By Karen Crouse

updated 10:54 p.m. ET June 13, 2009

Fatherhood is a major enterprise, requiring strategic planning. So when the tennis star Roger Federer and his companion, Mirka Vavrinec, were tossing around the idea of starting a family, Federer decided to bounce it off an expert. Somebody familiar with the globe-trotting, privacy-challenged lifestyle of a sports icon.

He phoned Tiger Woods, a married friend with two small children. It was like seeking the actor George Hamilton’s opinion on tanning. Woods, 33, has been married to Elin Nordegren since 2003. Their daughter, Sam Alexis, turns 2 this month. Their son, Charlie, was born in February.

During a teleconference with reporters this spring, Woods expressed delight with the direction of his life since 2002, when he won the U.S. Open the first time it was held at this year’s site, Bethpage State Park.

Speaking as if it were Federer on the line and not a flock of reporters, Woods said: “I couldn’t be happier than where I am right now. Having the two kids is just unbelievable, how much fun we are all having, except the sleepless nights — that can be a little tough at times. But other than that it’s just been incredible.”

In March, Federer announced that Mirka, whom he married in April, was pregnant. Recalling their conversation, Woods said, “I don’t think I was the turning point.”

Maybe not, but his public embrace of fatherhood has given the 21st century male a new paradigm: the alpha athlete as ardent second-string mom.

Jack Nicklaus, whose legacy Woods has been eyeing since he was old enough to read the record books, was considered the super dad of his day. He would fly home during tournaments to attend his sons’ football games, and he would never play more than two consecutive weeks if it kept him apart from his five children.

Nicklaus, who won 18 majors and 73 PGA Tour events, did bedtime stories but not diapers. Leave it to Woods to keep raising the bar.

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On the golf course Woods’ intensity calls to mind an animal in the wild stalking his next meal. He has 67 tour victories, including 14 majors. While parenthood has not dulled Woods’ competitive edge, it has brought into sharp relief his alter ego.

That would be Eldrick, the diaper-changing, peekaboo-playing homebody who occasionally hijacks Tiger’s pretournament and post-round news conferences to reveal, with a smile that starts in his eyes, the human side of golf’s armored tank.

He talks about cutting short his practices to be with Charlie when he wakes up from a nap. He speaks of missing his children terribly when he is on the road, the joy of teaching them things when he is home and the hilarity of seeing his stubbornness duplicated in his daughter.

“She doesn’t like for me to help her hold a golf club,” he said. “She’ll figure it out herself.”

When Woods was 2 years old, he shared the stage with Bob Hope on “The Mike Douglas Show.” With his miniature golf bag slung over his left shoulder, Woods walked purposefully to a plastic mat, plucked out his driver and hit a golf ball with a swing as rhythmic as a child’s cradle swing.

Woods was asked if it was wild to think that he was roughly the same age then as his daughter is now. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s hard to believe I was swinging a club at that age.”

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His precocity was a benefaction from his father, Earl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who stood behind him on the Los Angeles soundstage that day, as he would, figuratively, for the next two decades until his death from cancer in 2006.

Earl Woods got a mulligan on fatherhood and made the most of it. His first marriage, which produced two sons and a daughter, ended in divorce. In an interview with Golf Digest in 2003, he said his military obligations kept him away from his family too much.

“I remember coming back from one tour of Vietnam,” he told the magazine, “and my daughter answered the door and wondered who I was.” He added, “I can understand the regret and the lost contact.”

He vowed not to make the same mistake when he remarried and became a father again with Tiger’s arrival in 1975. If Woods grew up knowing nothing else, it was that his father and his mother, Kultida, were wholly committed to him.

“I got a chance to see my dad quite a bit,” Woods said. “I was very lucky that way. But our lifestyle’s different.”

Raising Woods was Earl’s full-time job. He was retired from the Army by then. And therein lies the rub. Tiger Woods has a job that requires him to leave home on a regular basis. Can he nurture his children in the same way his father did him? And how can he avoid the pitfalls that Earl Woods experienced in his first go-around as a parent, when he also was away from home a lot?

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