I make my living looking like Tiger

Californian Canh Oxelsen on impersonating the world’s most famous golfer

To the students at the New York prep school where he works as a counsellor, he is ‘Sir’. But to the majority of people he walks past in the street each day, Canh Oxelson could easily be 14-time major-winner Tiger Woods.

That’s because the 40-year-old Californian bears an uncanny resemblance to the former world No.1 – a resemblance that has taken him around the world and back again as a professional ‘Tiger Double’.

On a daily basis, he’ll be asked countless times to sign autographs or pose for photographs by people who think he’s Tiger. And sure, from time to time, he’s able to get the odd table upgrade at some of his favourite restaurants.

“It really is fascinating being a Tiger lookalike and getting to experience even just a fraction of what he does,” says Oxelson in a telephone conversation with bunkered from his New York office. “It gives you an idea of the sort of things that Tiger goes through on a day-to-day basis with the public.”

It was back in 1997, whilst attending the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, that Oxelson’s similarity to a then major-less Woods first came to light.

“I was walking around the course and people kept coming up to me saying, ‘Look, we know you’re not Tiger… but you do look a lot like him!'” he laughs. “Then one gentleman said to me that he thought I could maybe get some work as an impersonator.

“I didn’t know much about what that would entail at first but, anyway, I sent some photos of me in a Nike hat and golf clothes to a few agencies in LA and, sure enough, a lot of them got back to me saying they thought they could get me some work.”

Since then, Oxelson’s services have been in high demand and he has travelled all over America, and as far afield as Abu Dhabi, to attend various functions in his ‘Tiger’ guise. It’s a gig that pays well – he has earned a reported $3,000 per day as a Woods’ double – although business did take a bit of a battering in the immediate aftermath of Woods’ well-documented sex scandal in late 2009.

“It’s fair to say that the last few years have been very difficult,” acknowledges Oxelson. “I had several offers on the table to do a range of different things which were quickly withdrawn when the scandal broke. Companies just didn’t want to be associated with anything to do with Tiger.”

Consequently, Oxelson’s work dried up for a spell – but not for long. “I suddenly started getting a lot of calls from people wanting to do Tiger parodies, poking fun at him and his scandal,” he reveals. “I even had an adult entertainment producer ask me to dress up as Tiger and sit on a stage surrounded by a lot of, how shall we put this, scantily-clad women. Believe me, it was a very lucrative offer but I turned it down.

“For one thing, I didn’t think it would match with my day job and, besides anything else, I don’t know how I’d have been able to look my mum in the eye after it!”

Oxelson’s work has got so high-profile that he has even met the real Tiger and worked with him on a couple of occasions.

“We’ve done a few adverts and corporate things together,” he says. “He’s a cool guy and doesn’t seem to have any problem with me impersonating him. I know his father, Earl, wasn’t very pleased with me being a lookalike at first.

“He didn’t like the idea of someone making money off his son like that and, ironically, he was concerned that if I did something that I shouldn’t be doing, then people might think it was Tiger himself. That seems kind of funny now given what’s happened over the past few years.”

As much as Oxelson looks like Tiger – as a point of fact, he also speaks spookily like him, too – there are no similarities in the ways the two of them play.

“I’m a double-digit handicapper,” he says. “I’ve been as low as 12 or 13 before but those days are long gone. It’s actually quite hard playing golf and looking like Tiger because people automatically expect you to play like him, too. Trust me, that’s definitely not the case!”

Even so, Oxelson’s resemblance to Woods has enabled him to play some of the world’s top courses “I’ve played the Olympic Club, Riviera, Bethpage Black and so on,” he says. “I even managed to play the Old Course at St Andrews in 2005, which was amazing. I had such a blast. Nobody mistook me for Tiger, though. It’s true what they say: you Scottish people really know your golf!”

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Bryce Ritchie is the Editor of bunkered and, in addition to leading on content and strategy, oversees all aspects of the brand. The first full-time journalist employed by bunkered, he joined the company in 2001 and has been editor since 2009. A member of Balfron Golfing Society, he currently plays off nine and once got a lesson from Justin Thomas’ dad.

Editor of bunkered

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