10 things you didn’t know about Tiger Woods

There’s still one name that comes to mind before all others in the golf world, and it’s Tiger Woods. Although his chase for the career majors lead has slowed, Woods is synonymous with greatness on the course. We’ll take a swing through ten facts about the golfing great that you may not have known before.

Besides an unrelenting competitive desire, what really fuels Tiger Woods on the golf course? The answer might surprise many. Woods loves to bite into peanut butter and banana sandwiches on the course, as captured by Bleacher Report.

Woods told Golf’s website, “I tend to lose weight when I play. Every time I play, I lose three to four pounds per tournament.” It makes sense that he would have to compensate for the energy he’s burning.

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Woods told CBS News, “People probably don’t realize it, but I was raised a Buddhist, and I actively practiced my faith from childhood.”

With that said, the golfing legend admitted that he strayed away from the fundamental principles of the religion as he got older. He told CBS News, “Buddhism teaches that a creation of things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously, I lost track of what I was taught.”

Tiger Woods has won the Masters five times, so golf fans are used to seeing him don the traditional green jackets that Masters winners get to wear. However, some may not realize that Woods doesn’t actually get to keep any of them.

The Masters is one of the most respected tournaments in sports, and there are a lot of traditions and customs associated with it. One of them is that only the current Masters champion can take the green jacket off of the course, but that they must return it once a new winner is crowned the following year. News Nation dug deeper into the prestige of the Masters in April 2023.

TGL stands for TMRW Golf League, and is a new venture launched by Woods, Rory McIlroy and Mike McCarley. Woods and his co-founders spent eight long years setting the stage for its ultimate debut in 2025.

TGL matches are played in indoor arenas, and take advantage of golf simulation technology. As reported by ESPN, Woods uses a golf simulator at home to hone his skills, so he was very familiar with the possibility of using the technology to expand the sport.

It’s often said that it’s great to start children on the track of playing sports early, but Woods start playing golf not long after he was born. He started swinging a golf club at just two years old, as Golf’s website notes.

It wasn’t just in the back of his childhood home, either. Tiger Woods appeared on the Mike Douglas Show with his father when he was two, and dazzled the world with what he could do at such a young age.

Essentially Sports tracked Woods’ answers during a rapid fire question and answer session in 2021. When he was asked what his favorite movie was, he responded “there’s only one, that’s Caddyshack.”

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It’s understandable that one of the greatest golfers of all time would fall in love with arguably the greatest golfing film ever. Woods also appeared in a commercial which parodied the movie.

For multiple decades, Woods and Nike were peanut butter and… banana sandwiches. Something just made sense with the premier golfer of his generation joining forces with the iconic apparel brand. However, it’s often said that all good things must come to an end, and the breakup happened in January 2024.

Not long after leaving Nike, Woods launched his own brand in a partnership with Taylormade, as CNN reported.

The brand that Woods ultimately launched was called Sun Day Red, which is a nod to his tendency to wear the color during the final day of tournaments. He told Bunkered, “I wear red on Sundays because my mom thinks that is my power color. You know, you should always listen to your mom.”

Woods didn’t just wear the same exact red shirt every single Sunday of his tournaments. ESPN broke down the different shades of red he’s won throughout his career when he’s won, going into whether the shirts were light red or dark red.

According to Greg Garber of ESPN, Woods is one-quarter Thai, one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter Caucasian, one-eighth African-American and one-eighth Native American.

His mother Tida Woods told ESPN, “I have taught him since he was young, his heritage and where he comes from. So he knows who he is. And those people who don’t accept that, it’s their problem.”

His birth name is Eldrick Tont Woods, but of course no one calls him that. The legendary Tiger nickname was bestowed upon him by his father, who had a friend who was known as Tiger.

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Earl Woods served in the US Army, and became close friends with Colonel Vuong Dang Phong. Unfortunately, Phong never met Tiger Woods before his passing, but Earl Woods told Golf Digest, “Phong would be totally flabbergasted by Tiger, completely blown away. He would view him as his own son. He wouldn’t know a damned thing about golf, but it wouldn’t be necessary. He would be so proud and so happy.”