Tiger Woods' ethnicity - 2 May 1997

With superhuman restraint – or what some listeners seem to regard as startling sensibility – a week or two ago, when all America was hearing about the first black man to break into major league baseball, I said nothing about the 21-year-old black man the whole world was talking about breaking into big-time golf.

I have never yet, in these talks, mentioned the name of Eldrick "Tiger" Woods. Two weeks ago, the omission was deliberate. I rush to say that this is not going to be a talk about golf. Too tiny an audience for that.

From time to time, I check the conventional wisdom about this and that against the available scientific evidence. And there is a sports statistical bureau; its last national survey revealed that only just over 6% of Americans ever play golf, read about golf, watch golf. And the figures are, if anything, bleaker for England and the other English-speaking countries so, say that at most, 94 English speakers in 100 have never heard of Ben Hogan or old Tom Morris or Harry Vardon or Jack Nicklaus.

The astonishing exception is that for the first time in the history of the game, it seems that about half the human race has heard about a golfer, Tiger Woods. In the past couple of weeks, the most unlikely people who wouldn't know the difference between Chilli Dipping and chilli con carne, or even between a Mid-Iron and a midwife, are crooning, "Wasn't it wonderful about Tiger Woods?"

Why I never mentioned him in the talk about Jacky Robinson's bravery, and the social ordeal he suffered for several years, was that coupling the two names tended to imply a false comparison, which was elaborated on in every other paper and every television network. The implication that, whereas Robinson had broken the colour line in baseball, Tiger Woods had done the same in golf. This is quite false.

On that famous Sunday there were old black men looking on with pride who were retired after 20 or 30 years in professional golf on the white tour. And two of them, at least years ago, had played in the Masters, more than once. Of course, the thing about Tiger Woods was his winning the Masters in such a spectacular fashion and being the first black man to do so, not to mention the relentless promotion that his sponsors are putting on.

After all, when you pay out $40million to a man to wear a shoe and another 20 million to hit a particular ball, you expect a lot. Even before Tiger's triumphant last round, there was shown, on the telly, a one-hour glorification – commercial, it really was – which exploited the effect a win was going to have on the black community.

After a collage of Tiger Woods driving, chipping, putting, winning, it showed a parade of little black boys, some girls, saying, chanting in turn, "I'm Tiger Woods! I'm Tiger Woods!" You could see from the gleam in their dark eyes that they meant to learn golf and go onwards and upwards and maybe they too, the day after they turn pro, can bag a sponsor, two sponsors, with a collective promise of $60million. Those happy faces with their proud little recitations formed, for me, the saddest image, memory, of the day.

This has happened before. After the emergence of every star basketball player, every black city slum came alive with a square of bare ground and an iron hoop and a clutch of small black boys practising, practising, endlessly at throwing the ball in from every angle. Many black boys, many more blacks than whites, saw basketball as the blessed escape from poverty.

Of course, what it is heartbreaking even to hint to them is that not one boy in 200,000 will ever make it. Though it costs very little indeed to rig up a hoop on a patch of raw ground, but where are they going to get and buy and have access to a 130 acres to play on? The disillusion will set in next year, or the one after.

Like the day after uhuru, the day of freedom for an old colony which is celebrated with bands by day and firecrackers by night. Next day, having knocked down the old regime, they have the awful job of building a new one.

Still, one thing is for sure. There'll be a spectacular increase in the number of black boys, and I do mean boys, teenagers, who begin to infest the public courses in America. And people who still believe golf is an exclusively country club, rich man's game, should know that 65% of all the golf courses in America are public courses.

Well, now, to move on to related matters that will affect American society much more in the long run than the professional fate of a talented black college boy who decided, after winning the national amateur for the third time, to turn pro. An old friend of mine wrote to Tiger to stay on for his last two years at Stamford University. "You will find", my friend wrote, "that nothing can be more enriching than two more years of university life". Well, the shoe and golf-ball manufacturers saw to that.

