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Tiger wants the lion's share
By Mark Kreidler
Special to Page 2Standing around the copy machine the other day at work -- Tiger Woods doesn't endorse a company that makes copy machines, does he? -- we were trying to place Woods' overwhelming dominance of the golf landscape in an historical sports context that made sense. And you know what that means: Babe Ruth is out.
|  | | It's a simple fact: Golf's surge in popularity can be traced directly to Tiger Woods. |
Right, Babe Ruth could never be Woods, because even at the peak of his massive popularity Ruth never had a bargaining chip bigger than a renegotiation of his own player contract. I mean, Ruth never got a piece of the broadcast rights. There sort of weren't any.
Muhammad Ali as Woods? Nope. Even in his heyday, Ali was basically living from paycheck to paycheck. Of course, those were paychecks with more zeroes in them than your average singles bar, but still, Ali wasn't trying to cut himself in on an entire sport's worth of action.
Woods as Gandhi, the man with whom Tiger once was favorably compared by his father, Earl? Please. Was that Tiger starring in the movie version a few years back?
The closest parallel for Woods probably is Michael Jordan, who certainly was the golfer's forebear in a marketing sense. Before Jordan, an NBA star might have considered himself well paid with his standard $4 million contract. After Mike, any top-rack talent who wasn't pushing his own line of sporting apparel or slamming with Bugs in a major motion picture was flat-out getting punked by the Man.
And what Jordan and Nike loosed upon modern sporting society, Woods has taken to a new plateau. This is a man whom Golf World has estimated will take in $54 million in endorsements this year alone. But that's not what frightens the real golf world. No, what scares the bejeebers out of the PGA Tour is something far more basic, if not outright base.
Tiger Woods, age 24, has finally figured out what he wants.
Unfortunately for golf, it's everything.
The PGA is in a serious bind here, and I'll tell you why: Everything that Woods says about himself is true. It might not be happy news, but it's true. The PGA Tour is enjoying enormous popularity surges because of the presence of a single player, Woods. The Tour will be able to crowbar open the treasure chest at the television networks in its upcoming broadcast-rights negotiations because of the presence of a single player, Woods.
Record purses at Tour stops: Woods. TV ratings that you'd normally have to be Seinfeld to garner: Woods. The ascendance of golf as a sport of interest among the tiny tots who someday will grow up to possess their very own remote controls: Woods.
And when Woods said, as he did the other day, that "in a perfect world" he would personally receive his own cut of the new TV deal, you could hear the wounded howls from Tour stop to Tour stop. The reason they're so wounded out there? They know, deep down, that Woods is right.
People get confused on this issue rather easily. They have a hard time distinguishing between Woods the golfer and Woods the phenomenon. Saying that Woods is the only golfer who matters to Corporate America is not the same as saying Woods is the only guy with a club who knows how to play. As a golfer, Woods is brilliant, breathtaking and all that, but he's hardly unbeatable. Heck, Phil Mickelson has taken the man down twice this season alone.
But Woods the phenomenon is something else again. That's a different animal. That has to do with arena-rock crowds and an almost religious devotion among his followers, with that noted spike in the ratings every time he's in contention in a tournament. The phemonenon part is something that can be recorded, presented and cashed, and you had to know that the day would come when Tiger (a) finally accepted just how absurdly enormous he is, and (b) wanted to do something with all that power.
I'm not saying it's a good thing. Quite the opposite. If you read the particulars of Tiger's complaints against PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, for example, you find yourself walking through some incredibly lame territory. They wouldn't let Earl Woods follow Tiger in a cart during the "Showdown at Sherwood" last year? Finchem never just chats with Tiger to ask how he's doing? Tiger doesn't feel loved? What, did we suddenly get lost in an old episode of "thirtysomething."
But that's part of what happens when you realize you can have just about anything: You want exactly that.
There's a popular theory around that Woods' anger is all prompted by the people at his management company, IMG, whose primary interest is protecting Woods' corporate partners and the like. There's probably a small kernel of truth there, but only a small one. Though it's much more likely that most of this is coming from Woods himself, and that a lot of it is just talk -- that, when push comes to shove, the PGA will wind up showing Tiger a little more love, and Tiger in turn won't talk anymore about taking his own slice of the next TV contract.
But there's something significant about all that, and that is the scary notion that Woods is right about his own worth to golf. The PGA Tour would certainly go on without Tiger, but not as happily, not as richly and not as buoyantly, and that's just the fact.
Golf is going places it has never gone before precisely because Tiger Woods is aboard for the ride, and maybe the reason we could never come up with an adequate historical parallel for Woods is that there really isn't one. Maybe Tiger Woods' popularity really is beyond anything sports has ever seen. If that doesn't scare the water out of the people trying to run the business of golf around him, nothing will.
Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.
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