was saying. "You have to have both. Tiger wouldn't be so good if he didn't have the fire. I think I gave him fire. I tell him that he never give up. I always tell him go for the throat. I always tell him that as little boy. I tell him always go for win, don't worry about anything else. His father was Green Beret but has more compassion than me. I want him to win every time."

That's not the only thing that she told Tiger Woods as a little boy. "I want him to be good boy, not embarrass our family," said Tida. "I wouldn't be happy if he embarrass me. He never embarrass me."

For the Woods family, it was about developing the body and the mind, and stoking the competitive fire without having it consume their son. To that end they had a naval psychologist from San Diego, Jay Brunza, caddie for Tiger when he was in the juniors. "It was a way of helping him to stay under control," says Earl Woods. "Teenagers get pretty hot-headed, they react with a lot of emotion to things, and Tiger wasn't any different. You don't want him to kill that emotion. You've got to have it to be competitive, but having Jay around was the right kind of calming influence. If you stay angry with yourself for a bad shot, you won't be able to prepare for the next one. Tiger can get real angry with himself for a bad shot, but he doesn't let that affect him for the next one. That's the key: play every shot with the same frame of mind and let go of what happened before."

Earl Woods is in bad health these days. He doesn't attend many tournaments anymore and, if he does, he stays in his hotel room to watch the play on television. He watched his son win the U.S. Open while sitting at home in Cypress, California.

"Awesome, totally awesome," said Earl Woods of his son's performance. "It's like watching a Mercedes climb a hill. The power was there, control was there. He was just on cruise control."

You don't see Earl Woods behind the 18th green anymore, embracing his son and dribbling tears on his red Nike golf shirt after a victory. Even though he's had open-heart surgery, Earl Woods still smokes. There's a tiredness to his voice, although he is no less passionate about the achievements of his son. It can be an effort for him now just to talk. That is very different from when Tiger was the dominating junior player, the dominating college player, and came to the PGA Tour with preordained greatness. It was an effort then to get Earl Woods to stop talking.

There is now a distance between father and son that is conspicuous, though Earl Woods says that it doesn't mean a thing, that it's the natural progression of his son becoming a man and taking charge of a life that's larger than life. That's something, Earl Woods says, that was inevitable and important. "The one thing I always told him was that he had to trust himself, believe in himself," says Earl Woods. "He had to believe in his golf swing and trust he was going to make a good swing every time. When you step up to the ball, you've got to believe you're going to hit the perfect shot. That's what I instilled in him. So when you grow up and aren't a little boy anymore, you've got to trust that you will make the right decisions. That's what being a man is about. He doesn't have to ask me anymore what I think about something. He does sometimes, but we don't always talk about things. He's entirely capable of making his own decisions, and that's the way it should be."

It was his son, Earl said, who made the two most publicly significant decisions of the last two years, to let go of the agent who negotiated his first big deals, IMG's Hughes Norton, and to let go of the caddie who toted his bag in the 1997 Masters, Mike "Fluff" Cowan. Hughes has gone silently underground since the firing. The recently married Cowan now caddies for Jim Furyk, and isn't ready to say much about his break-up with Tiger. The problem seems to have been that Fluff's ability to read greens became less important than his assertive personality, a type that doesn't mesh well with Tiger Woods' desire to be always low key. Woods' new caddie, Steve Williams, will say little more than what club his boss used on any given shot. Woods seems to have drawn a curtain of silence around himself, preferring to speak for himself in carefully measured sentences that seldom give much of a glimpse into his psyche or soul.

The once-effusive Earl Woods also will not talk much about the firings, beyond saying that the decisions were made by his son and that he had given him advice. "He made the decisions, he thought they were the best thing to do," says Woods. "That's all part of trusting yourself. That's all part of what I taught him to do." And part of trusting himself required that Tiger Woods put some distance between himself and his ever perspicacious father.

As his relationship with his father has changed, Tiger Woods seems to have grown closer to his swing coach of seven years, Butch Harmon. It was Harmon who first hugged him after he walked off the 18th green at Pebble Beach, a heartfelt embrace that was beyond a relationship between guru and prodigy. Harmon has a cocky sort of demeanor that nonetheless seems to fit into the Woods' style. They laugh a lot on the practice tee or walking down the fairway during practice rounds. Harmon wouldn't have been around this long if there wasn't this measure of simpatico. Harmon is as awestruck as anyone by Woods' accomplishments, but isn't surprised in the least that Tiger has won three majors and 20 PGA Tour events in not quite four full seasons as a professional.

In Harmon's view, a session spent with Woods on Monday after a practice round at the U.S. Open was a microcosm of Woods' strength of work ethic and depth of desire. "Here's a guy that's making more putts than anybody, making a lot of putts on these greens, and he's not happy with the way he's rolling the ball," says Harmon. "So we go to the putting green for maybe a couple of hours and work on getting his release right. The way he was putting, that's a very, very small thing, but he knows that there's something that isn't the way he wants it, so he's going to work on it until he gets it right. Do you think someone who's making a lot of putts anyway would tinker with their stroke? Not many people. But that's the way Tiger is. If something is a little off, he'll work and work until he gets what he wants. He always gets what he wants from himself."

Getting his prodigious power under control was important to Woods taking the next big steps as a player. He needed to put more drives in the fairway, certainly if he expected to win major championships. Now he's done that. He needed to improve his wedge game, to keep his shots from flying too long or spinning back too much. He's done that, too. He worked on the speed of his putts, learning not to be so aggressive all the time. That task is now completed.

"If he's got a weakness, he'll work on it until it becomes a strength," said Harmon. "He has a tremendous work ethic. We all see how hard Vijay Singh works on his game because he's out on the range all the time. Well, Tiger can't be out on the range [at a tournament] all the time because it's too public. He has to do a lot of his practicing in private. But, believe me, he's a real worker and he isn't satisfied until he gets it right."

Woods won the PGA Championship at Medinah in a completely different manner than he did the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. At Medinah, he was pressed down the stretch by the Spanish wunderkind, Sergio Garcia. Woods was not at the top of his game, not that he wasn't playing well. But Medinah required all of his mental strength as well as his physical prowess. The Chicago crowd warmed to Garcia, saw him as the underdog phenom. Woods was heckled on occasion during the final round. When Woods dropped the final putt for victory, he grabbed his face in relief rather than pumping his fist in unbridled celebration. Medinah was hard work, and Woods had previously won tournaments that way and will again.

"I taught him to be tough. You can't beat these guys out here if you aren't tough," says Earl Woods. "And they can't beat him if they aren't tough."

As Woods was completing his coronation march at Pebble Beach, Nick Price, the three-time major winner, was summing up what he had seen. "We all felt for the longest time that someone was going to come along who would drive the ball 300 yards and putt like [Ben] Crenshaw," said Price. "Well, this guy drives the ball better than anyone I've ever seen and putts better than Crenshaw. You put that together and he's hard to beat. He's a phenomenon."

It's in his genes. Always has been.