Brief Summary
Based on years of reporting and interviews with more than 250 people from every corner of Tiger Woods’s life—many of whom have never spoken about him on the record before—a sweeping, revelatory, and defining biography of an American icon.
In 2009, Tiger Woods was the most famous athlete on the planet, a transcendent star of almost unfathomable fame and fortune living what appeared to be the perfect life. Married to a Swedish beauty and the father of two young children, he was the winner of fourteen major golf championships and earning more than $100 million annually. But it was all a carefully crafted illusion. As it turned out, Woods had been living a double life for years—one that unraveled in the aftermath of a Thanksgiving-night car crash that exposed his serial infidelity and sent his personal and professional lives over a cliff. Still, the world has always wondered: Who is Tiger Woods, really?
In Tiger Woods, Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian, the team behind the New York Times bestseller The System, look deep behind the headlines to produce a richly reported answer to that question. To find out, they conducted hundreds of interviews with people from every facet of Woods’s life—friends, family members, teachers, romantic partners, coaches, business associates, physicians, Tour pros, and members of Woods’s inner circle.
From those interviews, and extensive, carefully sourced research, they have uncovered new, intimate, and surprising details about the man behind the myth. We read an inside account of Tiger’s relationship with his first love, Dina Gravell, and their excruciating breakup at the hands of his parents. We learn that Tiger’s longtime sports agency, International Management Group (IMG), made $50,000 annual payments to Tiger’s father, Earl Woods, as a "talent scout”—years before Tiger was their client. We discover startling new details about Earl, who died in 2006 and to this day lies in an unmarked grave. We come along as Tiger plunges into the Las Vegas and New York nightclub worlds alongside fellow superstars Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley. We are whisked behind the scenes during the National Enquirer’s globetrotting hunt to expose Tiger’s infidelity, and we get a rare look inside his subsequent sex-addiction treatment at the Pine Grove facility in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
But the portrait of Woods that emerges in Tiger Woods is far more rewarding than revelations alone. By tracing his life from its origins as the mixed-race son of an attention-seeking father and the original Tiger Mom—who programmed him to be "the chosen one,” tasked with changing not just the game of golf but the world as well—the authors provide a wealth of new insight into the human being trapped inside his parents’ creation. We meet the lonely, introverted child prodigy who has trouble connecting with other kids because of his stutter and unusual lifestyle. We experience the thrill and confusion of his meteoric rise to stardom. And we come to understand the grown man’s obsession with extreme training and deep sea diving—despite their potential for injury—as a rare source of the solitude he craves. Most of all, we are reminded, time and time again, of Woods’s singular greatness and the exhilaration we felt watching an athletic genius dominate his sport for nearly twenty years.
But at what cost? Benedict and Keteyian provide the answers in an extraordinary biography that is destined to become the defining book about an authentic American legend—and to linger in the minds of readers for years to come.
ISBN:9781501126420
Author:Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian
petermwaburi77 (verified owner) –
Eye opener into the intrigues and happening on how the World body runs.
nuria (verified owner) –
Deeply researched and convincingly told, Warah’s book is a damning indictment of the UN that shatters any notions that the organization is the moral conscience of the world, instead revealing an internal culture of fraud, corruption, mismanagement, racism and sexism, driven by an instinct of craven institutional self-preservation.
By Christine Mungai
Chief, the NuriaStore bookseller –
The book debunks the myth that the United Nations is a club of equals committed to preventing wars and protecting the rights of the world’s most vulnerable people. On the contrary, the five permanent veto-holding members of the UN Security Council, namely the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, have extraordinary power and influence in the UN, and often overrule the will and votes of the majority of the UN member states.
The book is divided into four parts:
Part One shows how the UN is simply a mirror of the misogyny and racism we find in the rest of society. Not even the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements had an impact on how the UN deals with sexual harassment and racial discrimination, both of which are tolerated at the UN. Internal UN surveys have shown that up to a third of UN employees have experienced sexual harassment, and more than half of people of colour have experienced racism, yet few of the victims report their cases for fear of retaliation. Despite policies to prevent sexual harassment and discrimination, the UN has failed to curb these vices. On the contrary, whistleblowers are retaliated against; most lose their jobs or are demoted.
People benefitting from UN programmes and projects are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation. Despite a “zero tolerance” tolerance policy towards sexual harassment and abuse, investigations have shown that UN peacekeepers and UN employees delivering aid have been known to sexually abuse or exploit women and children in countries where they are stationed. Recent cases in Haiti and the Central African Republic illustrate how peacekeepers get away with sexually abusing children without fear of being prosecuted or court martialled. UN personnel implicated in such cases get away with these crimes because they enjoy immunity from prosecution bestowed on them by the UN Charter.
Part Two shows how development projects perpetuate racist and patriarchal models that end up hurting rather than helping beneficiaries. It seeks to “decolonise development” by questioning development models that essentially disempower people who are supposed to be “empowered” because development is viewed through the prism of poverty reduction rather than social justice. It also presents evidence showing that much of the aid that is raised for disaster relief often ends up being stolen or diverted by both UN personnel and so-called “implementing partners” on the ground.
Furthermore, fundraising for disaster relief is often based on erroneous or misleading statistics. Part Three shows how UN agencies that deliver aid often exaggerate the scale of a problem in order to remain relevant or to attract donor funding. Much of this funding and aid ends up in the wrong hands, as in the case of Somalia during the 2011 famine. Besides, in the case of famine relief, the problem never gets resolved because food aid can never be a substitute for good governance that delivers food security.
Part Four shows how UN bodies, including the UN Security Council and the UN Human Rights Council, operate on the whims of their most powerful and influential members, including the permanent veto-holding members of the Security Council who failed to stop the war in Iraq and the genocide in Rwanda and have not even censured Saudi Arabia for the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Even though the war in Iraq was declared “illegal”, Britain and the US were not sanctioned for waging it. In Rwanda, as génocidaires roamed freely in Kigali, UN staff were seen packing their suitcases and boarding chartered flights to safer countries. The UN only intervenes when these wars create humanitarian crises, which leads it to raise funds for the relief effort.