Profile: Tiger Tales
Documentary producer Jenna Millman ’97 provides an inside look at global sports icon Tiger Woods.
Jeff Selesnick
Above: Millman at work during the pandemic.
It was nearing the end of the project, and producer Jenna Millman ’97 didn’t have the opening to her HBO feature documentary. In her first foray into independent documentary film producing, the product lacked a thesis, and the elusive piece of footage that promised to ground the entire piece remained beyond her grasp.
The clip in question was of Earl Woods, father of legendary golfer Tiger Woods, delivering a speech at the 1996 Haskins Award dinner, honoring the top-ranked collegiate golfer. The speech had only been written about once (in a 1997 Sports Illustrated article), but, from reading it, Millman knew the footage of the speech was the crux of the film she was helping to make. When she finally tracked it down at the 11th hour, it was even better than expected.
“The speech showed the expectations of a father to his son, not just as an athlete, but as somebody who was going to change the world,” says Millman. “Earl thought Tiger would unite all races and create a better humanity…and Tiger was 18 years old.”
Inspired by the 2018 book Tiger Woods, the two-part documentary Tiger debuted on HBO this January. Navigating the space between puff piece and tabloid fodder, the two-episode series offers an inside look at one of the most recognized people on the planet, blending rarely or never-before-seen archival footage with intimate interviews. Millman, who had been overseeing ABC’s Nightline prior to the Tiger project, knew nothing of golf or Tiger Woods when she was contacted about the piece.
Millman’s selfie with Tiger Woods in the background.
“I got a call out of the blue that this incredible team was putting together a documentary on a topic I didn’t think I was interested in,” she recalls. The team consisted of renowned director Matt Heineman and Oscar-winning executive producer Alex Gibney, a tandem that made the leap from Millman’s “cushy” network job a no-brainer. Millman was brought onto the project because of her ability to make subjects feel comfortable on camera, and explain to them the scope of the narrative. Since many of the Tiger contributors had been interviewed for the tell-all book just a few years prior, Millman and the rest of the team did not anticipate that securing on-camera interviews with the same people would turn out to be one of the tougher parts of the entire process.
“Getting people to talk, somewhat anonymously, for a book is much different than getting them to talk on camera,” admits Millman. “Even golf writers were hard to get as they feared losing access to Tiger at future championships based on their involvement with this.”
Persistence paid off, as Millman secured a bevy of key interviews, including Woods’s high school girlfriend, the ghostwriter of his father’s book, and close friends from his childhood. Woods himself declined to participate, citing contractual reasons, but this gave Millman and the production team a certain freedom to tell their story. “All of the facts had already been exposed,” she says. “This wasn’t about muckraking, this was about understanding the ‘why’ as opposed to the ‘what.’”
Panned by many die-hard Tiger fans, and lauded by many outside the golfing world, the film largely accomplished what Millman and her team set out to do. “We were going for something that people saw as more than a golf movie,” she explains. “It was an analysis of gender, sex, race, and fame and asks the question, ‘As part of the creation – and destruction – of the icon that is Tiger Woods, what does that say about us?’”
Millman has earned many honors for her work. In 2017, she was part of a team that received two Emmy Awards for the Nightline special “Gangland.” She developed and managed multiple projects as a senior producer for ABC News, including “The Dropout,” named “Podcast of the Year” by iheart Radio in 2020.