Ten years of Tiger: A new era, a new game
Just as the man himself has undergone an almost mythical tranformation, so, too, has the game he has come to dominate. Since Tiger Woods burst onto the scene with a dominatiung performance never before seen in a major championship, golf has become cool, technology has changed and tournament purses have exploded. We can only imagine what the next 10 years will bring.
By Dave Shedloski, PGATOUR.com Senior Correspondent
From the skinny kid with all-world potential to the mature and muscular man who has become a global icon, Tiger Woods has undergone incalculable -- but all along calculated -- transformation since he won the first of his 12 major championships at the 1997 Masters Tournament. Simultaneously, Woods also represents the physical manifestation of what the game of golf has become in the elapsed decade.
Woods, a self-proclaimed and proud mix of races and cultures, has drawn increasingly more minorities into the sport, if not as participants then at least as spectators and fans. He is on track to become the world's first billionaire sportsman, and golf at the professional level is a notably richer endeavor. Through steadfast dedication he has constructed a physique that could withstand the rigors of any contact sport, and in lockstep his foes have become bigger, stronger and more fit, while the courses they play are far more muscular than any their predecessors encountered.
Ten years is an era or a blink of an eye, depending on your point of reference. Woods admits he can hardly believe that it's been a decade since he throttled Augusta National Golf Club with an aggregate score of 18-under-par 270 and won by 12 strokes, both records. "It seems like forever ago," he says. "My buddies and I always kid that I live in dog years out here. It's just hard to believe that it's been 10 years."
And yet, those 10 turns of the calendar have flipped like pages of a book on a windy autumn day. "It's gone so incredibly fast," admits Woods, who only has to look at how his own life has changed. The man with whom he shared that touching and emotionally charged bear hug behind the 18th green at Augusta 10 years ago, his father and mentor, Earl Woods, is gone, having succumbed after a lengthy battle with cancer. But the circle renews itself. This summer Tiger is to become a father; wife Elin is expecting the couple's first child in July.
That could certainly change things. After all, Woods has had a single-minded focus on becoming the greatest champion the game has ever seen and breaking Jack Nicklaus' record of 18 professional major championships. Now he is mulling over the possibility of skipping the British Open -- where he will be two-time defending champion -- if his progeny should make his own "Hello World" introduction in that time frame.
Andy Warhol once noted that, "they say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." The artist might as well have been talking specifically about Woods, as proactive and energetic as anyone in sports, or, perhaps, any other endeavor.
What has the so-called "Tiger Effect" in golf wrought? Well, start with the course he conquered with a resolute combination of efficiency and brutality in his first major event as a professional. In 1997, Augusta National measured 6,925 yards -- one of 22 layouts on the PGA TOUR that year less than 7,000 yards. The advertised yardage for the 71st Masters is 7,445 yards. Augusta is one of 20 layouts at least 7,300 yards long; only 10 slip in at less than 7,000 yards.
Prize money on the PGA TOUR totaled about $80 million. This year the TOUR will dole out more than $266 million thanks to television revenues that are about eight times what they were when Woods stepped up to a microphone at the '96 U.S. Bank Championship in Milwaukee, grinned like a gambler with pocket aces, and said, "Hello world." Little time expired before the imperialistic Woods began to gather for himself all the spoils in his orbit.
He prepared for the upcoming Masters by capturing his 56th PGA TOUR title at the World Golf Championships-CA Championship at Doral Resort & Spa's Blue Course in Miami. His 12 professional major titles (15 total if you count his three U.S. Amateur wins) include the last two contested, the British Open and the PGA Championship. Now the mark of Jack Nicklaus and his 18 majors is coming ever more into focus, so mathematical probabilities suggest that he should be approaching the Golden Bear's target around 2012.
One could only imagine what golf will look like then. Woods, 31, marvels at some of the changes already witnessed since his resounding Masters victory.
"Can we take it back a few more months before that? Because when I beat Davis Love in a playoff in Vegas [in 1996], he was using a Persimmon driver," Woods says. "I won the Masters in '97 using a 43-and-a-half-inch steel shaft, and that was the norm with everybody. And now the norm is 45 inches. Nobody really used a solid construction ball. Everybody was still in wound balls. Some guys still had fairway Persimmon woods. The game has changed quite a bit. I mean, look at the club head sizes, the length of shafts. Everybody is using graphite now. The average driving length on TOUR has gone up quite a bit."
Indeed, the average drive on the PGA TOUR has increased 22 yards during Woods' pro career, from 267.6 to 289.3 yards. Only John Daly exceeded 300 yards for a season in '97 and Woods was the only other man (at 294.6) to average more than 290 yards off the tee -- and as recently as 2000 they were still the only two players averaging at least 290. Last year, 20 men averaged 300 or more yards in driving distance, and 87 muscled it out past 290.
