Tigers' niece Cheyenne creating image of own

When Cheyenne Woods was 2, she plucked a club from a bag, like a sword from a stone, and whacked a golf ball into the netting in her grandfather's garage, where her Uncle Eldrick — you may know him as Tiger — famously took his mythic first cuts.

Cheyenne doesn't remember, but she knows all about the family lore. Her mother, Susan, recalls how Earl Woods Sr. — beguiled by her swing — found a shorter club and showed his granddaughter just how to grip it.

"He saw something in her," Susan says.

Earl Sr. didn't coach Cheyenne, as he did Tiger, but he bought her clubs of her own by the time she was 6 and set her up with a coach in Arizona, who would send tapes of her swing to the doting grandfather in California.

Today Cheyenne is 20, a junior at Wake Forest who will compete in this week's NCAA championships in Bryan, Texas.

She is ranked 23rd by Golfweek, a long shot to win the women's individual title the way Tiger won the men's for Stanford in 1996. But when Cheyenne won the Atlantic Coast Conference championship last month, she immediately thought of her grandfather, who died in 2006.

"He would be very proud," she says, "of how far I've come."

Tiger tweeted his delight: My niece, Cheyenne, just won the ACC golf title by 7 shots! That's awesome, I'm so proud of her.

Cheyenne's father, Earl Jr., is Tiger's half-brother. She even looks a bit like Tiger. "I get that a lot," she says. "But I don't see it. I feel like I just look like myself."

Small wonder she asserts selfhood. When you golf, and your uncle is you-know-who, comparisons are unfair but inevitable — as much a part of her daily landscape as putting greens and open fairways.

"Hopefully everyone lets her be her," Tiger says. "People don't need to compare her to me."

They do, of course, and have since she picked up that first club — one of his old ones, as luck (and creation myth) would have it.

"Let her create her own life," Tiger says, "and her own path."

When she was little, Cheyenne would ask her teachers on the first day of school: Do you know who my uncle is? It was cool to be Tiger's niece. She still felt that way when she started playing junior tournaments and the cameras followed her every move.

Today, Cheyenne does her best to strike a middle ground: She is proud of her famous uncle but eager to own an identity apart from a man she does not really know all that well.

"We talk a little bit here and there," she says. "He's busy. I'm busy. We have our two separate lives."

They have played together, though not often. "Obviously, I'd love to play with her more," Tiger says. "It has been fun to watch her. I have watched her on film, and it's been amazing to see her progression over time."

Tiger's face lights up as he talks about her while walking to his car after practice before last week's Players Championship— from which he would bow out early with a knee injury.

"She has sought some advice here and there," Tiger says, "but that obviously is between us."

Earl Sr. offered advice mostly from a distance, except when her family made trips to California. On the visit when Cheyenne was 2, "We came to watch Tiger at the L.A. Open," Susan says. "He was 16. I pushed her around the course in her little stroller."

That night, Earl Sr. watched her in his garage. Years later, he predicted she'd be the female Tiger.

"He said that when I was really young, too," Cheyenne says. "So it's just funny how he had this eye for people. He knew when Tiger was young he was going to be a superstar. Maybe that'll be me.

"If I just keep working hard — nothing is going to be given to me — I think I have the potential."

'She's just getting started'
Cheyenne, on track to graduate from Wake Forest a year from now, hopes to play on the LPGA tour some day.

"If you look at the LPGA, there is nobody that looks like me," she says. "There's nobody that has my name. There is a lot of potential, I feel like, in my name and the fact that I am different from other people."

She means her blend of ethnicities: "My mom is white. My dad comes from my grandfather, who was part Native American, Chinese, black and white. That's me. I'm a mutt."

Her mother and father are divorced. She has two brothers and two non-mutts — Peanut, a 15-year-old basenji, and Moose, a 3-year-old chocolate Lab.

"It's fun to see her mature as a person over the years," Tiger says. "To see her grow up, starting … in the same garage where I started the game of golf, and to see her progress through all of this and to win such a big event (as the ACC) is great to see.

"And she's just getting started. I know what she can do, and it's going to be fun to watch her do it. … She's just a sweetheart. She is as nice and as humble as anyone could possibly be."

Cheyenne was highly recruited out of Xavier College Prep, a Catholic girls school in Phoenix. Wake Forest coach Dianne Dailey asked her then for her greatest strength. Cheyenne's answer: mental toughness.

"I still think so," she says. "I feel like having to separate myself from Tiger, and separate myself from pressure, from the expectations put on me, I feel like I can handle that pretty well."

Even so, Dailey did her best to shoo reporters from Wake Forest when Cheyenne arrived, figuring a media circus was not what a freshman needed.

"It got to be too much," Dailey says, "and we just had to say, 'This is not about famous relatives. This is about Cheyenne. When she becomes a good golfer, you all can come back and interview her.' And that's now. She is coming into her own."

As a freshman, she had a 76.2 scoring average, fourth on the team. As a sophomore, she had a 73.47 scoring average, the school record for women. And this season she is at 73.60, best on a team ranked 14th in the country entering the NCAA championships. The best NCAA finish for Wake's women's team was third in 1995; Wake's men's golf team has won three national championships.

Cheyenne found her ACC title troubling in one respect. When Natalie Sheary won the ACC in 2009 and Michelle Shin won it in 2010, her teammates got regional attention but little nationally.

"They work just as hard as I do," Cheyenne says. "They should get the same recognition."

"We understand," Sheary says, "it's not something she controls."

Sheary, one of Cheyenne's roommates, describes her as stylish — "great clothes" — and loyal — "great friend." She also says Cheyenne is surprisingly quiet in group settings.

"She doesn't pipe up in the conversation," Sheary says, "and then out of nowhere she throws in a line from a song or a movie, like Anchorman, and it fits just perfect, and it's hilarious. She's just very, very funny with a bunch of one-liners."

That sense of humor is on display in Cheyenne's bio on the Wake website. Asked for the best golfer she's ever played with, Cheyenne picks Charles Barkley, the Basketball Hall of Famer with a notorious hitch in his swing.

"Yeah, I know, I'm getting a lot of flack for that," she says, laughing musically. "Obviously, Tiger is the best golfer I've ever golfed with. But I had to throw something different out there."

The disappointment question
Tiger, 35, has won 71 PGA tournaments, including 14 majors. Still, his last Tour win came Sept. 13, 2009. Golf fans know the import of that time line.

He hasn't won since his life imploded after a day-after-Thanksgiving 2009 fender-bender with a fire hydrant led to a gusher of revelations about infidelities and ultimately to his divorce from Elin Nordegren, mother of their two young children.

At a remarkable news conference in February 2010, Tiger apologized to family and friends he had "severely disappointed."

Was Cheyenne disappointed in him?

"I mean, I feel like it's the same as anything," she says. "I mean, I don't know. It's hard to say. That's just hard. I don't know."

It is the only time she stumbles in an hour-long interview. Cheyenne is a communications major who hopes to get into broadcasting some day. She is uncommonly smooth in front of a camera or a digital recorder.

The question is posed again.

"I feel like I don't really have a say in whether I'm disappointed," she says at last. "I mean, we're not super, super close. It's not like my dad cheated on my mother.

"But he is a member of my family and I guess maybe a little bit disappointed, but it doesn't affect how I see him. And I still look up to him. He's one of the people I look up to the most."