My senior year of high school was a very fun year. I ran track and played golf with my friends. I was never really good at golf, but every once in awhile I would surprise my friends and myself and get a birdie or two. I always preferred the shorter 9-hole executive courses, which had 2 par 4s at the most, par 5s? Forget about it…lol. The year was 1996 it was also the year that a very young man by the name of Tiger Woods joined the PGA Tour. Right before that he was playing golf at a little school called Stanford. Another reason why I liked this guy, he was just a little bit older then me, and he attended Stanford, which was only about 25 minutes from my house.
After having an incredibly successful couple of years at Stanford, he decided to turn pro at the age of 20 in 1996. Oh and guess who came knocking at his door to sign him, Nike and Titleist. You know you are doing something right in the sports world when those two behemoths, Nike especially, want to sign you to advertising deals. This deal at the time was the highest paying endorsement contract in golf history. Oh and Tiger was named Sportsman of the Year by Sports Illustrated and the Rookie of the Year by the PGA. This guy was on fire! In 1998 Tiger even got a video game series named after him, by the Huge Sports publisher Electronic Arts. The first in the series was called Tiger Woods 99 PGA Tour Golf, after that each year it was called Tiger Woods PGA Tour. Every year a new game would come out until 2014 when they did not release a new game. A new PGA Tour game wouldn’t come out again until the following year 2015, this time, it was called Rory Mcllroy PGA Tour.
What happened to Tiger? He was/is the biggest name in golf history and one of the highest paid athletes.
Between 1996 and 2013 Woods would go on to have 79 PGA Tour wins and 40 European Tour wins, not to mention numerous other wins. 14 of those wins were Major Championships, including the Masters, US Open, The Open, and the PGA Championship. In 2013 during The Players Championship he would sustain an elbow injury, later causing him to not do very well at the US Open that year. He wound up scoring 13 over par, which would be the worst he had since turning pro. He took some time off because of his injury. He never really returned to his dominant form, and would wind up having back surgery as well, causing him to miss more tournaments. The years went by and he would compete in some tournaments here and there but still would not get a tournament win. His name was no longer one of the dominant names in golf, a shame too, because he was still relatively young, I mean I have to say that, he is just a few years older then me...:).
Woods would go on to have a 5-year drought as far as tournament wins goes. Until this weekend when he had a remarkable Tour Championship and wound up winning the tournament with a score of -11. He was 2 strokes ahead of the next golfer Billy Horschel. You could say Woods was a bit excited. The past few months he has played amazing, and did quite well in the Open and PGA Championship and even had a chance to win those. It is really fun to be a Tiger fan again. I personally have always been a Tiger fan, so I am happy to seem him succeeding once again. Especially for a player that some thought might never win another tournament again.
Well done Tiger, well done.
So what do you think does the future look bright for perhaps the best golfer of all time? Will he keep this up and return to his dominant form? Let me know in the comments below.
Matt aka bayareasportsfan
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