Tiger's Appeal

(Note: this was supposed to run two days ago, but got sidetracked. Also appears in next Thursdays edition of The Heights

Ten years is a long time. Imagine, if you can, where you will be in 2017. College will have past and our lives running ahead at full speed. Now remember where you were ten years ago.
I was only eight, my major obsessions at the time were collecting basketball cards and hanging out with my buddies next door. I really had no idea what golf was. But this week in April things changed. On this week a 21-year old kid with a big smile from Southern California said “hello world” with a 12-stroke win at the Masters. That kid, of course, was Tiger Woods, and after winning on Sunday, April 13th, 1997 he would take the golfing world by storm, going on to win 56 PGA Tournaments and 12 Majors.
After watching one of the most spectacular triumphs ever over that week in April, I was soon lured into golf with a little coaxing of my buddies, hitting the links regularly through middle school and playing on the golf team in high school. I was hooked for life (I play a fade though).
And I wasn’t alone. Across the country, countless kids picked up golf, drawn into the game because of the charisma of Tiger. The smiley 21-year old kid showed the nation his 300-yard drives, his unbelievable short game, and his steadfast putting ability. Soon, many thought, the draw of one man would bring the game of golf to experience the boom it had been waiting for since the dying days of the Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer Era. What had been a sad, faceless decade for golf was about to end because of Tiger and the new wave of players he would soon bring to the game.
It was the Tiger Generation, I admittedly was part of it. This group of young golfers feasted on bombing it off the tee, going for the green in two, and hitting everything hard. While my pursuit of the dream ended after high school, many of the kids from the Tiger Generation are starting to make their way to the Tour, exemplified by guys like Bubba Watson and J.B. Holmes (both will be sitting at home watching the Masters this week).
But despite all the hoopla Tiger creates with his every move, a media feeding frenzy in which he has to buy “Privacy” in the form of a $20 million dollar yacht, golf in America has not been saved by the emergence of a transcendent superstar.
While courses continue to spring up in every nook and cranny of America, golf course play is actually on a decline since the dot com burst in 2000-2001. Less people are playing golf today than they were five or six years ago, and relatively speaking, golf has not experienced the boom it thought Tiger would bring.
Beginning this year, many of the PGA Tournaments will be covered exclusively by The Golf Channel, which is selectively provided on certain cable and satellite networks, meaning that America cannot turn on ABC or CBS on Sunday to see the final round each week. ESPN no longer has midweek coverage, meaning golf highlights, which historically took a back seat on the highlight reel, now barely make it into Sportscenter. Golf is returning to its pre-1997 niche among sports fans and participants.
The Tiger Effect has been one underwhelming for a variety of reasons. Without a consistent foe, it often seems as though there is a Tiger vs. Field mentality of the viewers each week when he is anywhere near the first page of the leader board. While Phil Mickelson might have won back to back majors a year ago, nobody has been able to challenge Tiger the way Nicklaus had Palmer, Lee Trevino, Gary Player, and Tom Watson to challenge him and flat out beat him on a regular basis. After all, Nicklaus finished second 19 times in majors, Tiger only twice.
Other factors contributing to the lack of interest in golf are that people simply do not have time to spend two or four hours without cellphones and PDAs, and often courses price themselves out of the market making them inaccessible to the general public
2007 marks the tenth anniversary of Tiger’s first burst on the scene at the Masters, and instead of his glorifying achievement propelling golf to the national spotlight this week, most of the focus this week will be on NCAA Basketball, a certain Japanese pitcher, and the next arrest of Pacman Jones. Its ten years later, and golf is still on the backburner.
Some things change, some things just stay the same.