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Into the Woods
Alumnus teams with Tiger's dad on book

Fred Mitchell broke records as a placekicker for the Tigers in the mid-1960s. Now he’s known for catching another Tiger by the tail, having co-authored a book with Earl Woods, the father of famed pro golfer Tiger Woods.

Ttitled Playing Through: Straight Talk on Hard Work, Big Dreams, and Adventures with Tiger, the book has been distributed worldwide with about 100,000 copies in print.

Mitchell, a sportswriter for the Chicago Tribune for the past 24 years, has written three other books, but none has captured attention quite like this one. It’s a story not so much about golf but about the unusual relationship between a father and son, one that has frequently been misunderstood.

“I think Earl is wrongly criticized for being an over-protective parent. All too often pro athletes come from single-family homes or homes where the father was not active in their lives. Now we have just the opposite in Earl.

He is a caring person who only wants the best for his son,” said Mitchell, who was chosen over a writer for Sports Illustrated to write the book.

“What I enjoyed most about this project was an opportunity to depict a story of a unique family bond that goes beyond being just another sports book. Everyone knows that Tiger Woods is a great golfer.

I wanted to go behind the scenes and talk about the good times and bad times that every family endures.”

Earl and Mitchell began communicating on the book in the spring of 1997, and they met that June in Chicago when Tiger was competing in the Western Open. After that, Mitchell submitted a 15-page proposal to HarperCollins Publishing Co.

“I visited Earl at his home in Cypress, Calif. three times,” Mitchell said. “I also caught up with him and Tiger at the PGA Championship in New York and again in Miami where he and Tiger were putting on a golf clinic for inner-city youngsters, and I went to Spain for the Ryder Cup in Sept. 1997.”

The interview process included countless telephone interviews, lasting up to three hours a session.“The most time-consuming task was transcribing the hours and hours of tape,” Mitchell said.

“Then, to go back and write the book, I had to organize his thoughts, polish up the sentence structure and make it sound like Earl talking.”

Through it all, Mitchell said he found Earl to be a fascinating subject and easy to work with despite a reputation for being somewhat irascible.“Earl and I got along famously,” Mitchell said.

“He has many strong opinions on many subjects, which is a positive quality that helped me with the project.”

The two also discovered a number of parallels between them that helped create a strong bond and trust, which is so essential in making a project such as this work.“We discovered right away that he has many things in common with my late father,”

Mitchell said. “My father (LeRoy Mitchell Jr.) passed away in 1990. Both Earl and he played college baseball. Both had four older sisters. Both of their mothers died when they were 13. Both were in the military, and both were born in March.

Earl said it was meant to be, and Mitchell said the Woods’ book was his most satisfying project.“It was a challenge because I did not take any time off from writing my five-times-a-week column for the Tribune.

They offered that option to me, but I did not feel right doing that. So that meant a lot of late nights and early mornings of writing and transcribing.

Plus, at the last moment, the publisher moved up the final deadline by two weeks, which meant finishing up the book while I was in San Diego covering the Super Bowl.”

During Alumni Weekend last June, Mitchell held a book signing in the Wittenberg Bookstore. Among the well-wishers and autograph-seekers was a person who brought a rush of memories.

Nearly 90 years old and in a wheelchair, Dorothy Edwards, widow of Mitchell’s late Tiger football coach, made a special trip to see him.“It was a complete surprise to see Dorothy Edwards at my book signing.

It immediately brought back memories of Coach Bill Edwards and the impact he had on my life,” he said “He was such a charismatic personality and inspirational coach.

He sold me on attending Wittenberg. Seeing Mrs. Edwards at my book signing brought back many flashbacks of the two of them being such an influential aspect of the Wittenberg family.”

--Alan Aldinger