The announcement that Tiger Woods and Nike have called time on their 27-year commercial partnership came as no surprise to anyone who has been paying close attention. It has been nearly a decade since Nike, which said in a recent earnings call it will seek $2bn in cost savings over the next three years, stopped making golf equipment, including balls, clubs and bags. Woods’s limited schedule after his exhaustive litany of surgeries, before and after his career-threatening car accident in February 2021, have made the 15-time major champion less visible than ever.
But there is a specific finality to Monday’s conscious uncoupling, which came one week after Woods’s 48th birthday, that signals the end of an era in the business of sport: the death of the sort of all-encompassing athlete-brand marriage that truly flooded the cultural mainstream. The obvious template is Nike’s union with Michael Jordan, a leviathan deal whose modest origins were playfully dramatized for the screen last year. Indeed, Phil Knight spent three years aggressively recruiting Woods based on the Jordan proof of concept: that a single charismatic sportsperson touched with divine gifts could shoulder an entire sports-entertainment empire. “Everybody has been looking for the next Michael Jordan and they were looking on the basketball court,” the Nike chairman said at the time. “And he was walking down the fairway all the time.”
Woods was already among the biggest names in sport when, days after roaring back from five strokes down to win his third straight US Amateur in 1996, he announced he was dropping out of Stanford University and entering the paid ranks with two words: “Hello, world.” Given the present-day state of the newspaper industry, let’s just say Nike’s three-page spread in the Wall Street Journal announcing his arrival would not make the same splash today.
He immediately made good on the dizzying hype, winning four tour events in his first eight months, including the epochal 1997 Masters that launched his already soaring profile into the stratosphere. Woods soon delivered a return on investment that far exceeded the initial terms of $40m over five years. To call him the world’s most dominant athlete, which he was, only undersold his broader significance. He was larger than life, the rare chosen one who not only met but surpassed all expectations and held the world in his thrall, winning majors by record margins and conjuring one unforgettable moment after another.
Some of them Nike could not have scripted better on a backstage lot, like his chip-in from the rough during the final round of the 2005 Masters where the ball hung on the edge for more than a second, the company’s “swoosh” logo perfectly in frame, before dropping into the cup.
