Publishers Weekly
01/29/2024
Sports Illustrated journalist Harig (Tiger & Phil) tees up an adulatory account of Tiger Woods’s late-2010s comeback. Starting in 2013, Woods suffered from debilitating back pain that left him barely able to walk by the time he withdrew from a 2017 European Tour event “after just three full rounds.” In private, Woods signaled his pro career might be over, but following a successful spinal fusion, he was back on the green and contending in major competitions by 2018. Harig lauds Woods’s resolve to return to professional golf, noting that despite some clunky playing during his early return appearances (he slammed his arm on a pine tree while following through on a swing at the 2018 Valspar Championship), Woods persisted and in 2019 clinched a surprise fifth Masters Tournament victory. Harig’s determination to shape his narrative as an uplifting comeback story leads him to treat less positive developments with kid gloves. He frames Woods’s 2017 arrest for driving under the influence and his near-fatal car crash in 2021 (a police report indicated he was driving at almost double the 45 mph speed limit) as setbacks for him to overcome rather than indications of irresponsible tendencies. Additionally, Harig provides few new insights into Woods’s life and psychology, relying largely on public appearances to trace the athlete’s trajectory since 2017. Readers will wish for a more balanced take. Agent: Susan Canavan, Waxman Literary. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Whether Tiger Woods is the greatest golfer of all time is – narrowly – arguable. That no one has ever been a player of great impact, is not. From the very beginning, Bob Harig has been there to honestly document the ups and downs of the most consequential career in the game’s history. It’s all here in these pages and it is breathtaking.’’ – Jimmy Roberts, commentator NBC/Golf Channel; author of No One Wins Alone with Mark Messier.
“This is, without question, the best golf book I have ever read. Bob Harig uses Drive: The Lasting Legacy of Tiger Woods to capture golf’s most mysterious icon in ways I never considered possible. Bravo.’’ – Jeff Pearlman, author of nine best-selling sports books including The Last Folk Hero: The Life and Myth of Bo Jackson
Kirkus Reviews
2024-01-05
There’s perseverance. Then there’s Tiger Woods perseverance.
By Sports Illustrated writer Harig’s account, Woods single-handedly changed the game of golf—a child prodigy who is three major championships behind Jack Nicklaus and tied in the number of PGA titles with Sam Snead, to say nothing of having amassed unprecedented earnings. “Woods transformed the game,” writes the author, “turning golf geeks into keen observers, casual golf fans into ardent followers, and even indifferent sports fans into curiosity mavens.” Moreover, Woods racked up many of his stats while playing through intense pain: a fused disk, multiple bone fractures after his notorious 2021 auto accident, and so forth. Just a year after that near catastrophe, Harig notes, Woods was back at the Masters and the PGA Championship, dropping out only to undergo more surgeries. The psychology behind this drive is complex, but it involves putting aside pain and fear and pushing oneself beyond what would seem to be insurmountable limits. There’s also some grace involved: Whereas Woods was cocky and to some extent aggressive in his youth, by the time he hit his 40s, he was “a more modest, appreciative player who had come to embrace the younger generation of golfers who idolized him when they were growing up.” It’s noteworthy, Harig writes, that Woods returned after so much medical work. Countless golfers have had to endure back surgeries over the years, “but few have had surgery that dealt with the spine and returned to any high level of success.” Woods isn’t immortal or infallible, to be sure, but he’s admirable for playing through one malady after another, from a trick knee that he waited a decade to fix to the microdiscectomy that threatened to ground him for a season.
A solid portrait of an athlete’s lonely progress in battling pain, the yips, aging, and other obstacles.
