How Tiger changed his stripes

Woods then proceeded to talk about his upcoming schedule, a subject that used to be treated like a state secret.

“He never used to say, ‘Do you want me to elaborate?’” Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee said a few days after the Masters. “That’s all the difference in the world. That’s all you ever wanted from the guy. I don’t need private details of his life, but the athlete is obligated to give you more than X’s and O’s. You don’t just get to take the money.”

Over the previous two decades, Woods rarely gave fans, media, and certainly not his competitors a glimpse behind the curtain. And why would he? For most of those years, Woods was playing transcendent golf. Television revenues, sponsorship dollars, and endorsement deals all were exploding. Why mess with that?

Fans, many of whom had never played golf, couldn’t get enough of Woods. When he came to town, they turned out to see him.

“They just wanted to witness him and walk around with him and be that close,” said Greg McLaughlin, former CEO of the Tiger Woods Foundation.

[Opinion: The best thing about the Masters? Patrons can’t bring their phones]

So Woods stuck to his routine. His movements were closely guarded, his words highly calculated. Woods often rose well before dawn to play practice rounds, alone or with a trusted member of his inner circle, and finished before many fans arrived. Early in his career, he had a habit of saying he won with his “C-game,” which older opponents regarded as a slight. His dealings with the media were cordial, but unsatisfying, filled with anodyne quotes that left reporters hungry for more. Fans desperate for a fist bump or a smile instead were greeted with Woods’ faraway stare.

“He didn’t give us anything other than great golf, which was fun,” Chamblee said. “But he didn’t tell us anything.”

In retrospect, that’s understandable. From the moment Woods turned pro at age 20 in 1996, everyone — fans, media, celebrities, politicians, various causes — wanted a piece of him. A 1997 GQ cover story famously portrayed him, not unreasonably, as a foul-mouthed frat boy, which only caused the Woods camp to fortify the barriers between the star and the outside world. The mere fact that his affairs and chaotic private life were kept under wraps until late 2009 only underscored the resilience of the bubble in which he existed.

The Woods we saw at Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club in April seemed more approachable. To be sure, he’ll never throw back the curtain and bear his soul. When a reporter tried to probe Woods’ emotions as he putted on the final green, he reverted to golf-nerd mode: “It’s a new green. That damn thing should have broke,” Woods said. “I hit a pure putt. I remember that putt breaking, and it just didn’t break.”

But at other times, Woods let his guard down. He talked about his late father and his two children, Sam and Charlie. “I hope they’re proud of their dad,” he said. After years of debilitating pain, he spoke of the good fortune he felt at being able to play again. “More importantly, I’ve been able to participate in my kids’ lives in a way that I couldn’t do for a number of years,” he said. And he showed empathy for others struggling with injuries and adversity. “Keep fighting,” Woods said. “We wake up every morning and there are always challenges in front of us. Keep fighting and keep getting through it.”

It might not have been a curl-up-on-Oprah’s-couch moment, but it’s a start.

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“He lets you in a little bit. He’s reflective even,” Chamblee said. “I think some of that is dealing with some very difficult issues and having to face the reality that his kids are capable of judging him now. And he’s trying to change that narrative.”

Woods has dwarfed his sport since he was a teenager. Injury and scandal never altered that reality; they only reinforced it. He did, after all, spend 21 consecutive days on the cover of the New York Post after his 2009 run-in with a fire hydrant. That’s one more consecutive cover than 9/11 earned.

Woods, 43, transformed the way the game was played and the economics of professional golf. On the way to becoming a billionaire, he turned many of his fellow pros into multimillionaires who tweet from the comfort of their private jets.

Yet, oddly, while the professional game has never been healthier, particularly with the prospect of a resurgent Woods to use as a cudgel against networks in upcoming TV negotiations, the broader industry has been in a free fall. Golf participation has fallen some 30% over the past two decades, and annual course closures have outpaced openings for the past decade.

“Tiger’s impact on the game has been the PGA Tour and [TV] ratings and creating fans of golf,” said Jim Koppenhaver, president of Pellucid Corp., an industry research firm. “His impact on the game as it relates to creating golfers or rounds or diversity, as best I can tell, has been little to none.”

This is the great irony of the Woods era. When Tiger turned pro in 1996, there were predictions that he would attract more youth and minorities to the game. He was right out of central casting for such a role: a bright, handsome, supremely gifted, middle-class, multiracial son of an Asian mother and black father.

