The Secret History of Tiger Woods
Outside of the golf course, it really seems that Tiger felt most comfortable using his superstar status to train with Navy SEALS.
Eventually, Woods learned how to clear a room, working corners and figuring out lanes of fire, doing something only a handful of civilians are ever allowed to do: run through mock gun battles with actual Navy SEALs. “He can move through the house,” says Ed Hiner, a retired SEAL who helped oversee training during the time and wrote a book called First, Fast, Fearless. “He’s not freaking out. You escalate it. You start shooting and then you start blowing s— up. A lot of people freak out. It’s too loud, it’s too crazy. He did well.”
At one point, Marshall put him through a combat stress shooting course, making him carry a 30-pound ammunition box, do overhead presses with it, do pushups and run up a hill, with shooting mixed in. Tiger struggled with slowing his heart rate down enough to hit the targets, but he attacked the course.
“He went all out,” Marshall said. “He just f—ing went all out.”
Marshall got his golf clubs at one point and asked Tiger to sign his TaylorMade bag. Tiger refused, sheepishly, saying he couldn’t sign a competing brand. So Marshall challenged him to a driving contest for the signature. Both Marshall and Brown confirmed what happened next: Tiger grinned and agreed. Some other guys gathered around a raised area overlooking the shooting range. Marshall went first and hit a solid drive, around 260 or 270 yards. Tiger looked at him and teed up a ball, gripping the TaylorMade driver.
Then he got down on his knees.
He swung the club like a baseball bat and crushed one out past Marshall’s drive. Tiger started laughing, and then all the SEALs started laughing, and eventually Marshall was laughing too.
“Well, I can just shoot you now and you can die,” Marshall joked, “or you can run and die tired.”
Today, Woods held a demo for Golfweek Junior Tour and is seen hitting golf balls publicly since late February.
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