Tiger Woods: Golf’s ‘golden boy’

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2:04Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Lovely to be back in the room with you. Nice to see you again. And in case you don't remember what we're about, every episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money. Then we judge them. Are they good, bad or just another billionaire? I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor. And I'm Zing Zing. I'm a journalist, author and podcaster. And since our last podcast, Forbes magazine, these are the authority on billionaires as magazine publishing company, which compile a list and rank billionaires. We've got some new meat.

2:37Yeah, they've now actually listed 141 more billionaires than last year. That means there are officially 2 ,781 billionaires on the planet. That's a lot of episodes for future reference. And who's currently top of the tree? Bernard Arnault, who's head of the LVMH fashion conglomerate. We did a whole episode on him, so you can go listen to that right now if you haven't already. We've got some big-name billionaires coming up this season. Perhaps surprisingly, they are billionaires. People like Jerry Seinfeld, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. How do they get so rich? We've also got the story of Google founder Sergey Brin, financier George Soros.

3:12And we've got tons more of the world's wealthiest people lined up too. But we've also got a superstar billionaire to kick off the season. So who are we talking about today? Well, we've got the man with the golden swing himself. A man who really came to dominate a game where dominance is unusual, the game of golf. It is none other than Tiger Woods. And of course, Tiger is not his real name. He was born Eldrick Tont Woods, but his father quickly nicknamed him Tiger in honour of a missing friend he'd served with in Vietnam. And Tiger was a good name for a golfer who became one of the greatest golfers of all time.

3:48he actually won 15 major golf championships and 82 PGA Tour events. Now, for those of you who don't know what PGA is, it's the Professional Golfers Association, which organises the North American Tours. And 15 major golf championships is more than just about anyone else. It's not the record. A guy called Jack Nicklaus has the record who dominated golf in the 60s and 70s. But golf is hard. There are so many moving parts that it's very unusual for people to win tournament after tournament after tournament. It's not supposed to be possible, but he did it. Are you a golfer? I'm afraid to say. I was going to say, that was spoken like a man who knows golf.

4:25Much to the bemusement of my wife and two daughters. So, come to the present day, he's 48 right now. Tiger Woods is currently worth$1.3 billion. And this is partly down to a long-running deal he had with Nike, which netted him$500 million over 27 years. That's actually a very long time to be sponsored by a single brand. It is. And Nike came up in our other sports billionaire, Michael Jordan. So Nike have made a lot of people very rich. I am so shocked at how much money he made. I knew he was successful, but not billionaire successful. Neither did I. I have to say I was shocked that he made our list of billionaires.

5:01Not least because, as we will find out, his career had a very interesting turn at some point. I thought he would have lost quite a lot of his revenue-making potential when it was revealed that he had been having extramarital affairs. it became a massive global scandal and in fact he continued to make big money we'll find out how I have to say having affairs while still trying to be a championship golfer I mean where do you find the time but you know we'll get into that he's also been plagued by injuries let's listen to a clip of him let's hear the man himself speaking to the BBC as he prepared for the British Open one of the major championships this is in 2022 you would ask me last year whether I play golf again, all my surgeons would have said no.

5:42But here I am playing, and I played two major championships this year. So I will always be able to play golf, and whether it's this leg or someone else's leg or a false leg or it's different body pieces that have been replaced or fused, I will always be able to play. Now, if you say play at a championship level, that's just a totally different story. And that window is definitely not as long as I would like it to be. That's him after a near fatal car crash in which he almost lost his leg That's kind of wild isn't it that you could be in your mid 40s And still be playing a sport at the top of your game So Tiger Woods not only was he a colossus of the game He's also an amazing comeback kid But we're going to wind all the way back to the beginning And figure out how he goes from having zero to his first million And then we're going to chart how he gets from a million to a billion Which is a thousand times more than a million

6:40so Tiger was born in 1975 in Orange County California his dad was a retired army officer who met his mother in Thailand while he was stationed on duty there an interesting ethnic mix he actually coined a term called cabalinasium to describe a mixture of Caucasian black Native American and Asian ancestries you know that kind of interesting ethnic heritage is kind of what I think also made him massive because he was such an anomaly in sport. Yeah, and reached across so many different divides. It's worth saying that golf is a very white game, certainly in North America anyway. So he was a real trailblazer in many ways.

7:20But he started, I remember seeing him as a child. I think I must have been about 10. And there was this little kid who came on to a TV show. He was a child prodigy. I think he started when his dad Earl was hitting balls into a net in his garage, when an 11-month-old Tiger Woods got out of a little plastic club and made an almost perfect swing. OK, so an 11-year-old child. 11-month-old. An 11-month-old child. That's when babies start to crawl, right? I don't think I was walking until 12 months. He became a media sensation. He made this TV appearance aged two. This is one I saw on an American chat show.

