Tiger’s parents took out a second mortgage to get Tiger into golf as a teenager
Tiger’s parents took out a second mortgage to get Tiger into golf as a teenager, really?
Tiger Woods has amassed millions of fans throughout his illustrious career, but there’s two supporters who have been there for the pro golfer through it all: his parents Earl and Kultida Woods.
Earl and Kultida first met in the 1960s amid the Vietnam War. As a soldier in the U.S. Army Special Forces, Earl was deployed to the same base in Thailand where Kultida, née Punsawad, worked as a secretary.
The pair quickly fell in love, and, smitten with the Green Beret, Kultida followed Earl back to New York, where they married before settling down and starting a family in Cypress, California.
In 1975, they welcomed their son, future golf superstar Eldrick Tont “Tiger” Woods. Earl and Kultida were married for 37 years until Earl died in May 2006 at their home in Cypress.
Fans looked intimately at the golfer’s upbringing in HBO’s Tiger in 2021. The two-part documentary featured home videos and archived audio, including one of Earl recalling the first time he saw Tiger putt a ball.
“When Tiger was 10 months old, I unstrapped him out of his high chair one day and he walked over and hit the ball,” Earl recalled. “I said, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got something special.’ “
Despite growing up with a soldier for a father, Tiger has said it was his mother he was “deathly afraid of” as a child. “My dad was always the person who would plant seeds and give me encouragement but also would say things that would fester inside me that wouldn’t come to fruition for a while.
He was very worldly and deep in his thinking,” he told USA Today in 2017.
Kultida, on the other hand, was an “enforcer,” Tiger said. “My dad may have been in the Special Forces, but I was never afraid of him. My mom’s still here and I’m still deathly afraid of her. She’s a very tough, tough old lady, very demanding. … I love her so much, but she was tough.”
Nevertheless, Kultida never misses an opportunity to support her son both on and off the golf course. She joined her grandkids, Sam Alexis and Charlie Axel, at Tiger’s induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2022. Kultida is often seen on the fairway cheering on Tiger and sporting her signature oversized black glasses and visor.
