It’s a sunny day in Southern California. At One Tiger Woods Way, four miles north of Disneyland in Anaheim,
dozens of kids are streaming down a tree-lined path into an enormous glass and sandstone building called the TGR Learning Lab.
Many of them don’t fully understand who Tiger Woods is, although they see his name etched on the side of the building.
They don’t hear much about him on TV and they’re too young to remember him in his prime.
Many of the kids don’t really know who Tiger Woods is, although they see his name etched on the side of the building.
After school, hundreds of low-income middle and high school students from the area come to this center by bus to take part in STEM-based activities.
At the start of the academic year, the Tiger Woods Foundation reaches out to local parents, inviting them to enroll their kids in the program. It’s entirely free of charge, apart from the $5 fee to create an I.D. card.
Many of these children come from underfunded public schools where science classes are 45-minutes long and often don’t provide opportunities to complete experiments. But here at the Lab, a student might express interest in rockets and have the opportunity to build a water bottle rocket from scratch, then use those learnings to design an even more complex rocket, whose flight path can be manipulated. Kids who come to the center have explored topics as wide-ranging as oceanography, video production, and robotics.
“Now kids have a place to call home,” Tiger Woods told me about a month ago, over coffee in the West Village. “They have a place that is safe and a place to learn.” But can his foundation, built entirely around his celebrity (and celebrity earnings) be turned into a legacy that will last beyond him?
Woods was only 20 years old when he founded the foundation with his father, Earl Woods. This year, as Tiger Woods turned 40, the foundation celebrated its 20th anniversary.
The charity began as a simple junior golf clinic where Woods, a rare person of color in an overwhelmingly white sport, introduced the basics of the game to inner city kids. But everything changed in 2001, right after the events of September 11. At the time, he was slated to play at the American Express Championship in St. Louis which was eventually cancelled. “As I was driving home on the 13th, I thought, “What if I was in that building?” Woods recalls. “What would happen to this Foundation? It would be gone because it depended so much on me physically hitting the golf ball.”
This was an important turning point. Until then, much like other celebrities, Woods saw the foundation as another way to boost his fame and build his brand. But in the wake of the national tragedy, it dawned on him that his wealth and global recognition would allow him to create something that could make a serious impact on the world. It could become a legacy to leave behind long after his days as a golf superstar were behind him. Ironically, though, this plan would only work if he became less central to the foundation’s mission, so that he would not need to be physically present for the work to move forward. Woods began to envisioned his foundation as a hub for STEM education to kids from underprivileged communities.
The foundation has provided something for Woods to focus on during times of crisis. In 2006, the same year his father passed away, Woods opened the ambitious 35,000-square-foot Learning Lab in Anaheim. As Woods dealt with the unraveling of his personal life after widely publicized affairs and coped with devastating physical injuries, the foundation seemed to loom even larger in his universe, giving him a positive way to channel his energies. His current goal is to broaden the scope of its impact to serve millions of children annually.
Today, Woods is by far the Foundation’s biggest donor. The other big chunk of the Foundation’s $8 million budget comes from putting on PGA golf competitions and other events where Woods makes an appearance. Many of these events are also underwritten by corporate sponsors such as AT&T, Deutsche Bank, and Rolex, although some revenue comes from attendees who pay anywhere from $50 to see Woods play on the golf course to $10,000 to hang out with him on poker night. “We find that people may not know what the Tiger Woods Foundation does, but they certainly know Tiger Woods and that certainly opens doors,” say Rick Singer, the Foundation’s president and CEO.
The lab, buzzing with excited students eager to learn, is exactly what Woods had in mind back in the days after 9/11. Back then, STEM wasn’t the buzzword that it has become today, but Woods chose to make this the focus of his charity because he felt it would reflect a facet of his own identity. He’s very keen on math, physics, and chemistry. “I’ve always been a science nerd,” he tells me with a grin. “Golf is an extension of me, but there is another part of me: the science part.”
For years, he spent every moment not consumed with golf trying to learn new scientific concepts. As a college student majoring in Economics at Stanford, he remembers taking a six-person astrophysics course where the material seemed, at first, to go way over his head. But he was determined to take everything in. “I had to suck it up,” Woods says. “With six people, there was to where to hide. I had to do more work than anybody else: there were only two problem sets for the entire week but it would take me between 48 and 54 hours to do it.”
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Source: New York Post
