Tiger Woods once held all four major golf titles at the same time
When Tiger Woods won the 2001 Masters, he already held the other three major trophies from the previous season, the only player to hold four majors in a row. A year earlier he had taken the US Open by 15 strokes, a margin many rank as the finest performance golf has seen.
Born in 1975 in Cypress, a Los Angeles suburb, he was the only child of Earl Woods, a retired Army officer who had been among the first African American college baseball players at Kansas State, and Kultida, who came from Thailand. His first name, Eldrick, was his mother's choice: its opening and closing letters stand for the two parents' initials; Tont is a traditional Thai name, and Tiger honoured a South Vietnamese colonel friend of his father's. He calls his mixed heritage Cablinasian. Earl, a skilled amateur golfer, put a club in his hands before age two, and military privileges let the boy play the Navy course at Los Alamitos.
Woods turned professional in 1996 at 20 and won the 1997 Masters by 12 strokes, reaching world number one that June. He then held the top ranking for 264 consecutive weeks from 1999 and 281 more from 2005, records for both streak and total. He has 15 majors, three behind Jack Nicklaus, and shares the career PGA Tour record of 82 wins with Sam Snead. He is the youngest of six men to win all four majors and, like Nicklaus, has done it three times.
The following decade brought setbacks. He stepped away from December 2009 to April 2010 over marital problems and slid to 58th in the world in November 2011 before fighting back. In February 2021 a single-car crash left his right leg and ankle badly broken; he said his full-time career was over but returned for the 2022 Masters. His mother, who died in 2025, was the person he said made his success possible.
Off the course the numbers are just as large. He was PGA Player of the Year a record 11 times, AP Athlete of the Decade for the 2000s, and Forbes's highest-paid athlete for 11 years, 10 of them in a row. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May 2019.
Source: Tiger Woods
