Kultida Woods, mother of Tiger Woods, dies at 80

Tiger Woods announced Tuesday that his mother Kultida Woods had died. She was 80.

Woods said in a post to social media that his mom died early Tuesday. He said she “was a force of nature all her own, her spirit was simply undeniable. She was quick with the needle and a laugh. She was my biggest fan, greatest supporter, without her none of my personal achievements would have been so possible.”

Born in the province of Kanchanaburi in Thailand in 1944, Kultida Punsawad was working as a civilian receptionist at a U.S. Army outpost in Bangkok during the Vietnam War when she met Earl Woods, a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces. The pair married in 1969, and later moved to Brooklyn and then California. She gave birth to Eldrick "Tiger" Woods on Dec. 30, 1975. In tribute to his mother, Woods has always characterized himself as half-Thai.

Woods paid frequent tribute to his mother's sacrifices and tenacity. Upon his induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2022, he described what Kultida did for his career in its earliest days. "We didn't know that we were going to have enough money for me to go to college or a top college or be recruited," he recalled. "So my family made a tough decision, and at the age of 14 1/2 we took out a second mortgage so I could go out and play the AJGA Tour. Mom stayed at home. Dad traveled. And I went out and played the AJGA Tour on our second mortgage."

While Earl Woods trained the young Tiger to be both mentally tough and physically superior, Kultida remained in the background, a stern, iron-willed presence watching over her son's best interests with a keen eye and a lacerating tongue.

“As we said in our family, my mom was the hand, and my dad was the voice," Woods wrote in the book The 1997 Masters: My Story. "I could negotiate with him, but not with my mom. There was no middle ground with Mom."

While Kultida was a frequent presence in the galleries as Woods played, she remained almost completely out of public view otherwise, shunning advertisements and interviews. She remained steadfastly in Woods' corner, publicly supporting him during his early-2010s scandals.

"My mom was the enforcer. My dad may have been in the Special Forces, but I was never afraid of him," Woods told USA Today in 2017. "My mom’s still here, and I’m still deathly afraid of her. She’s a very tough, tough old lady, very demanding. She was the hand, she was the one, I love her so much, but she was tough."

Her last appearance came just last week at the fourth installment of TGL, the indoor golf league Woods co-founded. Cameras caught him cheerfully calling out to her during the event, still a son anxious to please his mother.

The last time Kultida saw her son play, he won.