Tiger Woods, Notah Begay, and the Meaning of Golf
By Colman McCarthy
Bethesda, Md.—They rose before dawn, these dream-chasing former Stanford University teammates who became world-class golfers and first-class citizens. Tiger Woods and Notah Begay III were on the virid fairways at Congressional Country Club at 6:15 a.m. playing a practice round for the AT&T National tournament in early July.
At 31, Woods is a once-in-a-generation athlete who scaled the national stage as a two-year-old toddler swatting golf balls on television in front of Bob Hope. The prodigy would become prodigious. No one has ever won more tournaments at a younger age or earned more money in prizes and endorsements. Begay, 34, is a four-time winner on the PGA tour and one of an elite band of four players ever to shoot a 59 in competition.
However much their golfing talents set them apart, Woods and Begay are unique for another reason: they are cultural anomalies, ones who emerged from minority backgrounds and learning the game on courses far away from monied country clubs. Woods, the son of an African-American father and a Thai mother, said of his ethnic roots: “I’m from everywhere.” Begay’s father is a Navajo, his mother a Pueblo.
Going back decades, I’ve interviewed dozens of players on the PGA tour. They tend to be amiable but, with some exceptions, their minds are one-dimensional. How could it be otherwise? They bounce along from country club to country club, adulated everywhere and, if enough putts are sunk, rake in heaps of prize money. Their ties are to corporate America, with Fed Ex, Buick, Wachovia, AT&T and John Deere among the many companies bankrolling tournaments. On Wednesday pro-ams that precede the 72 hole tournaments, players are teamed with shagged out CEOs as hot to lower their golf scores as they are to lower their capital gains taxes.
On that Tuesday practice round at Congressional, I was among the 2,000-odd early risers in the gallery of Woods and Begay. I admire them both, obviously for their years of self-discipline to use their athletic skills fully but as much, too, for what they do off the course. They are givers, not takers.
Through his foundation, Woods has endowed a learning center in southern California to help educate children. He is planning another one in Washington D.C., a city with the nation’s highest dropout rate for high school students and where 36 percent of the adults are functionally illiterate. Begay is also involved in education, starting with Native American children who are often among the poorest of the poor. Through the Notah Begay Foundation, he is a regular visitor to Indian Country schools, hoping to inspire tribal children to push themselves to pay attention to what matters in life: knowledge, ideals, kindness, appreciation.
I’ve seen those qualities in Notah. In May, 1999, his rookie year on the tour, we played an afternoon round of golf in Washington. That morning, Notah testified before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, reminding the politicians of the high rates of unemployment and disease on reservations. I can’t recall a PGA player ever leaving the inbred insular world of golf to speak to a congressional committee, and surely not one who stood with, and spoke for, people as forgotten and needy as the American Indian.
Advocacy comes naturally to Begay. He is the second of five children in an Albuquerque Catholic family where involvement in social justice issues was a given. His mother Laura works in the Department of Justice in Washington as a specialist in delinquency prevention programs for Indians youths. His father is an official in the Indian Health Service in New Mexico. His wife Apryl, who I came to know when she walked the fairways at Congressional during Notah’s four rounds of play, is well-read, politically astute and assuredly aware that the world beyond the 18th hole needs immediate fixing. She, too, comes from a family with the right commitments: her mother is a teacher in a multicultural low-income school in Albuquerque. As for the family’s work ethic, there is sibling Clint Begay, a muscular lad who is a genuine heavy-lifter: he is Notah’s caddy and definitely his brother’s keeper--if keeping quiet on the backswing and keeping the clubs clean means anything.
During my round eight years ago with Notah, we didn’t talk much about golf. It was mostly politics and public issues. It was that way after Notah’s second round of play at Congressional when he carved out a hot 70. As the best known athlete in New Mexico, and a well-informed Democrat with a strong social conscience, he would be a natural to run for office. What’ll it be, I asked: governor, senator? Not yet, he smiled, saying he still had some golf to play.
Starting right then. After four hours and four miles in 95 degree heat, it was off to the practice range to hit balls. Who else was there? Tiger.
(Colman McCarthy, a former professional golfer and twice the city amateur champion in Mobile, Ala., is the author of “Pleasures of the Game: the Theory-Free Guide to Golf”).