James Patterson deals mostly in fiction, of course, but the author of 114 New York Times bestsellers also has a growing number of biographies to his name. His diverse range of subjects includes an Egyptian child king (Tutankhamun); valiant ER nurses, combat veterans, and members of the police force; notorious newsmakers like Jeffrey Epstein, Aaron Hernandez, and Barry Slotnick (the attorney who represented Mafia boss John Gotti); and extremely prominent individuals such as Princess Diana and her sons William and Harry, John F. Kennedy and other members of his politically omnipresent family, and the great Beatles frontman, John Lennon.
The focus for his latest nonfiction work is Tiger Woods, whose accomplishments Patterson admires tremendously but whom he sees as something of a “tragic figure.”
A five-time-a-week golfer in Florida (at Emerald Dunes Club) who’s played since his high school days and is now a member at Sleepy Hollow in New York, the prolific Patterson has written close to 400 books and sold anywhere between 230 million and 425 million copies depending on whether you count collaborations and where you’re getting your information. His record for simultaneous writing projects stands at a frankly mind-boggling 31, and he keeps a binder full of ideas that’s three inches thick and which currently holds roughly 300 different plots, thoughts, and concepts.
“The idea for a Tiger Woods biography was in there for 20 years or more,” Patterson says. “I suppose I finally decided to act on it because recently I’ve been seeing a lot of Cameron Young, whose parents are friends of ours. So I’ve watched a lot of golf and the light went on about writing the Tiger book.”
It’s inevitable Patterson’s character study will be compared with those of Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian (Tiger Woods—2018), Curt Sampson (Roaring Back—2019), Michael Bamberger (The Second Life of Tiger Woods—2020), and Bob Harig (Drive—2024). All of them approach the task of profiling the game’s most newsworthy figure slightly differently with differing starting points, tones, sources of information, and formats (indeed, the subtitle for Tiger, Tiger is “His life as it’s never been told before”), and all of them win high marks for various reasons.
Tiger, Tiger will win many fans simply because Patterson wrote it, which means it comes from the mind of a born storyteller. Throughout its six parts (Prodigy, Amateur, Professional, Superstar, Family Man, and Comeback), 87 chapters, and 439 pages, the author weaves in all the most relevant and important moments, moving quickly from one to the next and citing dozens of sources, be it the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, ESPN, Golf Channel, Sports Illustrated, Golf Digest, etc.
It is incredibly thorough and must have involved a huge amount of research, and there will surely be quotes and facts that are new even to the most committed fan who’s spent the last 20 years reading everything they could find about Tiger Woods and tuning in to every telecast of which he’s been a part.
And it’s obviously the most up to date of the Woods biographies with the last chapter chronicling Tiger’s decision to leave Nike and create his own clothing label—Sun Day Red—then teeing it up in February’s Genesis Invitational at Riviera Country Club. The epilogue follows and mentions the win at the state high school championship his son’s (Charlie) team recorded in March, the announcement of Woods as Vice-Chairman of PGA Tour Enterprises, and the 15-time major champion’s performance in the Masters at Augusta National.
Where it loses marks, however, is in the absence of any editorializing. For much of his nonfiction work, Patterson has rightly been labeled a great reporter. And while the quality and sheer amount of reporting in Tiger, Tiger is enormously impressive, the lack of any opinion, first-hand experience, and theorizing is noticeable. Really, the only perceptible comment Patterson is making is silently though his choice of which “scenes,” as he calls them, to include (his favorite is when daughter Sam is crying and Tiger, who always had trouble sleeping, rocks her on his lap while doing leg exercises), the order in which he puts them (chronologically but with little or no cross-referencing), and which sources he decides to use. After a while, you may begin to miss it. You’re getting a heap of information, but not given the chance to agree or disagree with Patterson’s assertions, simply because he doesn’t make any.
A brief review on publishersweekly.com says Patterson “delivers a strangely detached biography of Tiger Woods, based entirely on previously published remarks from family, competitors, and others in the athlete’s orbit…Patterson’s overreliance on the perspectives of those who weren’t as close with Woods [as his father] creates an odd sense of remove as the book wears on…Accounts of Woods’s scandals, including 2009 revelations about his infidelity and his 2017 arrest for drunk driving, read more like recaps of contemporaneous media coverage than descriptions of the events themselves. This pales in comparison to Jeff Benedict’s Tiger Woods.”
There’s definitely some truth to that. Tiger, Tiger isn’t an insider’s look at Tiger Woods because Patterson isn’t an insider. This may be his fourth golf book (Miracle at St. Andrews—2019, Miracle at Augusta—2015, Miracle on the 17th Green—2012), but the previous three were fiction and, technically, he’s not a golf writer. He hasn’t attended any Tiger Woods press conferences or spoken with him one-to-one (very few writers/reporters ever get to speak with Woods, of course, but many, including the authors of the other biographies, certainly have attended many press conferences and taken part in media calls.) Patterson says the only time he’s ever met Woods, in fact, was in 2008 at a FedEx event in Chicago honoring Woods’s then caddie, Steve Williams.
Start reading expecting to see a lot of biting comment and searing analysis from a seasoned member of the golf media and Tiger, Tiger likely won’t do it for you. There will be many readers, though, for whom the mass of information is all they need.
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