Golf Cub

At eight, Tiger won his first junior world championship, in the 10-and-under division, with a five-under-par final round at the par-3 Presidio Hills Golf Course in San Diego. By the time he was 14, he had won five age-group junior world titles, two more than any other golfer has won. With the trophies for those and more than 100 local junior titles, the Woods house contains more hardware than your neighborhood True Value Home Center.

"The other guys always ask me before the tournaments if Tiger is really as good as people say he is," says Notah Ryan Begay III, Tiger's close friend on the golf trail. "He has taken on a celebrity status, and most of the guys are afraid of him."

PGA professionals have also contracted the yips around Tiger. The kid played with 21 touring pros in a round at the Insurance Youth Golf Classic, a pro-junior event in Fort Worth last August. He shot 69 and beat or tied 18 of the pros, including Scott Verplank, Billy Mayfair and Tiger's playing partner, Tommy Moore. "I wish I could have played like that at 14," Moore said after the round. "Heck, I wish I could play like that at 27."

Tiger, at 15, plays to a plus-four handicap despite a still boyish 5'11", 138-pound body. With a physique that is hardly more developed than a four-iron and an unquenchable thirst for practice, he frequently pushes himself to the limit of exhaustion. His current mentor is John Anselmo, the pro at Meadowlark Golf Club in Huntington Beach, whom Tiger visits twice a month for tune-ups. On road trips, which have included stops from Paris to Bangkok, Tiger is almost always chaperoned by his father, who retired in 1988 after 20 years in the military and 10 years with McDonnell Douglas. Team Tiger also includes San Diego sports psychologist Jay Brunza, who has taught the ferocious Tiger how to dial down his adrenaline during a round.

"Tiger shouldn't be portrayed as the Robo-Golfer," says Brunza. "He doesn't need motivation from anybody else; his is internal. I don't see him burning out, because golf is pure pleasure for him."

The game is also his ticket to a college education. Tiger, a freshman at Western High in Anaheim, has been fending off the advances of the country's premier college programs ever since he got his first letter from Stanford, at age 13. But can he resist the lure of the Tour when he is already humbling the pros? "I plan to get my degree first," he says, "and then tear up the Tour."

These are brash words from a kid who shaves with tweezers. "With Tiger, anything is possible," says Anselmo, who at 69 has seen golf supernovas come and go for 40 years and is not prone to hyperbole. "I kid his dad that Tiger is not his, but that he comes from another world. I just hope I live long enough to see what's going to happen. It's going to be amazing."

Tiger is reluctant to forecast his potential social impact. He knows that five years have passed since Calvin Peete became the last black golfer to win a Tour event. He is also aware that he could become the role model for a generation of golfers before he's eligible for his driver's license. But he resists being typecast as a racial pioneer. "I don't want to be the best black golfer on the Tour," Tiger says. "I want to be the best golfer on the Tour."

Early in Tiger's round at Los Serranos, where the opening holes are long and offer birdie opportunities, it seemed ludicrous to think that he might play a pivotal golf shot on the 18th hole. On the first four holes, Tiger played like the teenager he is, hitting a tree from in the rough and two cart paths with tee shots, and it appeared he would wind up fourth in his foursome. But then he sank a pair of 15-foot birdie putts at the 6th and 7th holes and chipped in from 40 yards away for an eagle on the 8th. "Don't touch me, I'm burning up," Tiger told his father, his confidence restored.

He went on to save four pars with knee knockers of five feet or more. Then on the downhill, 504-yard par-5 16th hole he cracked a drive 344 yards. Standing 40 yards behind Tiger in the fairway, as he had all day, Hogan Tour regular Brad Gallagher turned to his playing partner, Ron Hinds, and said, "This kid is mean." Hinds, the golf pro at Westlake Village (Calif.) Golf Course, would say later, "You try to avoid envy in golf, but that kid humbled all of us." Tiger pitched his ball onto the green with a nine-iron and two-putted for birdie.