Tiger Woods looms large for Rich Lerner.
The 65-year-old broadcaster joined the Golf Channel broadcast team in 1997 – just as Woods’ professional career was taking off into the stratosphere. Lerner has had the opportunity to witness Woods’ ups and downs throughout his three-decade tenure on the network.
On this week’s episode of Subpar, Lerner joined hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz to discuss his new, recently published book Aren’t you that golf guy? Lerner said he originally conceived the book as a “Tiger at 50” effort, but that changed after he added vignettes from his younger days that included stories and experiences from growing up on his father’s highway. Lerner describes the book as similar to an Instagram feed, with short chapters, some funny and some poignant. But Woods remains an anchor throughout.
“It was the biggest thing I’ve ever seen,” Lerner said of Woods’ highlight reel. “I talk about that in the book at length. It’s not just how he won, and he won fruitfully, it’s how he did it in the most unlikely of ways. But it’s a complicated saga, we know that. I’d say about a third of the book is Tiger, and chronologically the book kind of follows Tiger’s rise, his fall, and these are the stories of his comeback and his detours.”
Lerner said the best story he ever heard was that Tiger was like his peak came from an interview Lerner had with Ernie Els.
“I asked Ernie Els in 2010 — I sat down with Ernie on the eve of the 2011 US Open. So this is like 10 years, a decade after Tiger’s season for the ages, the three-major season of 2000, and I said, all these years later, how do you see Ernie’s influence, as a winner on me and Tiger? Seven, eight majors, he would definitely win a Masters. He had all, big elastic boy with soft hands.
And Ernie said to me, in that big South African accent, he said, ‘You know, around 2000, my father, he said to me, ‘Why don’t you stand up to that man?’ And I said to my father, I said, “You have no idea what we’re dealing with.” And Ernie wasn’t laughing when he said that, and he stopped me in my tracks.
“Think about it,” Lerner continued. “‘You have no idea what we’re dealing with,’ as if Tiger were a force of nature, like a tsunami, that couldn’t be dealt with. And, he was. I mean, they didn’t have an answer for the guy. They just didn’t have it.
For more from Lerner, including his thoughts on Phil Mickelson, watch the entire episode of Subpar below.
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