Eldrick Tont "Tiger" Woods (born December 30, 1975)[4][5] is an American professional golfer whose achievements to date rank him among the most successful golfers of all time. Formerly the World No. 1,
he is the highest-paid professional athlete in the world, having earned
an estimated US$90.5 million from winnings and endorsements in 2010.[6][7]
Woods has won 14 professional major golf championships, the second highest of any male player (Jack Nicklaus leads with 18), and 72 PGA Tour events, third all time behind Sam Snead and Nicklaus.[8] He has more career major wins and career PGA Tour wins than any other active golfer does. He is the youngest player to achieve the career Grand Slam,
and the youngest and fastest to win 50 tournaments on tour.
Additionally, Woods is only the second golfer, after Jack Nicklaus, to
have achieved a career Grand Slam three times. Woods has won 16 World Golf Championships, and won at least one of those events in each of the first 11 years after they began in 1999.
Woods held the number one position in the world rankings for the most consecutive weeks and for the greatest total number of weeks of any other golfer. He has been awarded PGA Player of the Year a record ten times,[9] the Byron Nelson Award for lowest adjusted scoring average a record eight times, and has the record of leading the money list in nine different seasons.
From December 2009 to early April 2010, Woods took leave from professional golf to focus on his marriage after he admitted infidelity. His multiple infidelities were revealed by several different women, through many worldwide media sources.[10]
In October 2010, Woods lost the world number one ranking; his ranking gradually fell to a low of #58 in November 2011.[7][11] He snapped a career-long winless streak of 107 weeks when he captured the Chevron World Challenge in December 2011.[11] As of March 26, 2012, he is ranked #6.[12] His victory at the 2012 Arnold Palmer Invitational was his first on the PGA Tour since September 2009, after a drought of 132 weeks.
Woods was born Eldrick Tont Woods in Cypress, California, to Earl
(1932–2006) and Kultida (Tida) Woods (born 1944). He is the only child
of their marriage, but does have two half-brothers, Earl Jr. (born 1955)
and Kevin (born 1957), and a half-sister, Royce (born 1958) from the
18-year marriage of Earl Woods and his first wife, Barbara Woods
Gray.[13] Earl, a retired lieutenant colonel and Vietnam War veteran, was of mixed African American, Chinese, and Native American ancestry. Kultida (née Punsawad), originally from Thailand (where Earl had met her on a tour of duty in 1968), is of mixed Thai, Chinese,
and Dutch ancestry. This makes Woods himself half Asian (one-quarter
Chinese and one-quarter Thai), one-quarter African American, one-eighth
Native American, and one-eighth Dutch.[14] He refers to his ethnic make-up as "Cablinasian" (a syllabic abbreviation he coined from Caucasian, Black, American Indian, and Asian).[15]
Woods' first name, Eldrick, was coined by his mother because it began
with "E" (for Earl) and ended with "K" (for Kultida). His middle name
Tont is a traditional Thai name. He was nicknamed Tiger in honor of his
father's friend Col. Vuong Dang Phong, who had also been known as Tiger.[16]
Woods has a niece, Cheyenne Woods, who is an amateur golfer on Wake Forest University's golf team.[17]
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