So, we now take up with no relish the howling gaffe of a most agreeable man. A famous golfer. An attractive and funny man. It is the custom for the winner of the Masters to choose the menu at next year's dinner of the ex-champions which is held on the Wednesday evening before the tournament begins on Thursday.

Dear old, easy-going, Fuzzy Zoeller, himself a Masters champion, said, in walking off after talking with a reporter or two, he said – and here again, he was the victim of the new fact all public men should be alive to, a television camera and a microphone – so there, for all the world to see and hear in about five seconds, was our old, easy-going pal, Fuzzy Zoeller, saying, "Maybe he'll pick fried chicken and collard greens."

Collard greens is a cabbage dish, derivative of kale or cole, a favourite dish among black families. "Thank God", a friend of mine said, "at least he didn't mention water melon" After a day or two, when the whole country had seen that little scene, Fuzzy's national sponsor, which had kept him in secure millions for half a dozen years, dropped him like a brick. He read aloud, with evident humility, an apology. But apologising for a condescending joke about blacks is today no help whatever. It's been done. The mind set, as they say, was there.

You can still make jokes about Scotsmen, about the Irish, about rabbis and priests – most stupid jokes used to be about Poles, but have gone underground since a Pole turned into a pope. I run into people who still make faint jokes about Englishmen. They don't even guess that the English they have in mind were stage creations of about 70 years ago. They say things like, "Jolly good, what?" and "Ripping, eh!"

You can still tell Japanese jokes. In New York, Jewish jokes, provided they're told by Jews. I suppose Jacky Mason is the last of the old vaudevillians who has an entire act of kidding, ridiculing, belittling, his friends and family and every other type of Jew of his acquaintance.

But you can no longer, anywhere, make a halfway public joke about blacks. Public sensitivity on this matter gets more touchy every day. By now, we are never quite certain what to call them. First, well into and beyond the mid-century, Negro was absolutely correct both in speech and in writing. Going along with it was the word coloured. In 1951, I remember, an old friend on the staff of my paper, in fact, the London editor of The Guardian, visited me for a week here. It was his only visit, and he went on a night-time radio show. I listened in. At one point, he said to the MC, "Well, how do the blacks feel about it?" There was an intake of breath from the studio audience like an oncoming whirlwind. I was appalled. When he came home, I said, "Good God, man! Did you think you were in Africa?" He was, in his turn, appalled.

But only about a dozen years later, after the integration ruling of the Supreme Court and the civil rights marches, leaders like the Reverend Jesse Jackson were chanting as a mantra, "Black is beautiful!" And we whites learned that "negro" was offensive, "coloured" was now patronising, and we'd better switch to "black". Which we did. And now, I suspect, that black is on its way out. In newspapers, magazines, in discussions on the telly, in every sort of public discourse, from the most august to the most humble – talks with the homeless, say – "African-American" is now the term of choice.

And now Tiger Woods with his abrupt, vast fame has further complicated the problem. His mother doesn't like him to be called black because she is a Thai, once known as Siamese. Her marriage was a wartime Vietnamese romance with a black soldier, an American soldier. His family claims some white blood and some American-Indian blood. Which, incidentally, you must now call Native American. So Tiger precisely defines himself as Afro-Asian-American-Indian and white. Which surely is too much for a passport? And how about the census? The Census Bureau is getting ready for the 1990 count and is worried about the standard terms, Caucasian, Hebrew. Used to be "coloured", it's now "African-American". Asian, so on.

A congressman has introduced a bill to try and solve, or simplify, the whole ethnic linguistic social problem by having a code which, for purposes of the next census, divides everybody into white or multicultural. Not multi-racial. Multicultural. Can you imagine? The millions of youngsters of every colour and race and religion just loving to be known as "multi-cultural". That's going nowhere.

In the meantime, if we're all going to be precise about how we should be described on our passport, I want to be put down as white, Anglo-Irish, Scottish, Protestant. On the other hand, you could just call me "whitey!"

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