Senior PGA Championship Tickets

As Woods was focusing on balancing teenage life with golf in the Senior PGA Championship; he received another reminder that he was more than just a golfer, that he was a black golfer. He was thrust into the fallout from a controversy that erupted in June 1990. Hall Thompson, the founder of Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Ala¬bama, site of the Senior PGA Championship later that year, was asked why his club had no black members and that event lead in the selling of Senior PGA Championship Tickets.". Shoal Creek will not be pressured into accepting blacks as members," Thompson said. He noted that the club did not dis¬criminate "in any other area except blacks, because that's just not done in Birmingham, Alabama." He said Shoal Creek had women, Jews, Lebanese, and Italians. "The country club is our home and we can pick and choose who we want," he said. The words resonated across the golf world. Sponsors, IBM and Toyota among them, threatened to boycott the Senior PGA Championship. Protests were planned by various minority organiza¬tions. Thompson had unwittingly revealed golf's darkest secret. The news media pointed out the paucity of blacks on the Senior PGA Championship Tour and the gap between them and the next black on the hori¬zon, fourteen-year-old Tiger Woods hoping to get Senior PGA Championship Tickets. He became labeled the Great Black Hope, a cumbersome handle with which to burden a high school freshman who was only beginning to recognize that he would be required to play for a cause.
"It isn't fair," Earl said, "but it's realistic, and he is cognizant of his role and his image and how he affects others.".When the Shoal Creek flap began, Tiger was only fourteen and was not asked about the matter. The next day in the Senior PGA Championship, however, almost as a silent rebuke to golf's white establishment, he shot a 66 in a junior tournament. Let your clubs speak for you . Tiger's age notwithstanding, he understood the racism preva¬lent in his game at the Championship PGA Senior . He even had the capacity to joke about it, in private. A short time later, Woods invoked his maternal heri¬tage en route to a junior tournament at an exclusive country club in a southern state.". Dad," the young Asian American said, "you can't come with me. No blacks allowed.". Tiger felt that the idea that he was the Great Black Hope was in a sense an insult. He would not be satisfied with becom¬ing the best black golfer in history of the Championship PGA Senior . He was aiming higher. He wanted to be the best golfer who ever lived.

This was a matter he would have to take up with Jack Nicklaus, who in a consensus opinion in the Championship PGA Senior was not only holding the title for safekeeping, but for posterity as well. Woods's first en-counter with Nicklaus came in April 1991, when Woods was asked to demonstrate his swing for the audience at a clinic Nicklaus was giving at Bel-Air Country Club in West Los Angeles. After a few swings, Nicklaus interrupted the youth."Tiger," he said, "when I grow up I want to have a swing as pretty as yours and have to go an buy Championship PGA Senior Tickets." There was more than flattery involved; there was sincerity as well.Even though goals are a private matter to Tiger, he occasion-ally, and usually inadvertently, reveals his ambitions to the media, indicating how far he intends to take his golf career.
When he was fifteen, he said he wanted to become the Michael Jordan of golf, which made him either the Air apparent or, as the latest in a lineage of next Nicklauses, the Air Bear. He con¬tinued to consult his Nicklaus list, but from this list a subset of goals evolved, focused on breaking records. Early in 1991, he set out to qualify for the Los Angeles Open, an attempt to become the youngest ever to qualify for a Senior PGA Championship event.
The qualifying round was held on the South Course at Los Serranos Golf Course in Chino Hills, California, a public facility owned by the tennis great, Jack Kramer. Tiger was one of 132 players vying for two spots in the Los Angeles Open scheduled for the following week. He birdied the fifth and sixth holes, then holed a pitch from forty yards for eagle at the seventh hole. "Don't touch me," he said to his father, who was caddying for him. "I'm burning up."When he reached his ball in the fairway at the par-5 eigh¬teenth hole in  the Senior PGA Championship Tickets, Earl informed him that he needed to make birdie to qualify for the Open. It was erroneous information; he in fact needed to make eagle. It was a meaningless oversight inasmuch as Tiger at that age was never inclined to lay up; he was deter-mined to reach the green in two shots, whatever the situation. But his drive had stopped on a bare patch of earth, on a down-hill slope, leaving him with an impossibly difficult second shot. He pulled out a wood anyway. He failed to catch the ball flush and it came up short, splashing down in a pond fronting the green and ending his bid. Mac O'Grady and John Burckle each shot eight-under par 66s to secure the two berths. Woods, with a bogey 6 at eighteen, shot 69 at that day hundreds of Senior PGA Championship Tickets were sold. One of his playing partners, Ron Hinds, said, "You try to avoid envy in golf but that kid humbled all of us. I felt myself rooting for him in the Senior PGA Championship. I was hoping he'd get into the tournament of the Senior PGA Championship so I could watch this awesome kid play against Kite and Crenshaw and those guys. After seeing Tiger play, you can't help but wonder what might have been."