Earl Woods: The champion golfer Tiger Woods is expected by many experts to become the game's greatest player of all time. Yet one person knew this even when Tiger was only a little boy: his trainer, mentor and father, Earl Woods, who has died aged 74 from cancer.
His nurturing of his athletic genius of a son was made all the more exceptional by the harsh influence of race, for Tiger's success was in a sport that shunned African-Americans when Earl was a young man and later when Tiger was growing up. Even the sport in which Earl excelled, the more racially tolerant baseball, gave him some unpleasant reminders of his status in 1950s America.
He had won a baseball scholarship to Kansas State University and his father hoped he would play in the Negro Leagues. In 1951-53 he did break another league's colour bar, but on away games had to stay at separate hotels. When he joined the army, where he became a lieutenant colonel in the special forces, he still suffered discrimination.
Once in Georgia as a young soldier with a black friend and two white friends out window shopping, the police arrested all four, and they were fined for making a disturbance. "Blacks and whites weren't supposed to mix in public," he recalled.
Such experiences may have been an influence for some of Earl's more extravagant claims for his son. He got a bad press for comparing Tiger to Gandhi and calling him "the chosen one". Although he later denied the remark, he always maintained his son would be a great man, as well as a brilliant golfer.
His faith took hold when Tiger was aged one. Earl was practising golf in the garage as the tot watched from a high chair. Then he descended, took the club and hit the ball into the net his father had strung up. "I was flabbergasted," Earl recalled. "It was the most frightening thing I had ever seen." At 18 months, he took Tiger to a golf course for the first time and let him play a hole. The toddler shot an 11 on the 410-yard par four, with eight shots to the green and three putts. When he was 11, he first beat his father, who never won against him afterwards.
Earl proved a hard teacher, jingling coins or slamming a door as Tiger launched a putt or took his back swing. But the pupil did not bear a grudge and when he became the first black person to win the Masters at Augusta, Georgia, in 1997, the two embraced tearfully.
After winning it for the fourth time last year, Tiger broke down because for the first time his father's poor health prevented him from being there. Now 30, the top-ranked Tiger has won 10 major championships, fourth behind Jack Nicklaus, Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones, and earned more than $70 million playing and making endorsements. His father managed what has become the Tiger Woods Foundation.
Earl was born the last child of six to a stonemason in Kansas, and was orphaned by 13. He graduated in 1953 in sociology and psychology. Deciding against the uncertainty of a baseball career, he joined the army, doing two tours in Vietnam. After marriage, three children, and a divorce, he was posted to Thailand, where he married army office worker Kultida Punsawad in 1969.
The pair settled in Cypress, in California's prosperous Orange County suburbs, where Earl started work for an aircraft company. They were not an average family racially. His wife was half Thai and a quarter Chinese and Caucasian. Earl was half African-American and a quarter American-Indian and Chinese, a combination that later led Tiger to call himself "Cablinasian".
As Tiger's career flourished, Earl's shared fame allowed him to write three books with titles that personified his dogged attitude: Training a Tiger; Start Something: You Can Make a Difference and Playing Through: Straight Talk on Hard Work, Big Dreams and Adventures with Tiger. The question of why his son had this name led Earl to tell the story of how in Vietnam his life had been saved by a South Vietnamese officer whose nickname was Tiger, and whom he revered so much he decided to give the name a new life. He did not see the officer again, and a reporter discovered he died in a relocation camp eight months after Tiger was born in 1975.
Two sons and a daughter from his first marriage and Kultida and Tiger survive him.
• Earl Dennison Woods, soldier, businessman and golf coach, born March 5th, 1932; died May 3rd, 2006