Earl Woods died Wednesday after a battle with cancer. Here’s hoping the notion he was a pushy Little League dad is buried with him.

Those who spent time around Earl and his son Tiger when the golf prodigy had just become a teen-ager didn’t see evidence of an overbearing dad. What they saw was a driven young athlete who had a focus that belied his youth and a father who pushed him as hard as he wanted to be pushed.

Mark Bisbing – acting on a tip given him by Mike Holder, then Oklahoma State’s golf coach and now its athletic director – began the recruitment of Tiger to Nike when Tiger was about 14, Bisbing said Wednesday.

Bisbing now works in Lawrence for the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, the governing body of greens-keepers.

When Tiger was playing in a tournament near Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., Bisbing served as host to the young golfer and his parents.

“Whatever Earl did, it worked,” Bisbing said. “Their bond was very strong. Tiger wanted it, and Earl helped him get it.”

A couple of years later, at the Nike campus, Bisbing said Tiger asked him if he saw Nike eventually grouping him with the company’s top athlete endorsers, who at the time were Michael Jordan, Ken Griffey Jr. and Andre Agassi. That’s a pretty heavy question for a teen-ager just learning to drive.

The only evidence Bisbing said he saw of Earl pushing Tiger was when Tiger was tired from the tournament and wanted to blow off the visit to the compound, go to Taco Bell and go back to the hotel for a nap. Earl told him he had to go.

“I think he wanted to send the message that when you make a commitment, you have to keep it because that’s the way he wanted him to lead his life,” Bisbing said.

When Bisbing’s wife died of breast cancer in 2001, he created the Barbara Stalp Bisbing Memorial Scholarship Fund at Aloha High in Aloha, Ore.

“I sent out letters asking for donations,” he said. “Most people gave $25, $50, or maybe $100. Earl made a donation of $500 to the fund.”

John Strege, senior writer for Golf World, began writing about Tiger Woods when Woods was 14, interviewed his father as early and often as any sportswriter and authored, “Tiger: A Biography of Tiger Woods.”

“Tiger forever wanted it for himself,” Strege said from his Southern California home. “Earl was not a stage father who orchestrated everything. I’ll argue that forever. He recognized the kid was a special talent and kind of removed the obstacles for him.”

Earl, a catcher on the baseball team at Kansas State, did two tours of duty in Vietnam. He used some of what he learned in the military to sharpen his son’s mental discipline, but was no puppeteer.

Once, Earl told Strege many years ago, when Tiger made a questionable course-management decision at the age of 10, the father asked his thinking. When the son said he asked himself what his father would want him to do, the father said: “Wrong. From now on, you have to think for yourself.”

Copycats trying to turn a house cat into a Tiger are the ones who damage relationships with their sons. This relationship was strong until the day the father died.