Tiger Woods’ chances of winning again

BC: Well, that sums up my dad, too. That was a good one.  

I had just won the Dallas Junior or the Dallas Men’s, and I was out playing at a pretty famous golf course in Dallas called Cedar Crest, famous for a lot of reasons. They played a major there in the ’20s that Walter Hagen won, but also a really famous gambling club. Big gambling. Of course that’s true of most municipal courses in Dallas. But I was out there playing with some high school buddies, and this elderly gentleman, Black man came up to me and asked me if I wanted to play a match for $100 a hole. He was going to play me with three clubs and I could pick two clubs. That was the game.

I said, ‘Well, I can’t do it now because I have a game but I’ll come back next weekend and play you.’ He’s like ‘But you’ve got to have $900, I’ll have $900, we’ll both put it up and give it to the head pro or whatever before we play, and we’ll play $100 a hole for the nine holes.’ He told me he was going to use a 7-iron, a wedge and a putter. So I went home, and at the time I was working in the bag room at Las Colinas Country Club, and I had $300, $400, $500 that I had saved up and I told my dad that I needed to borrow the rest of it, $400 or $500, and my dad said, ‘Explain the game to me.’ I said, ‘This guy is like 70 years old and he’s going to play with three clubs, and he told me I could choose any two clubs and we were going to play nine holes, $100 a hole.’  

I had a week to practice and prepare for it. My dad goes, ‘All right, I’ll loan you the money, but you’re going to get your ass beat.’

I said, ‘Dad, there’s no way I’m going to get my ass beat.’ I said, ‘There’s not a chance. This guy is like 75 years old.’ Then my dad told me that he put himself through college playing 9-ball and 8-ball and he was the best pool player there was in Lubbock, Texas, and then he explained that a man came in one night and spotted him everything and gave him the break, and my dad said after the break he never shot again. He goes: ‘There’s always somebody better. If a guy comes to you with a game and proposes a game, he’s thought about this game more than you. He knows his game. I’m just going to tell you you’re going to get your ass beat.’

Anyway, so I went out and I played with an 8-iron and a putter because I could blade the 8-iron with a Top-Flite, and it would roll out 250 yards because the fairway was rock hard. I could punch that 8-iron…