On 13 April 1997 Tiger Woods putted his way to golfing history in Augusta, Georgia. The fact that he was the first black winner of the US Masters was not even half of it. At 21, he was the youngest; with a 12-stroke lead, he was the most emphatic; and finishing 18 under par, he was, quite simply, the best the world had ever seen.
But the fact that he was black explained much of the excitement. Golf in the US was never just a game. Long regarded as the bastion of the white, Christian and middle class, it was a gatekeeper to respectability and networking, open principally to local and national elites. Black players had been allowed to compete in the Masters in Augusta only since 1975. Until 1982, all the caddies in the tournament there had to be black. And until 1990, Augusta didn't allow black members and even then conceded only because, if they hadn't changed their policy, they would have lost the right to host the tournament....
...But within a fortnight of black America gaining a new sporting hero, it seemed as though they had lost him again. From the revered perch of Oprah Winfrey's couch, Woods was asked whether it bothered him being termed "African-American". "It does," he said. "Growing up, I came up with this name: I'm a 'Cablinasian'."
Woods is indeed a rich mix of racial and ethnic heritage. His father, Earl, was of African-American, Chinese and Native American descent. His mother, Kultida, is of Thai, Chinese and Dutch descent. "Cablinasian" was a composite of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian. When he was asked to fill out forms in school, he would tick African-American and Asian. "Those are the two I was raised under and the only two I know," he told Oprah. "I'm just who I am ... whoever you see in front of you."
It's not difficult to see where Woods was coming from or to sympathise with what he was saying. Few people relish having their identity reduced to tickable boxes. "By choosing to embrace all of who he is," argued Gary Kamiya in Salon.com, "an entity for which there is no name, except one that sounds like a tribe from the imaginary country of Narnia – Woods, the goofy 21-year-old with the golden-brown skin and the beautiful swing, has become a messenger for a larger truth: Our race does not make us who we are."
True. And yet, if that is the case, Woods' insistence represented not an advance but a retreat in our efforts to retire race as a restrictive category. For far from abolishing racial categories by coining "Cablinasian", he simply created a whole new category just for himself.
Some black Americans, not unreasonably, felt Woods was trying to write himself out of their story....