George, Nov 18: As soon as Tiger Woods walked through the door, he felt a strong presence in the room without immediately seeing the man he came to visit.
``He was in the corner, reading the paper,'' Woods said. ``I said, 'President Mandela, it's a pleasure to meet you.' He started talking about American football. He was just starting to learn about it.''
Woods was coming off a 1998 season in which he won only one time on the PGA Tour while revamping his swing. The week after Thanksgiving, he played the Casio World Open in Japan, then made his first trip to South Africa to play in the Million Dollar Challenge. Nelson Mandela, the prisoner-turned-president of South Africa, invited Woods to his home.
``I had read all the information about him,'' Woods told reporters. ``If you're a minority, you've read up on what he did. To go through what he did for 27 years and come out and be as humble as he was, and then run the country ... how tough a person do you have to be to do that?''
Mandela, respected and admired around the world, is a hero in South Africa for his work toward racial reconciliation in an apartheid-scarred nation, despite being imprisoned for 27 years.



Released in 1990, he won his nation's first all-race election in 1994 after the fall of apartheid. Mandela, 85, retired in 1999, but he remains as popular as ever.



He also is the main reason that Woods, who originally scoffed at the idea of the American golfers traveling halfway around the world after a long season, will be leading the U.S. team in the Presidents Cup starting Thursday.



``If I decided not to go, I'm sure I would have gotten a phone call,'' Woods said with a grin. ``How can you not want to do anything for that man?''


Bureau Report