It might seem like Woods caused the revolution toward the recent phenomenon of bomb-and-gouge golf, but not everyone is buying that.
"I think he's had some impact on how the game is played, simply because people are going to copy the best player in the world," says reigning U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy. "It's just natural that you're trying to do some of the things that he does, but I don't know if you could copy him. I'm not sure that's realistic for anyone, even us."
Former British Open champion Ben Curtis argues that today's pure power players aren't really emulating Woods at all. "How we play the game, most of us, anyway, I don't think it's changed a whole lot," Curtis says. "Tiger wasn't the first guy who just came out and won with power. John Daly was really the first guy who wowed everyone with how far he hit the ball. Fred Couples, Davis Love, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh ... all those guys came before Tiger and were playing the way Tiger plays. But Tiger took all of it to another level, and he changed the way others looked at the game and how to set up a golf course."
Not only that, but he also changed the perception of how a golfer should look.
"Wherever he goes, I think he exemplifies something that I have believed in, and that is your health is still the most important thing that you have," says Gary Player, who credits his intense workout routines for helping him win nine majors and 43 combined titles on the PGA TOUR and Champions Tour. "I was in Dubai [last month], and I saw Tiger Woods in the gym in the morning, and he was playing that day. Now this, to me, was incredible. I just turned around, and I thought, I'll watch him and see what he does. He was playing at 1 o'clock that day. He grabbed two 25 pound weights ... I thought I was seeing things. Here he was pumping this iron, and I said, 'Well, he's raised the bar even further.' I mean, this was an education. This guy deserves every bit of success he gets."
Woods might be having an impact on how the game is played and how players at the top level prepare for competition, but more significant is his influence in how the general population beholds the game, particularly segments of society that heretofore had little interest in it. More than anyone since Arnold Palmer, Woods has made golf seem cool and hip to outsiders. At the same time, he has turned it into by far a more lucrative enterprise for his peers.
"The purses have tripled or some such crazy thing. That is one of the most obvious impact, really," Ogilvy says. "More non-golf fans are out watching golf. I mean, 10 years ago, that's when it all started to go crazy. I wasn't out here 10 years ago, but I have to believe the atmosphere at a golf tournament is different when he plays."
Veteran Mark Calcavecchia, who joined the TOUR in 1982, corroborates that assessment.
"You look at the television and the fan base and you definitely see how it's changed out here," Calcavecchia, another former Open champ, says. "All of the great things that have happened out here, the growth, the purses ... he's certainly the man responsible for it in the last 10 years. Arnie started it all, then Jack carried it, and now it's Tiger."
Woods concedes that he "brought a new look to the TOUR," but his point of view comes from outside the ropes. "What I mean by that," he explains, "are young kids that have never even thought about going to a golf course are now coming out and watching what we do out here and getting inspired by some of us playing golf and watching it on TV and participating in the game."
"I think what I'm probably the most proud of is what we've done with the Foundation; and the youthfulness of the faces in the crowd in the galleries now and the diversity, that wasn't the case before," he added. "Now to see more youth involved in the game of golf, it's just a pretty cool sight."
What hasn't yet come into view is a wave of young challengers to Woods' dominant position. The early conjectures that his own success would spawn the seeds of his own demise with the development of younger, stronger, fitter players have yet to come to fruition. Woods, however, believes the arrival of new rivals approaches swiftly.
"It takes time. It's like a pyramid effect," he says. "You have to have a big base in order to have one or two get to the top. The bigger the base, the better your chances are. ... I believe it is coming."
You have to believe that he is right, that it is coming: the bigger base, the better incarnations of himself. A lot can change in 10 years. A lot more could change in the next 10.
Ten years ago the Tiger Woods Foundation was in its infancy, but has since awarded more than $30 million to various causes. There was no Tiger Woods Learning Center, dedicated in 2005, and which in 2006 helped 8,000 children in and around Anaheim, Calif., enhance their public school education. Ten years ago there was no official PGA TOUR event hosted by Woods, but this year he lords over the inaugural AT&T National at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Md. Nicklaus was 36 when he started the Memorial Tournament, Palmer 49 when he took over the Orlando, Fla., event that now bears his name.
Ten years ago there was no street named Tiger Woods Way (in Anaheim). But, then again, there always has been a clear avenue down which Woods has marched. He has been blazing his own valid path for a decade.
Ten years is an era or a blink of an eye, depending on your perspective. Whatever happens in golf in the next decade, Woods undoubtedly will continue to have a major impact.