PART 3 Professional Chapter 21

Greater Milwaukee Open

Brown Deer Park Golf Course

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

August 28, 1996

Tiger Woods is about to make history—again.

Here at the twenty-ninth annual Greater Milwaukee Open, at the Brown Deer Park Golf Course, Tiger will be playing on a sponsor’s exemption—just as he did in his first PGA event, the 1992 Los Angeles Open—but with one huge difference.

He’s turning pro. Today.

“We’ve got a world changer here” is the assessment inside Nike. The company’s top executives are among the few insiders aware of Tiger’s secret decision, one he’s wrestled with for months.

Sports journalists Jaime Diaz and John Strege have been covering Tiger throughout his amateur career. Earl gives them the scoop, but not permission to break the story.

Not yet.

“You can’t write it until I let you write it,” he tells them.

The call to Wally Goodwin in Palo Alto was a tough one.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times published just yesterday, the Stanford coach had sidestepped rumors. “I never second-guess Tiger. He’s very smart and very thorough in his thinking. And his dad is very businesslike. They have it all worked out,” Goodwin tells reporters, while acknowledging that Tiger turning professional is undeniably on the horizon. “When he does it, it’s because he wants to play against the pros on that level.”

Bets are being hedged. As an amateur player, Tiger can’t use a professional caddie, but he’ll need one right away if he goes pro at the Milwaukee Open. He reaches out to forty-eight-year-old Mike “Fluff” Cowan, who’s been caddying since before Tiger even picked up a club in the Teakwood Street garage. Cowan, who sports an oversize Wilford Brimley–esque mustache and “who just might be the only 2-handicap Deadhead in the country,” according to the Baltimore Sun, usually caddies for Peter Jacobsen, but Jacobsen’s been out with back injuries.

“I’m turning pro this week, and I plan on playing the next seven events,” Tiger tells Cowan. “How many of those can you work for me?”

Cowan considers his empty dance card. “Well, I expect just about all of them,” he replies.

He’s conflicted about leaving Jacobsen, whom he’s been caddying for since 1978. But Jacobsen—who says his first impression of Cowan was that “he looked like a cross between Grizzly Adams and Jerry Garcia”—gives his blessing. “You have a chance to work for a kid who could be one of the great players,” Jacobsen tells his longtime caddie. Jacobsen’s wife, Jan, even threatens to fire Cowan if he doesn’t take it. “The only thing I was mad about,” Jacobsen later jokes, “was that Tiger didn’t ask me to caddie for him.”

On August 27, the rumor mill churns even faster when a few reporters learn that Tiger, a native Californian, has officially declared himself a resident of Florida.

Becoming a legal resident of the zero-income-tax state is taken as proof that he’s preparing to sign on to a pair of very lucrative endorsement deals: “Without ever winning a dollar in a pro tournament, Woods has been elevated to the marketing status on par with Nicklaus, Palmer, and Norman,” notes CNN.

Now the money is about to come flooding in.

“People close to the situation,” reports the New York Times, “have confirmed that Nike will pay Woods $40 million over five years to wear its shoes and that Titleist will pay him $3 million over three years to use its balls and clubs.”

In his nightly newscast, NBC’s Tom Brokaw projects that in Tiger’s first year on the PGA Tour, he’ll earn—including winnings and endorsements—$7 million. “Not bad,” Brokaw says, “for a young man who is dropping out of Stanford just to play golf.”

When the news leaks, Tiger has no choice but to issue a confirmation that “as of now, I am a professional golfer,” but he holds all questions until a press conference on Wednesday, August 28, at 2:30 p.m.

The Woods family dresses for the occasion in the Nike athletic gear sent to Tiger’s hotel room. “I got all these great clothes delivered Wednesday, yes,” Tiger says, “but the best thing was they came in these great [Nike] bags. They’re unbelievable bags. They have all these pockets and stuff. Just the best.”

The $40 million Nike payday far surpasses Greg Norman’s reported $2.5-million-per-year Reebok spokesmanship, which IMG’s Hughes Norton—Norman’s then agent—called “the largest in the industry in a long time.”

As expected, Tiger also signs with IMG and Norton, a huge win for the agent who’s kept in touch with the prodigy for fifteen years and who’s still smarting from Norman’s defection to start his own management company at the start of 1994. “There has been a restructuring of the relationship between IMG and Greg but it’s no big deal,” Norton said at the time, downplaying the move. “Everything changes in life.”

The changes today are remarkable. Norton is quick to explain the speed at which Tiger’s deals came together. “I’m a voracious reader, and I had read a lot about Tiger,” he says. “I’d like to tell you it was brilliance on my part, that I knew he’d win six consecutive USGA championships. The fact is, I was just doing my homework.”

Nike cofounder Phil Knight knows the power of branding. He has a single Nike swoosh tattooed on his left ankle. There are ten swooshes on the outfit Earl’s chosen. Tida wears ten—though she refuses to toss out her old Reebok sneakers, saying of Nike, “They pay Tiger, they don’t pay me.”

Tiger is wearing a green Nike shirt, a black Nike cap, and black Nike golf shoes (eleven swooshes) when he goes to the Brown Deer Park clubhouse and is delighted to find more goodies in his club locker: three dozen Titleist Tour Balata golf balls and four golf gloves. “He was like a 10-year-old dropped into the middle of Toys ‘R’ Us,” says his swing coach, Butch Harmon.

His custom Titleist irons won’t be ready in time for this morning’s GMO pro-am (where, for the last time, he’ll be playing as an amateur), but the customized staff bag is ready to go. Tiger and Fluff Cowan, his new caddie, methodically transfer his clubs—taking special care with the driver and its plush tiger-shaped head cover—from the lightweight Ping bag Tiger used at last week’s Amateur into a new professional-grade black-and-white Titleist bag stitched with the name TIGER WOODS.

Tiger’s pro-am tee time is moved up to accommodate the timing of his press announcement. Just after he tees off in Milwaukee, a call comes through to golf reporter Jeff Babineau at the Orlando Sentinel sports desk. It’s an excited colleague on the other end of the line, talking so fast Babineau can barely keep up.

“Hear about Tiger?” his fellow reporter asks. “Well, you probably don’t know this. When Tiger just teed off, he was announced ‘from Orlando, Florida.’”

Sentinel reporters chase down the lead to 9724 Green Island Cove, a golf villa in Isleworth Golf & Country Club, ten miles west of Orlando. The IMG head, Mark McCormack, also owns a property there. The agency will hold the deed to the villa until it can be properly transferred to Tiger.

Back in Milwaukee, the community golf club scrambles to prepare space for all the reporters and film crews arriving to cover the news conference. Officials lease a media tent from a local restaurant and assemble a platform in front of a beer ad.

At 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, August 28, 1996, Tiger takes the stage.

Earl sits on one of two striped armchairs that flank the podium, facing the press. Tiger grasps his father’s hand, then takes a deep breath and greets the room. “I guess, hello world, huh?”

The line strikes the seasoned media professionals as clever, charming.

Reading from a prepared statement, Tiger thanks Earl and Tida for being good parents “who have raised me well.” He explains how some “very special people, my parents,” helped him through the “frustrating and painful process” of deciding to relinquish his amateur status.

“Instantly,” ESPN’s Jimmy Roberts says, “Tiger Woods is one of the biggest names in professional golf.”