The Declaration of Independents by Nick Gillespie Matt Welch

Author:Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

RISE OF THE MUTANTS

When Tiger Woods burst onto the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) tour in August 1996, he was nothing short of mesmerizing, and not just to golf obsessives who lay awake at night sweating water traps and misfired nine irons. After a heavily publicized and smartly truncated college and amateur career, Woods turned pro and immediately collected more than $60 million in endorsement contracts with Nike and such top golf names as Titleist. He managed to win two tournaments by year’s end and was named both PGA Rookie of the Year and Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year. In spring 1997, he won the Masters, the first of fourteen major tournament victories (so far), second only to the legendary Jack Nicklaus. It was a blazing start to a career that has landed him at the very top of the Forbes list of highest-paid athletes with amazing regularity ever since. The magazine for “capitalist tools” estimates that Woods pulled down $105 million in winnings and endorsements in 2010, over $45 million more than the number two sportsman on the list, boxer Floyd Mayweather. That’s even after his most recent turn in the headlines and the exposure of a sex life every bit as driven as his golf game.

Of course Woods was mesmerizing. Too-cute clips surfaced of him from the old Mike Douglas Show golfing as a two-year-old with his father and Bob Hope. Unlike the often-tortured relationships between sports stars and their parents, this was no Fear Strikes Out scenario, in which anguished baseball player Jimmy Piersall freaks out and climbs a backstop due to the unsettling effects of his father’s psychic torture. This wasn’t an Andrea Jaeger (tennis) or Todd Marinovich (football) or Mike Tyson (boxing) story, in which the athlete is driven to failure and self-destruction due to overbearing or absent parental figures. No, Woods seemed to get along just fine with his parents, no matter how focused they might have been on his golf game in utero. He was the all-American kid, Jack Armstrong reborn, a Wheaties box just waiting to happen. He’d quit Stanford, not some junior college, to hit the pro links. He was young and fit, unlike the blobby, seemingly interchangeable guys named Duffy and Fuzzy and Payne who were playing the game around him. Woods was the Babe Ruth or Red Grange of golf, transforming a sport that has always worried about creating the next generation of recreational players and galley watchers. He was the perfect face for Nike’s golf division, which reportedly pays him upwards of $30 million a year to plaster his mug and signature all over their equipment.

Most mesmerizing of all, Woods was a black man in a game whose events took place at country clubs with long and ugly histories of racial discrimination. Before Woods, even golf diehards struggled to remember another black player who was really in the top tier. There was Lee Elder, who was born in 1934 and turned pro in 1959, more than a decade after the color barrier crumbled in football, baseball, and basketball.

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