NEW YORK, NEW YORK - Twenty years before Cheyenne Woods spent Wednesday and Thursday on a media tour that included a national television morning show and a photo shoot with one of the biggest fashion sites in the world, there was a letter to a sports agency that foretold it all.
At the time, though, the readers of the letter had to wonder if it was simply a joke or just a proud grandfather trumpeting one of his own.
The line read: “Watch out for a four-year-old named Cheyenne Woods! She’ll be an LPGA Tour star one day.”
The impetus for the letter was déjà vu of sorts in 1994 as the letter’s penman, Earl Woods, sat in his garage watching a four-year-old Cheyenne naturally smack balls into the net he’d hung from his garage. He’d previously seen his son, Tiger Woods, rise to acclaim as a child prodigy with a similar natural acumen for the game and later watched as Tiger had grown into one of the most accomplished amateur golfers in the world.
At the time before Tiger turned pro, the prominent talent representation agency IMG had asked Earl to compile scouting reports for them on promising young players on the circuit that he would see as he went around with Tiger. It was in one of these reports that Earl in 1994 scribed the line about his granddaughter.
By the time Cheyenne found out about the letter, she was 10 and her uncle was one of the most accomplished golfers in the game’s rich history. But her grandfather wouldn’t tell her the contents of it but promised her that she would find out in time.
Again, Earl knew.
Earl died in 2006 when Cheyenne was 16. But when Cheyenne graduated Wake Forest after a decorated college career and made the decision to turn professional, IMG showed up to recruit her. They brought with them the letter that had been penned 20 years earlier by her late grandfather.
That letter with that line hangs framed in her house in Phoenix, Ariz., today.
And while Earl seemed to always know, Cheyenne did, too.
“When I was six or seven, I would always go to school and tell everyone, ‘I’m going to play on the LPGA Tour one day.’ I just always knew that was what I wanted to do,” Cheyenne said.
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