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He points to the golf division's dramatic growth since 1996, the year Nike, Acushnet and American Express plucked him off the Stanford golf team with $12 million of inducements. "Back when we started," he says, "I think we had a red shirt, a yellow shirt, a blue shirt and a black shirt." And gosh, when Tiger beat Davis Love III in a playoff at the '96 Las Vegas Invitational, Love was still using one of those clubs with a wood head and a steel shaft. "We've come a long way," Tiger sums up, giving particular credit to Knight, his billionaire mentor. "It starts from the top. We have a leader that everybody's excited to work for."
Ninety minutes later, as our gleaming white G5 banks over Catalina Island and turns tail on the sun, the Nike executives toast each other and sink into their comfy chairs. It will be a short, happy flight to Scottsdale.
You get too close to Tiger and he disappears. . . .
That is ironic, because getting close to Tiger is the reason SI brokered a deal with the PGA of America to put me on Tiger's pro-am team at the PGA Grand Slam of Golf. It's November 2006, and I've just started my Tiger audit. "You guys can talk, get reacquainted," says one of SI's top ad sales execs. "Maybe he'll give you a few minutes on the side."
So here I am, Mr. 12 Rounds a Year, standing with Tiger and our scramble partners in the fairway of the par-5 2nd hole at the Poipu Bay Golf Club in Poipu Beach, Hawaii. We have a bit of a hanging lie, and I need to fly my five-wood about 225 yards to an elevated green, employing maybe 10 yards of fade against a right-to-left crosswind to fit my ball into an opening between a half dozen bunkers. I also have to consider the influence of Tiger's gallery, hundreds strong, clutching cameras and pens, whom I imagine to be debating the identity of the beanpole senior with the mainland pallor and green golf glove.
Tiger? He and caddie Steve Williams are a few feet away, but if they were to don ponchos and fly into the Mexican hat dance, I wouldn't notice.
I misplace Tiger again on the tee of the par-3 3rd, where he smacks a short iron pin-high while I'm trying to choose between a hybrid four and a garden weasel. On another hole a smiling Tiger walks by, saying, "Give me a 6." (I won't learn until nightfall that he has just yanked his drive out-of-bounds.) Mostly, though, Tiger is merely a disembodied voice saying, "Good swing there," when you hit a nice shot.
Any Tour player could have told me: You don't learn about Tiger when you play golf with him. You learn about yourself.
So it has to wait until the following week, when we meet in that little room at the airport. How, I ask him, does he find time for his business pursuits? How does he keep the orbits of Mark Steinberg, his agent at IMG, and Hank Haney, his swing coach, from crossing? "It's a matter of keeping a balance," Tiger says, his eyes straying to the clock on the wall. "Sometimes in the late evenings I may have to sit down and do some figuring, make a bunch of phone calls, work different avenues. It's basically nonstop. But it's mentally stimulating to work like that. The practice time, the tournaments, doing things with my friends and family, the business side ... it all blends in."
I picture Tiger in his home office at midnight—signing documents, firing off faxes, checking his bank statements to make sure Steinberg hasn't bought Belize without his permission. He says, "There's no class to teach you balance. You have to learn on the fly."
A thunderstorm interrupts second-round play at the Dubai Desert Classic . . . so I drive my rented SUV into the desert for a look at Dubailand. There isn't much to see—a rough expanse of coarse sand and gravel dotted with patches of dusty-green scrub and the occasional stunted tree. But then, that's what the area around the Emirates Golf Club looked like a decade ago. If Dubailand is built according to plan, it will have 55 hotels and the infrastructure to accommodate 200,000 visitors a day.
Tiger had been coy the other day when a European reporter asked if he planned to spend part of his week in the desert, stepping off yardages and planting little red flags. ("I'll probably go out to the site and take a look," Tiger said.) His nascent design team, however, is huddling with the Tatweer staff at the Emirates Club. Tiger's man on the ground is his childhood friend and high school teammate Bryon Bell, who caddied for Tiger on occasion before going to work at the Tiger Woods Foundation.
