Out of anything you’ll see in Tiger, HBO’s two-part documentary about golf legend Tiger Woods, the images that’ll surprise you most won’t be the ones you’re familiar with. Not the car crash. Not the mugshot. Nothing from 20 years of Nike commercials. Instead, Tiger’s most revealing moments come from a dusty, old VHS tape Woods’s first girlfriend, Dina Carvell, gave to Tiger’s directors, Matthew Hamachek and Matthew Heineman. “I remember sitting in the edit room when we popped that in,” remembers Hamachek. “My first thought was, No one has ever seen this side of Tiger Woods.”This mysterious, previously-unknown side of Tiger Woods? It’s the guy as a teenager—before rising, falling, and rising again—playing the air saxophone in a cramped living room, surrounded by a group of friends cheering him on. In other words: the side of Tiger Woods he had to put away in order to become Tiger Woods. The fun-loving, innocent, carefree kid from sunny California. Showing Woods during the rare moments the American public didn’t see him is part of what makes Tiger so special. It’s thanks to Heineman and Hamachek, who saw an untold story in detailing the way American media tore him down after his sex scandals in the late ’00s—and how eager they were to lift him back up when he won the Masters in 2019.Over the course of its two parts, the last of which debuts on HBO Sunday night, Tiger also explores Woods’s complicated relationship with his father, Earl, and the people the… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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