Tiger Woods “Trained” with the SEALs

Wednesday, September 7th, 2016

Tiger Woods “trained” with the SEALs at the peak of his golf career, in 2006 and 2007:

At home, Tiger read books on SEALs and watched the documentary about BUD/S Class 234 over and over. He played Call of Duty for hours straight, so into the fantasy that his friends joked that after Tiger got shot in the game they might find him dead on the couch. When he could, he spent time with real-life operators. Tiger shot guns, learned combat tactics and did free-fall skydiving with active-duty SEALs. During one trip to La Posta, he remembered things they’d told him about their families, asking about wives, things he didn’t do in the golf world; Mark O’Meara said Tiger never asks about his kids.

“If Tiger was around other professional athletes, storytelling would always have a nature of one-upmanship,” a friend says. “If Tiger was around some sort of active or retired military personnel, he was all ears. He was genuinely interested in what they had to say. Any time he told a military-related story that he had heard or talked about a tactic he had learned, he had a smile on his face. I can’t say that about anything else.”

One evening, Brown and two other guys put Tiger in the back seat of a king-cab pickup truck and drove him an hour and a half out into the desert to a training base named Niland, where a SEAL team was doing its final predeployment workup, staging a raid on a mock Afghan village that had been built down in a valley. They stood on a hill looking into the darkness. The SEAL platoon charged toward the position. Flares popped off, trailing into the darkness, and the valley rocked with the deep boom of artillery simulation and the chatter of small-arms fire. In the glow, Tiger looked transfixed. “It was f—ing awesome,” Brown says, laughing. “I don’t know if we just got a glimpse of him in a different light, but he just seemed incredibly humble, grateful.”

[...]

The moments with the military added some joy to what he has repeatedly called the worst year of his life, and he chose to spend Dec. 30, 2006 — his 31st birthday — in San Diego skydiving with SEALs. This was his second skydiving trip; a month earlier, in the middle of a seven-tournament win streak, he’d gotten his free-fall USPA A-license, now able to jump without a tandem. Across the country, in Florida, his reps put a news release on his website, revealing for the first time that Elin was pregnant. Tiger Woods was going to be a father.

Elin came with him to San Diego on his birthday, and they rode south and east of the city, near a land preserve a few miles from Mexico, halfway between Chula Vista and Tecate. The road curved at banked angles, and up ahead a small airport came into view. Nichol’s Field is a collection of maybe two dozen buildings. To the east of the property, a cluster of metal huts sat behind red stop signs: warning, restricted area. This was Tactical Air Operations, one of the places where the SEALs practice jumps. The main building felt like an inner sanctum: a SEAL flag on the wall and parachute riggings hung from the ceiling. They wore blue-and-white jumpsuits, Tiger and the three or four SEALs. He learned advanced air maneuvers. After each jump, the guys would tell Tiger what to do differently and he’d go off by himself for a bit to visualize the next jump and then go back up in the plane and dive into the air, doing everything they’d said. “The dude’s amazing,” says Billy Helmers, a SEAL who jumped with him that day. “He can literally think himself through the skydives.”

The SEALs put a birthday cake on a table in one of the Tac Air buildings. It had a skydiver decorated on it in icing and read “Happy Birthday, Tiger!” The team guys and their families gathered around and sang “Happy Birthday,” and then Tiger leaned in and blew out his candles. Everyone took pictures, and in them Tiger is smiling, and it’s not the grin that people know from commercials and news conferences. He looks unwatched and calm.

Comments

  1. Slovenian Guest says:

    The Class 234 thing is on YouTube!

  2. Kgaard says:

    Great stuff. Though apparently doing all this military training is what screwed up his back and made his knees worse. Interesting that he seemed to find joy in this moreso than in golf.

  3. Adar says:

    The father of Tiger was a Green Beret career soldier.

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