Playing Through
Though Tiger Woods has found himself deep in the rough over the past several months, his charitable arm, The Tiger Woods Foundation, including Orange County's Tiger Woods Learning Center, is still right on par.
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Step Up to the Tee |
Sometimes people who do truly great things make truly great mistakes. And sometimes, just sometimes, the rest of us can separate the two.
Fortunately for 15,000 Orange County kids, everyone from corporate bigwigs at Target and AT&T to dedicated local teachers and parents, did just that in the past few months as gossip swirled about one of the greatest icons of sport: Tiger Woods. Woods is also one of the greatest givers this county has ever seen. Consider that the Tiger Woods Learning Center in Anaheim helps thousands of children each year reach their full potential and that it’s all due to Woods’s commitment from the start of his career to “give back” and help kids. It’s great work – such great work, in fact, that during this time of turmoil in Woods’s private life, the Learning Center, along with the national Tiger Woods Foundation itself, has not had a single defector. Not one corporate sponsor, staff member, parent, or school has withdrawn its support from the charitable organization (this despite a few pulling their support from Tiger as an athlete). Perhaps no fact speaks louder for the good work being done at the Learning Center.
That work started in 1996, the year Tiger went pro and he and his father Earl founded the Tiger Woods Foundation. “The main goal was a vision Tiger and Earl shared to help the world’s youth reach their potential,” says Greg McLaughlin, who became the foundation’s director in 1999 when Earl transitioned from the day-to-day running of the behemoth and took on more of a visionary role. McLaughlin met Tiger in 1991 when, as director of the Los Angeles Open PGA tournament, he saw the then 15-year-old amateur’s obvious potential as a golfer and allowed him to play the event. McLaughlin, who describes himself as an average golfer, was by contrast a superb not-for-profit organization leader and had kept in constant contact with the Woods family. So when the opportunity came along for McLaughlin to head their charitable organization, the decision was as easy as a 12-inch putt. “I looked at it as a great opportunity,” he says. “Here you have this iconic golf figure that is playing the game literally around the world. What a great chance to then take his philanthropic vision to people worldwide. Of course, I also looked at it as a challenge.”
But by all means, he and the 60 current staff members and 40-odd board members have met the challenge. When McLaughlin took the reins in 1999, the foundation’s assets were about one million dollars. “As of the end of the 2009 fiscal year, our total assets were about $125 million,” he says with an earned note of pride.
And it seems he has survived the most recent PR challenge as well, with the foundation, and especially the 2006-built, 35,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art Tiger Woods Learning Center (TWLC) continuing business as usual. Every day two specialized programs serve Orange County junior high and high school students from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., non-stop. During school hours, entire fifth-grade classes come with their teachers for hands-on experiences in forensic science and marine biology. At 2 p.m., kids from around the county come for after-school programs such as aerospace rocketry, forensic science, filmmaking, robotics, video game creation, and a host of other career-oriented classes. They also have golf clinics and a mobile golf “class” that interacts with 6,000 kids a year alone.
“We set out to help kids, particularly junior high and high school kids, make more meaning out of what they’re learning in school by giving them a real hands-on learning experience through career exploration and college preparation,” says TWLC Executive Director Kathy Bihr, who was the center’s first employee and, with an Ed.D. in education and experience as a school principal, had a huge hand in shaping the programs. “We’re trying to help kids build relevancy between what they’re learning in school and how it applies to their future.”
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Reaching for the Stars
It’s certainly true that Woods, his personal transgressions aside, is the perfect example of breaking stereotypes and achieving your highest potential. After all, is there another sport that was so dominated by gentrified white males before he came along? True, he was not your typical inner city African American with a gift. But it’s also true that choosing golf as a career at a time when some private courses still silently shunned minorities was dreaming big to say the least. But Woods silenced all doubters by becoming the greatest golfer of his generation, winning 14 majors (so far), becoming the first and only African American to win The Masters and being 2008’s highest paid athlete at $110 million. That’s called attaining your goals and then some.
And though there is a golf academy with two instructors on staff, golf is surprisingly not the favorite program at TWLC. “We have some staples that are pretty popular,” says Bihr. “Aerospace rocketry tends to be pretty popular. Filmmaking class is pretty popular. Then, coming in a close third, is the video game design class.”
A big reason why they are so popular is that from day one the vision of TWLC was to show – as opposed to tell – kids what careers were open to them. Especially the underserved kids from the community, of which unfortunately, there are a lot. In fact, roughly 80% of the elementary children served by TWLC are from families officially under the federal poverty income level. “A big challenge for kids that come from underprivileged backgrounds is their lack of opportunity to learn about life outside the block that they live on,” says Bihr. “We really wanted to give them an opportunity to identify what they’re interested in, recognize their own potential and explore things they never considered were possibilities for their future. So, we’ve never skimped in our attempt to give them an authentic experience with the real tools you would use in the workplace.”
So, for instance, in the rocketry class, the kids not only learn the math and engineering, they apply it by building miniature rockets and blasting them off. In the marine biology classes they dissect things; in forensic science they gather and study fingerprints and a host of other cool stuff it’s likely they are simultaneously viewing on “CSI: Miami.” In the filmmaking class, they make films; in the video game design class, they create sophisticated games with solid storylines and cool graphics. “If you and I had this opportunity when we were young, imagine how much better positioned we would be to take off on a career path and not end up taking classes that we’ll never use or getting stuck in a dead-end career that we had no intention of being in,” says Bihr.
Life Lessons
It’s not by accident that the after-school teens must fill out an application, provide report cards and write a personal essay, either. “It’s meant to mimic a small college campus. We give the kids a taste of what it would be like to be an electrical engineer, a rocket scientist, a forensic specialist, or a whole host of other careers,” says Bihr. “But basically, if we did nothing else but help kids discover how to find information and understand their own strengths and how they can use them in their future, it would be worthwhile.”
“We’re extremely proud of the work that we’ve done and all of the people that have been involved have been very supportive of our mission,” says McLaughlin. “They all believe in our work and that is ultimately what carried us through [the recent scandal]. Everyone landed on the point that the work’s important, it’s meaningful, and we need to continue to support our mission and move forward.”
Bihr simply adds, “We believe in the work and believe in the kids. And that’s been a pretty good mantra for us going forward.”
Of course, for Woods personally, like it or not, fairly or not, in today’s all-access world, premier athletes and their legacies are ultimately judged on three tiers: what they do competitively, what they do publicly and what they do privately. Many would argue that the third is none of the public’s business. The fact is that the kid who turns a dream into a reality at the Tiger Woods Learning Center or who garners a college scholarship, or who merely starts to believe he or she really can be anything they want really doesn’t give a triple bogie about the third. That in itself is a good life lesson.