We first glimpsed Woods as a 2-year-old in 1978 on “The Mike Douglas Show,” then later as a 16-year-old when he was granted an exemption to play a pro tour open in 1992. Even then, said McLaughlin, now CEO of the World Golf Foundation, Woods was “not awed by the enormity of the moment. Inside the ropes, he always seemed very comfortable.”

When he arrived in Milwaukee to launch his pro career in 1996, he brashly proclaimed that he expected to win every week because “second sucks and third’s even worse.” Some scoffed at his bravado, but not Phil Knight. The Nike chairman personally stalked Woods at the 1996 U.S. Amateur, then gave him a five-year, $40 million endorsement contract, unheard-of in golf. Knight knew greatness when he saw it, and he was willing to put his money where his mouth was.

“The world has not seen anything like what he’s going to do for the sport,” Knight said. “It’s almost art. I wasn’t alive to see Claude Monet paint, but I am alive to see Tiger play, and that’s pretty great.”

Truth is, it’s been pretty great for everybody, even Woods’ competitors. He was, and remains, the tour’s meal ticket. A month after Woods’ 1997 Masters victory, the tour announced a new TV contract that ensured exponentially larger purses. Other tour players would be competing for second when Woods was in the field, but the payoff would make it seem like coming in first in the pre-Woods era.

In 1996, nine PGA Tour players made more than $1 million, and none made $2 million. By 2000, 45 players made $1 million, topped by Woods at $9.2 million. In Woods’ first decade on tour, total annual purses nearly quadrupled, from $71 million to $272 million.

Fans, many of whom didn’t know a birdie from a bogey, turned out to see Woods.

And bet on him.

“Tiger crushed the sports books when he was in his prime,” said Vinny Magliulo, director of sports for Gaughan Gaming in Las Vegas. “People looked at betting on Tiger as an investment.”

Bettors’ confidence was well founded. At his peak, Woods won roughly 30% of the tournaments he entered. Even now, after nearly five winless seasons from 2014 to 2018, he has won 23% of his PGA Tour starts. By comparison, Chamblee noted, Jack Nicklaus, long considered the game’s greatest player, won about 11% of his tournaments.

Chamblee played with Woods in Denver in August 1998. The chaos that comes with being paired with Woods, he said, “is like playing golf in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.” It wasn’t just that Woods won; it was how he did it. “He could simply do things you couldn’t do.”

He brought a unique combination of substance — the drives that outflew his opponents’ best efforts, the soaring and flag-seeking long irons, the uncanny knack of holing clutch putts — and style. “He was like the gladiator,” Chamblee said. “He would lop everybody’s head off, then throw the sword up in the crowd and say, ‘Are you not entertained?’”

Just as Michael Jordan made David Stern a great NBA commissioner, Woods provided helium for former PGA Tour boss Tim Finchem. Woods’ presence on weekend leaderboards routinely doubled ratings, driving up sponsorship sales.

Finchem seized the business opportunity. In November 2000, he breezily told an industry gathering of a fantastical plan to double the size of the golf industry to 55 million U.S. golfers who would play 1 billion rounds annually by 2020.

That’s where the Tiger Train ran off the rails. “There isn’t a correlation between the success of the PGA Tour and TV ratings and the health of the underlying industry,” Koppenhaver said. Koppenhaver, a former Kraft Foods executive, launched his firm about the time Finchem announced his fanciful plans. He was skeptical of Finchem’s far-fetched goal, and with good reason. Golf participation peaked at 30 million in 2002 and has been in steady decline ever since. It’s down to 21 million golfers, with median annual rounds at 458 million.

After his Masters victory in April, Woods was asked about his broader effects on the game. “I think I’ve driven a lot more youths to the game,” he said. But even that claim seems dubious. Koppenhaver said participation by players ages 7-17 peaked in 2008 at 3.5 million. By 2017, it had retreated to 1.9 million. The problem is systemic. Millions of dollars have been invested over the past two decades in junior golf programs, hoping to draft off Woods’ popularity. In theory, that should have translated into strong participation among people now in their 20s and 30s. Not so, says Koppenhaver, “Where we have our biggest problem is with middle-aged golfers and millennials.”

Ironically, Woods did inadvertently cultivate a generation of competitors who molded themselves in his image, athletic gym rats who could match Woods’ bomb-and-gouge game. “The whole reason I’m playing golf is basically because of Tiger,” said Brooks Koepka, the world’s third-ranked player. “Tiger made it cool to play golf.”

