This season, Tiger Woods has firmly established himself as not only the most dominant golfer in the world, but also the biggest single-season money winner ever with over $6 million in prizes. He has won a total of eight PGA tour events this year, including his last four in a row, while capturing the 1999 PGA Championship, the PGA Tour Championship and, most recently, the World Golf Championship. Woods has matured professionally under intense public scrutiny, and is now truly fulfilling the promise of his birth chart, while finally living up to all the hype he generated when he originally turned pro back in 1996.

Tiger was born December 30, 1975 at 10:50 pm PST in Cypress, California with the Sun in Capricorn. He is, in many respects, a “typical Capricorn”; hard working, ambitious, focused on achieving his goals and climbing to the top of his chosen field. His fellow golfers on the tour, mostly older and more experienced, now regularly concede that this 23-year-old is already capable of things they will never achieve.

Family is very important to Capricorns, and Tiger is no exception. He maintains very close bonds with both parents. His father, Earl Woods, has been his coach and mentor from the cradle and closely guided the former phenom to greatness. The elder Woods has taken his share of the kind of criticism that befalls parents of over-achievers, but the relationship between the two of them has never shown any cracks and remains close and supportive.

Tiger’s drive and ambition come from within. No one has pushed him anywhere he didn’t want to go. His chart reveals a powerful Pluto, placed in the First House of personality and physical appearance. The world is already familiar with his sullen intensity and he radiates the kind of personal power that demands public adulation while fiercely defending his personal privacy. Perhaps that has been the hardest adjustment to life in the spotlight for Tiger. Individuals with a strong Pluto tend to cultivate a deep inner life and do not generally respond well to prying.

With his reticent Virgo Ascendant, he had the work ethic to spend the endless hours perfecting his game, but that inner focus did not serve him well in his initial interactions with his public. Tiger has made great progress in his efforts to come forward out of himself and cultivate a more media-friendly personality.

He exhibits a caring confidence now in his public relations, but that carefully controlled mask protects a deeply introverted individual who would prefer to be left alone to perfect himself. In an interview after his victory in the PGA Tour Championship, when asked why he did not, like so many of his colleagues, dress in the knickers and caps they wore to memorialize Payne Stewart, Woods replied, in grief, “I like to handle things internally. I don’t need to show it outwardly, the pain that I feel inside.”

Great athletes need a great Mars, and Woods is no exception. At his birth, Mars in Gemini had just passed its culmination, or the highest point it reaches in its path across the sky. This tends to give the greatest eminence or public visibility to an athlete’s martial abilities. In fact, that particular placement of Mars within the birth chart of champion athletes was the chief feature of some of the most famous and controversial astrological research ever done, the famous Mars Effect of French researcher Michel Gauquelin.

At the tender age of 23 Woods has nowhere to go but up. The indications in his chart seem to suggest that he will continue to improve, press his advantage, and succeed at an even more outrageous level over the coming years! While that will certainly make for some exciting golf, it also raises the question: Who will be the young gun that rises up to challenge him in the future? How good will he have to be? Tiger is raising the bar with every victory and golf, more popular than ever, will never be the same again.

Notes

Mars, the warrior, in airy Gemini shows adaptability and a willingness to try a variety of approaches to a given problem. It may be associated with scattering one's energies, but this tendency is outweighed here by Tiger's earthy Sun, Ascendant and prominent Pluto.

Michel Gauquelin was the leading astrology researcher of the twentieth century. His statistical studies revealed a meaningful correlation between the planets' positions at birth and a person's career. The "Mars Effect" was the best known of his studies. More on the Mars Effect.