The five African-American women on Spelman College's golf team learned to play in the Tiger Woods era. The majority were mentored by their fathers, as Woods was. They chose a college that expects them to change the world, as Woods did. They expect their generation to break down barriers like the men-only membership at Augusta National, the stage for Woods’ return.
These five will watch the Masters this week and take mental notes. Woods’ return from his spectacular downfall helps them walk their own high wire as achievers.
Last week, they talked before practice at Charlie Yates Golf Course at East Lake, where Masters founder Bobby Jones learned the game.
The actress wears two hats
“It’s unfortunate and sad what Tiger did, but it has nothing to do with how I look up to him as a golfer," said Joy Brunson, 21, a senior from Houston, who bonded through golf with her pro baseball player dad, Eddie Brunson. "It’s important to keep those two parts of life separate, but unfortunately the media won’t let us.”
Like many Spelman students, Brunson is all about juggling roles. She fits daytime golf practice around evening play rehearsals.
Her character in last weekend’s “The Bluest Eye” struggles to find beauty in her own skin. In real life, Brunson’s identity comes from staying honest, a necessity in golf, a game in which players call their own penalties.
“I’m not a basher of Tiger Woods. He didn’t make any pretense to me,” said Brunson, who plans to pursue a masters in acting at Columbia University. “But with the big deals he signed comes the responsibility for his own image.”
Woods hasn’t tarnished anything for her about the sport. She looks to Africa for the future, hoping one day to set up a golf school in Ghana.
“You don’t know where the next great golfer will come from,” she said.
A future attorney values integrity
Senior Sarah Jones, 22, a political science major, met Woods when she was 9 at a putting clinic in her hometown of Memphis. She met his father, Earl Woods, at a convention. She is in contact with Tiger’s niece Cheyenne, who plays golf at Wake Forest.
After many summers of incremental improvement, Jones posted 76, her best score. It was a tipping point comparable to “all the small decisions [Woods] made that led up to his private downfall,” she said.
She’s banking that the discipline and mental toughness from golf prepared her well for law school.
“If anything, what I have learned from golf is a sense of integrity,” she said. “If I put my name on it and commit to it, I will continue to deal with it 100 percent. I will make sure it’s a great decision for me, my path and goals and dreams. I’ve always been independent, but I want to keep positive people around me so we can benefit each other.”
A global eye on race and privacy
Lauren Sprott, 22, a senior from New Jersey, sees current events enmeshed in the context of race in America.
“Clearly after the health care reform debate and hearing all the words flying around, even the n-word, we don’t live in a post-racial world in any way, shape or form,” she said.
She picked up golf in a class at Spelman, to use as a business skill while learning Mandarin, going to grad school and landing a job in international affairs.
Like golf, her profession is dominated by white men. As a minority, she expects obstacles. As a kid, Sprott couldn’t swim at a nearby country club because members frowned on black kids at their pool.
“I’m not the first individual this happened to and it’s not the last time it will happen,” she said. “I don’t look forward to it happening again, but I understand that people came before me had a harder time and bore a greater brunt than I will bear.”
The moral to Woods’ downfall echoes on Spelman’s 2,000-student campus: When the private becomes public, repairing one’s image can appear nearly impossible.
“Spelman emphasizes to us, don’t do anything in private that you don’t want to be public," Sprott said. "If Tiger wanted to sleep around with a lot of women, he shouldn’t have gotten married. You have to be true to the image you give out to the world.”
Freshman focuses amid the fishbowl
Afton Lane, 18, of Katy, Texas, admires Woods for all of his golf success “and everything he’s overcome, like his father’s death.” She learned to play golf from her father, too.
Woods’ concentration amazes her even more now that she knows Woods “blocked so many things out of his head, even so many things going on at home.”
She wants focus like that, to toggle easily between golf and playing point guard for the Jaguars’ basketball team. Spelman gives no athletic scholarships, so Lane plays both games purely out of love for competition. She sees herself as a coach one day: “I’d like to help someone else with the potential to be great.”
Coaches must be responsible adults and Woods reminds her that misbehavior can be instantly transmitted.
“I feel that at my school, I am constantly being watched,” Lane said. “People can take photos and put them on Facebook or YouTube very quickly. The risks are higher. I don’t plan on acting on impulse.”
An activist, a media travesty
Meghan Wilson, 21, a junior from Southfield, Mich., wants to “uplift people in my community” and credits Woods with doing that through golf. “He made golf his life and tries to bring people into it who normally wouldn’t be playing.”
That includes Wilson. She sees no other parallels with Woods because he, as part Asian and Native American, doesn’t call himself black.
She does observe this truth in him: “The personal is always political. The decisions made in the limelight are going to be judged. There are things he could have done differently and better.”
The media's relentless pursuit of Woods makes them an accomplice to any future letdowns, Wilson said.
“I’ll watch the Masters to see how he comes back,” she said. “If he fails, it will be a travesty of the media to ruin a great man and bring him down into the hoi polloi. ... He fell from glory, but he is entitled to privacy.”
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