Earl Woods had a little boy called Tiger. He had two other sons and a daughter, by a previous marriage, but Earl didn't take so much interest in them. To put it mildly. It is safe to say that Earl was obsessed by his youngest child.

As time went on, his claims for Tiger became more and more extravagant.

Earl likened Tiger to Mahatma Gandhi and to Nelson Mandela. In 1996, Earl said of Tiger: "He's the bridge between east and west. . . he is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations."

Tiger plays golf. When the child was four, Earl placed him in professional coaching, one year after his son had appeared on a television show as, presumably, the world's smallest golfer.

Earl played the little boy tapes with subliminal messages, to strengthen him mentally. He mortgaged and remortgaged the family home (which had been bought because of its proximity to a golf course) in order to fund his plans for Tiger. And Tiger obliged. He won all before him. At 15 he became the youngest player ever to win the US Junior Championship. We won't talk about pressure exerted on a minor. Suffice it to say that the teenage Tiger had a habit of bursting into tears when he won.

Earl Woods was the youngest child of his father's 11 children, by two consecutive wives. His mother had a college education and later, when she had to work as a maid, Earl remembered that it broke her heart. Earl won a sports scholarship to university. His father was a black man, although Earl's grandmother was a knockout blonde. In the Woods family, there was a story that one of their grandparents was a Chinese worker who "didn't stay on his railroad job."

Earl's father loved baseball and Earl became the first black player on the circuit of midwestern colleges. As a black man he had to sleep separately from his fellow athletes when the team played away games. Later in life, when Earl became addicted to golf . . . the scourge of modern life . . . he attained a handicap of one.

But Earl was also an intelligent man, which cannot be said of all golfers. He joined the army and was decorated for bravery. He became the assistant of a South Vietnamese officer, a Colonel Phong. Colonel Phong saved Earl's life so many times that he nicknamed him Tiger. By the time Woods retired from the army he had become a lieutenantcolonel.

Earl called his youngest son Tiger from the moment he was born, although Tiger's mother, Tida, had christened him Eldric Tont. So from the beginning, as the cheapest psychoanalyst would say, Earl had decided that this boy was going to save his life, just as his namesake had done in Vietnam.

And here the tragedy, as laid out in the Daily Telegraph obituary of Earl Woods, comes full circle.

Earl was ill in 1996, the year that Tiger won the US Masters, at the age of 21.

Tiger's aunt Mae had the explanation for this triumph. "No one really understands why Tiger won that Masters so early and so fast, except Tiger and I do, " said Mae. "We thought Earl was going to die."

Earl and Tida began to live separately. It was Tida who attended the golf tournaments, alone. Earl watched on TV.

Tiger seems to have separated from his father and rarely visited his house.

And Earl's house is extraordinary, by his own account. "I have prepared this house so that it can be converted into a national historical museum one day. It is built to last . . . because I am certain that one day the birthplace of Tiger Woods is going to become widely acknowledged."