By JOHN STEINBREDER
For many people, their introduction to Tiger Woods came on August 28, 1996, when the then-20-year-old opened a pre-tournament news conference at the Greater Milwaukee Open, his first PGA Tour event as a professional, with the words, “Hello, world.” The next day, his career officially began when he shot an opening-round 67.
In many ways, those moments also marked Nike’s entry as a major player in golf.
To be sure, the Beaverton, Oregon, concern was already in the game, having released its first golf shoe in 1984. A year later, Nike signed its first golfer, Seve Ballesteros, and soon after inked footwear contracts with Peter Jacobsen and Curtis Strange. In 1988, the company that University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman and one of his runners, Phil Knight, founded more than 20 years prior hung its first major championship pelt when Strange won that year’s U.S. Open.
But even with that win and Strange’s victory in the following year’s Open, Nike was only a bit player in golf. Basketball was its sport. Track and field, too.
But then came Tiger, and when Woods hit his first shot in Milwaukee, he was wearing a Nike shirt and hat as stipulated by the five-year, $40 million endorsement contract he had just signed. The next day, Nike released the first of a series of cutting-edge television commercials featuring the golfer.
From there, the company and the kid embarked on a rapid rise. Tiger won 15 major championships and became arguably the greatest ever to play the game, while Nike made itself into a major factor in clubs and balls as well as shoes, hats and shirts. By most news accounts, its golf division produced more than $700 million in annual revenues for a stretch (and upwards of $1 billion at times, according to the one-time president of Nike Golf, Cindy Davis, and the division’s former head of sports marketing, Kel Devlin) and came to employ some 700 people.
But in the summer of 2016, almost two decades to the day that Tiger made his professional debut in Milwaukee, Nike announced that it was exiting the golf club and ball business.