It wasn’t an unreasonable projection. At that point, Woods was already a national figure. Although some remembered his appearance at age 2 on “The Mike Douglas Show,” his competitive career had begun in earnest at the Optimist Junior World, where he won his first age group title at 8. From there, his trajectory went only upward. Six months before his Riviera debut, he’d won the U.S. Junior for the first of what would be an unprecedented three times, becoming the event’s youngest winner and first African-American champion. When he showed up in Los Angeles, only 30 miles from his Orange County hometown of Cypress, the crowd greeted him with incessant cries of “You the kid!”