What Tiger Woods could learn from Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige

In 1953, Satchel Paige was a 47-year-old relief pitcher for the St. Louis Browns. After a legendary career in the Negro Leagues, Paige made his Major League debut only five years earlier with the Cleveland Indians. His age was one of the great mysteries in baseball history. He liked it that way. On documents as varied as his draft record, social security card and passport, the Mobile, Alabama, native gave different dates for his birth.

When the Indians signed him in 1948, they recorded in the team yearbook that he was born somewhere between 1900 and 1908. Called the Methuselah of baseball by the Pittsburgh Courier’s Wendell Smith, Paige skillfully used his advancing age in a young man’s game to burnish his legend as one of the greatest pitchers of all time.

“They want me to be old,” Paige wrote about the media and fans in one of his memoirs. “So I give them what they want. Seems they get a bigger kick out of an old man throwing strikeouts.”

During World War II, Paige was on a barnstorming tour through Kansas when he met a 12-year-old catcher named Earl Woods at a game in Manhattan, Kansas. Paige’s catcher, Roy Campanella, who would later player for the Brooklyn Dodgers, let Woods warm up the famous pitcher. Woods promised Campanella that he had a “major-league arm,” and he proved it to the future Hall of Famer when he blew Paige off the mound when he threw a pitch down to second base.

“I did have a good arm,” Woods told Golf Digest in 2003. “And I can say that I caught the great Satchel Paige.”

Woods’ son, Tiger, is 47 and like Paige, his age at this stage of his life is now on full display for the world. For a long time, Tiger Woods was a prodigy who would seemingly stay young forever. He was a Masters champion at 21, and at 25 he became the first golfer to hold all four pro majors at the same time. Where Paige cunningly tried to keep his age a mystery, Woods has carefully marked his career milestones in the chronology of his life.

Before injuries racked his body, Woods used aging as a sign of progress.

“Aging is not fun,” he said in 2020. “Early on in my career I thought it was fantastic because I was getting better and better and better and now I’m just trying to hold on.”

Many of us who have watched Woods’ rise over the last 30 years don’t want him to get old. By any measure — from TV viewership to tournament attendance and purses to greens fees at local municipal courses — Woods is important to the overall vitality of the sport.

On Sunday, Woods finished 18th out of 20 golfers in the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas. It was his first competitive individual tournament since pulling out of the Masters last April during the third round with ankle and foot pain. Later that month, he underwent fusion surgery on his right ankle.

In the Bahamas at the Albany Golf Club, Woods was understandably rusty but mostly pain free. It wasn’t the old Tiger who won 82 PGA events and had a record 142 consecutive made cuts on the tour or even the one that miraculously won a fifth Masters title in 2019 at the age of 43 after a nearly 11-year winless drought in major championships. With a four-day total of even par on Sunday, he finished 20 shots back of the winner, Scott Scheffler, who is the No. 1 ranked golfer in the world.

But Woods gave his fellow players, fans and the media what they wanted by showing up to play, despite injuries that have made the mere act of walking a golf course a burden for the 15-time major champion. This was one of his annual tournaments and he invited Scheffler and 18 other players to play. And by coming, they were paying homage to their aging hero.

“I’m curious to see what this is going to look like,” Woods said after his final round on Sunday. “I haven’t done this in a while. I spend more time in the treatment room and the weight room than I do on the golf course. That’s just a part of wanting to hang around as an athlete.”

Pro athletes fight for longevity. Golfers can hang around longer than most any sport. Only in golf could we be talking about a person still trying to win major championships approaching his 50th birthday. For Woods, who plans to play one tournament a month in 2024, it’s the way he’s built. All he’s known since he was a toddler was how to hit a golf ball.

It was the same way with Paige about throwing a baseball. In 1965, Paige pitched in his last major league game with the Kansas City A’s, where at 59 years old he gave up only one hit while pitching three scoreless innings in a September game against the Boston Red Sox on Satchel Paige Appreciation Night at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium. To help him earn enough time for a league pension, the A’s owner, Charlie Finley, gave him a contract at the end of the season. A showman in his own right, Finley staged Paige before the game in a rocking chair in the bullpen with a nurse rubbing liniment in his right arm. Paige, who died in 1982 at the age of 75, couldn’t have chased down a bunt, but on the mound he still had command of his pitches and threw in the high 80s. His performance was all the proof that the batters he faced needed to know that he still had the stuff to get out big league hitters.

Desperate for a pension to take care of his growing family at a time when the life expectancy of Black men was a little longer than his age, Paige wanted to prove that he could still pitch. “Now I’ll stay in shape,” Paige said after needing only 28 pitches over the three innings, “because now they know what I can do.”

Aging can often force people to do difficult and outrageous things to prove something to themselves and others. Built like an NFL safety, Woods is a fanatical gym rat who works out regularly between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m. At a recent event for one of his sponsors, Woods explained that he makes 1,000 contacts with a club per day when he’s getting ready for a tournament. In the Bahamas, many were relieved that Woods’ ball speed consistently hovered over 170 mph and that he showed a lot of power with his driver. It was a sign that the old man could still hit it out there with the kids.

“Every day I got faster into the round,” Woods told reporters in the Bahamas. “The first day took me a while to get a handle on it, the second day was faster, today was right away. And that eventually, when I play on a regular basis, that’s normally how it is. It usually takes me during warmup before I get a feel for the round.”

In that final major league appearance with the A’s, Paige took just 10 warmup pitches. His decades of experience had taught him how to beat batters with precision and touch. In his own way, Woods will have to lean on his experience, finesse and unmatched work ethic in this season of his career to beat younger players who haven’t had his nagging injuries. The younger generation might like to see him compete in tournaments and are awed by his accomplishments, but they also want to beat him. They will have their chance at next year’s major championships, where Woods could play all four for the first time during a season since 2019.

Woods, who will turn 48 on Dec. 30, could use his father now. Earl Woods, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1998, died from a heart attack in 2006 at the age of 74. He poured all of his years into his son: how to play golf, the work ethic and mindset to be a champion and the audacity to believe that he could transcend the sport. He couldn’t show his son the process of aging as a pro athlete with the entire sport watching his every move.

Paige offered a lot of advice for staying young, such as avoiding running at all times and fried meats, but his best line on the subject may be that, “Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”

While all of these solutions may not be appropriate for Woods, he would do well to embrace aging with some of Paige’s fun and wit. It could be his greatest asset.