For Woods, who never had many friends on tour, he has evolved into an avuncular figure, playing practice rounds with young protégés such as Rickie Fowler and Justin Thomas, occasionally joining them for dinner. That was unthinkable when Woods was a younger tour mercenary. “It’s awesome to see,” Paul Azinger, lead analyst for NBC and Fox Sports, said of Woods’ transition. “But don’t think he can’t flip that switch on [in competition] and go cold and go dark.”

Woods’ reemergence at Augusta as an intimidating champion is all the more miraculous given how recently he looked like a broken man. By April 2017, three microdiscectomy surgeries in 19 months had still not alleviated the nerve pain in his back and legs. That month he had to take a painkiller just to attend the 2017 Champions Dinner at Augusta National.

On April 20, 2017, Dr. Richard Guyer performed what likely will be remembered as the most famous back surgery in sports history. By that time, the disc at the base of Woods’ back had narrowed to the point that it was pinching the nerve at the L5-S1 junction. During the anterior lumbar interbody fusion procedure, commonly known as spinal fusion, Guyer removed the damaged disc and decompressed the region, relieving pressure on the nerve and allowing it to heal. Woods said the procedure brought an immediate end to the nerve pain. At the time, he spoke of simple goals: living a pain-free life and being able to play with his children. Guyer, however, set a higher bar. He said that once Woods completed his rehabilitation, “his workouts will be geared to allowing him to return to competitive golf.”

By that time, golf fans had been teased by a series of aborted and sometimes embarrassing Woods comebacks. In 2014, a year removed from a five-win, player-of-the-year campaign, he played an abbreviated schedule, withdrawing twice because of back pain. In January 2015 in Phoenix, he shot a career-worst 82, blading and duffing chip shots like an 18-handicapper. Fans suffered through a Tigerless 2016, other than a December cameo in the Hero World Challenge, Woods’ invitation-only fundraiser. Seven weeks later, he was gone, having missed the cut in San Diego at Torrey Pines, a course where he had been dominant, even winning the 2008 U.S. Open there on a broken leg.

So when Woods hinted at another comeback in 2018, he seemed a glutton for punishment.

When Woods flames out of such comebacks, “he becomes almost a national joke,” said Richard Crepeau, a sports historian and professor emeritus at the University of Central Florida, leaving fans wondering, “Why does he keep doing this?”

Still, the iconic image of Woods endured. “To the everyday fan who may not even play, he’s a superhero,” said Judy Rankin, who used to cover Woods for ABC. “There aren’t many real-life superheroes.”

That was evident a year ago, when Woods visited Hollister, Mo., to give a golf clinic. Some 7,000 residents turned out to Buffalo Ridge Springs Course, many arriving three hours before the scheduled noon start time.

Woods was greeted by children, many too young to have ever seen him dominate his sport, chanting, “Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!” “I love you, Tiger!” a woman wailed as Woods stepped onto the tee. “I love him even more!” another woman cried out.

Neither injury nor scandal seemed to have dimmed Tigermania. But then, we already knew that. A month earlier in Tampa, Fla., Woods had nearly won for the first time since 2013. Woods junkies mainlined the coverage, turning that sleepy event with its middling field into the highest-rated nonmajor tournament in nearly five years.

In retrospect, Woods said on ESPN’s recent documentary “Return of the Roar,” a victory in Tampa “would have been too soon. It just wouldn’t have seemed right.”

The 20-year-old prodigy who said he expected to win every week was now a middle-aged man focused on what he called “the process.” By summer, it was clear the process was working. He briefly held the lead on the back nine at the Open Championship, then finished second to Koepka by two shots at the PGA Championship. Even after all that Woods had been through, Koepka still measured himself against his idol. “I enjoyed stopping history,” Koepka said.

In truth, he only delayed history. Six weeks later, Woods won the Tour Championship in St. Louis, in a scene that looked more like a religious revival than a golf tournament.

At Augusta, when Woods walked off the 18th green and hugged his son, Charlie, a bookend to the hug he gave his father, Earl, 22 years earlier, it seemed just like old times. Woods quickly was installed as the 8-1 favorite to win his 16th major at the PGA Championship May 16-19.

“I thought, this is one of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever seen when his son jumped into his arms because his whole life had come full circle,” Chamblee said. “His body broke down, his game broke down, his reputation was lost. And he’s restored his body, his mind, his golf game, overcome the chipping yips, and come back to win the Masters. It’s a fabulous story. It’s beautiful.”

Martin Kaufmann has covered sports for more than two decades, including the past 16 years as senior editor at Golfweek.