Woods grew up in Orange County, California. He was a child prodigy who was introduced to golf before the age of two by his athletic father Earl Woods. Earl was a single-digit handicap amateur golfer who also was one of the earliest African-American college baseball players at Kansas State University.Training a Tiger: Raising a Winner in Golf and in Life, by Earl Woods and Pete McDaniel, 1997. Woods told reporters he had wanted to be a baseball player like his father but abandoned that goal after tearing his rotator cuff. His father was a member of the military and had playing privileges at the Navy golf course beside the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos, which allowed Tiger to play there. Tiger also played at the par 3 Heartwell golf course in Long Beach, as well as some of the municipals in Long Beach.
