In 2009, Tiger Woods was the most famous athlete on the planet, a transcendent star of almost unfathomable fame and fortune living what appeared to be the perfect life. Married to a Swedish beauty and the father of two young children, he was the winner of fourteen major golf championships and earning more than $100 million annually. But it was all a carefully crafted illusion. As it turned out, Woods had been living a double life for years—one that unraveled in the aftermath of a Thanksgiving-night car crash that exposed his serial infidelity and sent his personal and professional lives over a cliff. Still, the world has always wondered: Who is Tiger Woods, really?

In Tiger Woods, Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian, the team behind the New York Times bestseller The System, look deep behind the headlines to produce a richly reported answer to that question. To find out, they conducted hundreds of interviews with people from every facet of Woods’s life—friends, family members, teachers, romantic partners, coaches, business associates, physicians, Tour pros, and members of Woods’s inner circle.

From those interviews, and extensive, carefully sourced research, they have uncovered new, intimate, and surprising details about the man behind the myth. We read an inside account of Tiger’s relationship with his first love, Dina Gravell, and their excruciating breakup at the hands of his parents. We learn that Tiger’s longtime sports agency, International Management Group (IMG), made $50,000 annual payments to Tiger’s father, Earl Woods, as a “talent scout”—years before Tiger was their client. We discover startling new details about Earl, who died in 2006 and to this day lies in an unmarked grave. We come along as Tiger plunges into the Las Vegas and New York nightclub worlds alongside fellow superstars Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley. We are whisked behind the scenes during the National Enquirer’s globetrotting hunt to expose Tiger’s infidelity, and we get a rare look inside his subsequent sex-addiction treatment at the Pine Grove facility in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

But the portrait of Woods that emerges in Tiger Woods is far more rewarding than revelations alone. By tracing his life from its origins as the mixed-race son of an attention-seeking father and the original Tiger Mom—who programmed him to be “the chosen one,” tasked with changing not just the game of golf but the world as well—the authors provide a wealth of new insight into the human being trapped inside his parents’ creation. We meet the lonely, introverted child prodigy who has trouble connecting with other kids because of his stutter and unusual lifestyle. We experience the thrill and confusion of his meteoric rise to stardom. And we come to understand the grown man’s obsession with extreme training and deep sea diving—despite their potential for injury—as a rare source of the solitude he craves. Most of all, we are reminded, time and time again, of Woods’s singular greatness and the exhilaration we felt watching an athletic genius dominate his sport for nearly twenty years.

But at what cost? Benedict and Keteyian provide the answers in an extraordinary biography that is destined to become the defining book about an authentic American legend—and to linger in the minds of readers for years to come.

Jeff Benedict is a New York Times bestselling author, a special features writer for Sports Illustrated, and a television and film producer. He has also written for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and his stories have been the basis for segments on 60 Minutes, 20/20, 48 Hours, Good Morning America, CBS Sunday Morning, the NFL Network, HBO Real Sports, CNN, and the Discovery Channel. He has written fifteen books, including the New York Times bestselling autobiography of Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young. He lives with his wife and four children in Connecticut.

Armen Keteyian is considered one of the finest investigative journalists in the country. An 11-time Emmy Award winner, he is a network television correspondent for CBS News based in New York and longtime contributing correspondent to "60 Minutes." From 2013 to March of 2017, Keteyian was the lead correspondent for "60 Minutes Sports." From 2006-12, he was the Chief Investigative Correspondent for CBS News, winning multiple awards. Keteyian has written or co-written 11 books including "The System," an inside look at big-time college football. Keteyian earned a bachelor's in journalism from San Diego State University. He and his wife live in Fairfield, Connecticut and San Clemente, California.