Drive Book Review

Drive Book Review

Drive: The Lasting Legacy of Tiger Woods
Grade: B/C/D ?
Teacher’s Comments: What you get from this book depends on your prior knowledge of Woods, but it was a missed opportunity.

on Amazon

Bob Harig’s Drive: The Lasting Legacy of Tiger Woods is three hundred pages of exhaustive examination of the latter years of Tiger’s legendary career. While the first fifteen years of Woods career were magical, beginning with the 2008 US Open, chinks in the armor began to appear with injuries, surgeries and scandals. Harig’s book examines these years in deep detail.

How much the reader will get out of Harig’s Drive will depends upon how closely they have followed golf news over the last fifteen years. Casual golf fans likely will find a lot to digest. Serious fans of the game likely will have heard or read much of it before.

For less informed readers, the book grades out as a “B.” It has a lot of information. Readers who are more immersed in PGA Tour news likely will find it repetitive; thus, the “D” part of the grade.

For my part, I was somewhere in-between: I already knew the story, but was interested by some of the quotes from those who know Tiger, played with Tiger, or simply were close observers. For that, I give it a “C.”

In some ways, the book reads a bit like a collection of articles Harig had already written on Tiger’s tournament. With all the descriptions of rounds and the pre- and post-tournament interviews, it struck me that Harig was reframing old material.

I feel as though a major opportunity was missed with this book. Harig could have used Woods’ story to conduct a deep examination of the concept of drive. Such a book would feature discussions with psychologists, religious leaders, philosophers, physicians and others about what drive means and where it comes from. Why do some keep going when others give up?

What drove Edison to plow through hundeds of failed experiments? What drove Michael Jordan to keep playing basketball after he failed to make his HS team? What made Abraham Lincoln run for President after losing a Senate race? What kept Ernest Shackleton going after getting marooned on Antarctic ice?

What does Tiger’s drive tell us about the human condition, and what can we learn from his stuggles?

Instead, we get a lot of throwaway references to Tiger’s drive, such as

And for a long time it seemed quite possible tha thhe last golf we would ever see Woods play occurred over the closing holes at the 2020 masters, a remarkable tiny sample that as much as any of his other exploits perfectly encapsulated his drive.

What is that drive, and why does Tiger have it? This book doesn’t get us any closer to the answer.