Tiger Economy

An extract from "A Short History of Golf" by Matt Cleary with foreword by Greg Norman. Available at: www.mattcleary.com

The Human Highlights Reel

Tiger Woods was so powerful at his peak that he wore a t-shirt in a PGA Tour event and no-one in the golf’s Established Order called him out. They may have been thinking something akin to: Ooh-ooh, Tiger’s wearing a T-shirt. We can’t tell him to put a collared shirt on, he may pull out, and we will lose millions.

So Tiger wore a t-shirt. Too bad he didn’t go with shorts, thought John Daly, a noted exposed legs advocate.

And so Tiger played PGA Tour golf in a t-shirt. You think Daly or Duffy Waldorf or Boo Weekely could get away with a t-shirt? They’d be put in jail. But Tiger—and the Tiger Economy that bubbled about him like the frenetic Wall Street scenes in Trading Places (Sell, Winthorpe! Sell!)—was too big to fail.

Inaugural Augusta National chairman Clifford Roberts would’ve called Tiger on the t-shirt, among other things, because Clifford Roberts believed black men should only be caddies and that white men should care for them as one would pets. But the old fellow died in 1977 when he shot himself in the head by a fishing pond he’d built for President Eisenhower (below with Arnie). 

And here we are. Adding to the billions of electronic digits that have been pumped into keyboards about Eldrick Tont ‘Tiger’ Woods, the wunderkind who ruled the world. The man’s a human highlights reel.

When Jesper Parnevik finished 19 shots back from Tiger in 1997 at the Augusta National he said: ‘Unless they build Tiger tees about 50 yards back, he’s going to win the next 20 of these.’ And the concept of ‘Tiger tees’ was born.

‘When Nicklaus said last year that Woods would win 10 green jackets, everybody figured he was way off,’ wrote Rick Reilly after Tiger’s Masters master class in ’97. ‘We just never thought his number was low.

There was the shot on 16 at Augusta, the chip-in and the ball rolling inexorably to the hole, pausing at the Nike swoosh and toppling in. How about that? ‘In your life!’ exclaimed Jim Nantz. ‘Have you ever seen anything like that.’

No, Jim. We had not.

When Tiger was two years old, he met Bob Hope on TV.

Before Tiger was ‘Tiger’, reporters asked Sandy Lyle, the Scottish born golfer, what he thought of Tiger Woods. ‘Tiger Woods?’ replied Lyle. ‘I never played it.’ Orlando Sentinel columnist Leslie Doolittle thought Tiger Woods was ‘some kind of woodsy musk oil for men’.

There’s that probably apocryphal yarn that during the 1996 Quad-City Classic (now the John Deere Classic), Tiger was playing black jack on the Lucky Lady Riverboat Casino in Iowa (true). At 20 years old, he was underage using either a false ID or one someone had not checked. When Tiger tried to enter an adjoining nightclub, the conversation is probably too good to be true.

‘ID, please,’ says the bouncer.

‘I’m Tiger Woods,’ says Tiger Woods.

‘I don’t care if you’re the Lion King,’ says the bouncer. ‘Show me some ID.’

A mate of mine, from Ireland—same age as Tiger—was so good at golf as a boy he was invited to Stanford to play the same time Tiger was. My man turned it down because he’d heard you couldn’t drink in America until you were 21. He works for a bank now in Sydney. Tiger, meanwhile, is worth somewhere around half a billion dollars and lives in a mansion on an island.

Tiger was fastidious about the weight of his putters. He worked with Scotty Cameron who drilled out three little holes to give his putter better balance. Cameron painted them Tiger’s Sunday color of red, and that’s why Scotty Cameron’s putters sport little red circular holes.

Bobby Jones’s putter ‘Calamity Jane’ came with a leather strap around it because Bobby Jones broke it once and strapped it up, and his people sold Calamity Janes with a leather bit of strapping around the shaft for that reason. Golf equipment as a method of ‘game improvement’ remains, largely, golf’s great big lie.

Tiger won the Open Championship St Andrews in 2000 and 2005. At Holyake in 2006 he put on a master class of stinging 2-irons. He didn’t hit a bunker in 72 holes. He hit a driver once and shouldn’t have.

He beat Sergio ‘El Nino’ Garcia in a crackerjack US PGA Championship at funky old Medinah in 1999, the highlight of which was Garcia cutting a ball around a tree and chasing after it and ripping off a little leap in the middle of the fairway to see what happened. Good times.

Bad times: When Woods beat the all-yellow-clothed Garcia at Holyake in ’06 he texted friends: ‘I just killed Tweetie Bird’.

Tiger won the 2000 US Open at Pebble Beach by 15 shots. Repeat—by 15 shots. He slaughtered them. He shot 19-under at the 2000 Open Championship at St Andrews and won by eight shots. He was 24-years-old. He won the PGA Championship too but his fifth place in the Masters precluded a grand slam.

So he won the next Masters and they called it the ‘Tiger Slam’ and Jim Nantz declared it as ‘grand as it gets’. And who could argue?

He won the Masters the next year too. And in 2005. Not since. But a few things happened, including two more Open Championships, two more US PGA Championships and the 2008 US Open that he won in a play-off over Rocco Mediate after draining a putt on the 72nd hole that made the Torrey Pines golf course shake as though the San Fernando Fault had finally given way.

When Tiger is playing in a PGA Tour event, ratings are up 50 per cent, according to CBS analyst, Ian Baker-Finch. "And that was the case pretty much through the 2000s. And the Major numbers, when it was Tiger in contention, the numbers were astronomical.

"People who didn’t watch golf watched Tiger Woods playing golf. The regular Golf Channel audience, they’ll watch golf every week. But when Tiger’s playing, everyone wants to see him."

Baker-Finch again:

"Look at the 2015 Wyndham Championship. Compared to other PGA Tour events it’s not a big one, it gets relatively low ratings. When Tiger was in contention at that Wyndham, ratings were 40% bigger than any other tournament in 2015 outside the majors. That tells the story right there."

Broadcaster Scott van Pelt was recruited by ESPN from the Golf Channel in part because of his working relationship with Woods. Van Pelt says Tiger "changed everything".

 "There’s no other way to say it, and it’s not an original thought. It’s just the truth. In ’97 Tiger came along, and clearly that’s when every single thing about the way golf was covered and talked about changed. Everything. And the Golf Channel, where I was at that point in time, was just a baby, it was two years old. How we covered golf was a byproduct of this enormous tidal wave that Tiger created."

When Jack Nicklaus won his Masters in 1986, the story goes that Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly was walking around the media tent muttering, ‘It’s too big, it’s too big’, meaning he was worried he couldn’t find adequate words to cover its scale. Van Pelt says it was similar in ’97 when Woods won at Augusta.

"There was nothing to compare it to. In Jack’s case there was no historical context [for a 46-year-old to win the Masters]. In Tiger’s case there was no historical context for a 21-year-old to win. And not just that but a 21-year-old to win and shoot the lowest score. And not just that but a 21-year-old to shoot the lowest score and win by the largest margin. And not just that but at Augusta National for someone who’s dad was a black man … I mean, you don’t try to find context because none exists. You just put it out there and say ‘well here’s what happened and boy, well, this was something'.

"And only now, 20 years later, do you look back on it and really understand. That’s why it was seismic and it was game changing and it was the most significant event to happen in the sport in recent history, because all of those things are true."

Tiger Woods has won 14 majors. But you know that.

An extract from "A Short History of Golf" by Matt Cleary with foreword by Greg Norman. Available at: www.mattcleary.com