When I ask Smith about the trip, he corrects an error in Reilly’s retelling: He’d been in Rome, not Madrid. Let’s see what that’s like.’ Now he explores that too.” “When he explores it all, he says, ‘Wait a minute, there’s about eight inches between my ears. “He just wants to explore the world until there’s no inch left,” he says. He brought it up, still a bit awestruck by his friend after all these years. It wasn’t Smith who first shared the Castel Viscardo story. For a man engrossed by the distorting effects of fame on the superstar athlete, should we really be surprised he made the choices that he did? It’s telling that this is the Tiger that Smith saw. Each day there, even with all the best intentions, how can he help but be a little more removed from the world he’s supposed to change, and from his truest self?”
Before he knows it, he’s living in a walled community with an electronic gate and a security guard, where the children trick-or-treat in golf carts, a place like the one Tiger just moved into in Orlando to preserve some scrap of sanity. Before he knows it, a veil descends over his eyes when another stranger approaches. The machine will win, it has to win, because it makes everything happen before a man knows it. or the youth who has just entered its maw?” He tells the story of a child built to be the greatest, but more than that-built to be a historical figure of change, like Gandhi with a 9-iron.Īfter a section on the strange brew of Buddhism and Green Beret training that unleashed Tiger’s superhuman focus, Smith writes: In his prescient profile of a 20-year-old Tiger Woods, Smith asks the question: “Who will win? The machine. But he’s right there in each of his stories you can find him on the edge of the frame if you squint. How could you write millions of words and not reveal yourself as well? Smith spent a life on the edge of the limelight, remaining mostly invisible. And yet, when I asked, Smith admitted there is a bit of a ghost memoir in an oeuvre like the one he left at SI. Other writers speak of Smith’s ability to disappear, to be absent and allow the subject to be fully realized on the page.
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