A00009 - Kultida Woods, Mother of Tiger Woods
Kultida Woods, Mother of Tiger Woods, Dies at 78
A frequent presence in her son’s public life, she stood by his side during a period of scandal that took him away from golf.
Kultida Woods, whose guidance and support helped propel her son, the professional golfer Tiger Woods, to become one of his sport’s most dominant athletes, died on Tuesday. She was 78.
Mr. Woods announced the death on social media. He did not cite a cause or say where she died.
“She was my biggest fan, greatest supporter,” he wrote; “without her none of my personal achievements would have been possible.”
Ms. Woods was a frequent presence in her son’s public life, whether attending his tournaments or standing by his side during a period of scandal that took him away from the sport. Mr. Woods spoke often about his mother’s role in his career.
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“I didn’t do this alone,” he said in a speech in 2024, accepting the Bob Jones Award from the United States Golf Association. “I had the greatest rock that any child could possibly have: my mom.”
Kultilda Punsawad was born in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, on Sept. 30, 1946, and met Earl Woods in the country when she was a secretary in Bangkok and he was on a military assignment. (The elder Mr. Woods died in 2006.)
During his acceptance speech at the 2022 World Golf Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Tiger Woods credited his parents with providing him an early start in the sport he came to dominate.
He said that when he was 6 years old, his mother took him to a golf course in Long Beach, Calif., and asked employees there: “Can my son play here and practice a little bit?”
He recalled that when he was 8, she would drop him off at the entryway to the golf course and give him 75 cents to buy a hot dog and use the pay phone to call when he was ready for her to pick him up.
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In the speech, Mr. Woods said that when he was about 14, his family struggled to afford the costs of his golf tournaments. His voice broke as he recalled the sacrifices his mother had made to make it work. Ms. Woods, in the audience, smiled up at him.
Mr. Woods credited his father for inspiring his work ethic. But while he spoke often of how supportive his mother was, he has also said that she was tough on him.
In an interview with the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2006, Ms. Woods was asked whether she had experienced prejudice in the United States, and she said yes, especially when she took Tiger from a tournament to a country club. “Some of them reject us,” she said. “I said, ‘Tiger, it’s their problem. It’s their ignorance.’”
“Be proud of who you are,” she said.
When Tiger was a child, Tida, as she was known, said that she told him, “You will never ruin my reputation, because I will beat you,” according to an article in The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2006. The article quoted him as saying that she used to “beat the hell out of” him. “I’ve still got the handprints,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.
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In 2010, when Mr. Woods publicly apologized in front of national news media for having an affair while he was married to Elin Nordegren, he said his mother was among the people he had hurt, and that he had strayed from the Buddhist teachings she had instilled in him at a young age.
Ms. Woods embraced her son after he spoke. “I’m so proud to be his mom, period,” she said at the time. “As a human being, everyone has faults, makes missteps and learns from it.”
A New York Times article during the troubled period for Mr. Woods described Ms. Woods as the “matriarch, iron hand and spiritual compass for her son.”
In addition to her son, Ms. Woods’s survivors include a granddaughter and a grandson.
Last year, when Mr. Woods introduced his Sun Day Red lifestyle apparel brand with the golf equipment maker TaylorMade, he said that his company’s name was based on the red shirt he wore during the final round of tournaments.
“Mom thought being a Capricorn that my power color was red, so I wore red as a junior golfer and I won some tournaments,” Woods said at the Sun Day Red launch. “I go to a university that is red — Stanford is red. We wore red on the final day of every single tournament, and then every single tournament I’ve played as a professional I’ve worn red. It’s just become synonymous with me.”
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