7:56And he was putting against Bob Hope, famous American comedian that time. I actually looked this up on YouTube and you can still see it there. I mean, he comes on with this tiny little child-sized golf bag and executes this perfect little swing. It's actually very sweet, but sort of scary to see a child do something so adult. Yeah. It wasn't just for show, though. It wasn't just cutesy kind of stuff. He was actually winning competitions from a very young age. He won the World Junior Golf Championships in the nine to ten-year-old category when he was eight. And he won the World Juniors six times in total.

8:28I would say part of this is down to his dad, Earl, because Earl was a really tough coach. And, you know, now we look back with hindsight and we can say that was more than just tough. You know, apparently Earl was verbally abusing him during training when he was a child. He would swear at him during his backswing, say racist taunts to his own son to motivate him. That's amazing. I mean, these days our hackles will rise at that really quickly. That's more than being the pushy parent, right? Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, that's bordering on something that if you heard someone talk to their child like that in public, you'd probably try and ring someone.

9:02You'd ring someone, yeah. But Tiger himself said it gave him great toughness. He called it psychological training. He said it helped him in ways that other people might think were hurtful. Interestingly, right, they had a code word, which Tiger was allowed to say if he couldn't take it anymore. But Tiger never, ever used it. Because in his words, I was never going to give in to him. I was a quitter if I used the code word and I'd quit. I mean, you know, it's pretty on the edge here when you have actually agreed a code word if you can't take any more. That in itself tells you it's pretty out there.

9:33And yet psychologically, you feel like you can't use the code word. I mean, that's the mind games on display here are kind of crazy. We've had pushy parents before, haven't we? Aren't good, bad billionaire. And sometimes the temptation is to think that this is a frustrated parent living out their own dreams. through their child. It's an interesting one to how much of the frustrations, the ambitions of the parent are expressed through the child. When he was 14, he got asked what set him apart from his rivals and he said, my competitiveness, when you have to make a putt, you make a putt. You had to hit the shot, you hit the shot.

10:07You have to block out everything. And that's something that came through throughout his playing career. When he would give press conferences, he would say, what really turns me on, what gets me going is competing. That's interesting. You have to wonder how much of this was competing with his dad. Yeah, but he wasn't a one-dimensional kid. He had good grades. He was an A student. He described himself as a nerd. Apparently, I didn't know this either, he had a stutter as a boy. He took a class for two years to help manage that. It's kind of unsurprising you didn't know about this, because apparently people only found out in 2015.

10:37He wrote a letter to a boy who contemplated taking his life after bullying. And he said, I know what it's like to be different and to sometimes not fit in. I also started as a child and I would talk to my dog and he would sit there and listen until he fall asleep. Which is quite sweet, really. That's the kind of side tiger we don't usually see. Yeah, he also said, as I was younger than most of the kids I competed against, and often I was the only minority player in the field. But I didn't let it stop me. And I think it even inspired me to work harder. And I think it's hard to overemphasize just what a trailblazer he was in terms of ethnic minorities playing golf.

11:12And even though he was at the top of his game when he was a teenager, he still graduated age 18. He was actually fought over by universities because they obviously wanted a talented athlete on their books. He ended up choosing a golf scholarship at Stanford, which is an amazing Ivy League school, because he wanted to have a quality business education. So kid with his head screwed on. Head screwed on. It's worth saying here that the American college system and their relationship with sport is very different to the rest of the world. The college sport is almost as prominent as professional adult sport.

11:46Yeah, Stanford clearly really wanted him because they actually created a customised economics programme for him because their business programme didn't include what he wanted, which was accounting. Very glamorous of Tiger to want to take accounting. Well, he needs something to be able to count all that money he made. So during university, Tiger was competing widely, but only as an amateur. And really, only professionals can make money from playing golf. The distinction between being an amateur and pro is rigorously maintained. So he wasn't actually making money from winning any of these things.

12:16There are probably about 150 professional golfers in the PGA Tour. That is the North America Tour. By the mid-90s, the top nine were winning about a million dollars per year. That's just the prize money that's excluding sponsorship. I mean, it's a lot of money, which makes it understandable as to why Tiger wanted a piece of this. because after just two years at Stanford, he dropped out to turn pro and earned that money. And his pro debut was one of the most highly anticipated moments in golf. Unsurprisingly, Nike was poised to strike the second Tiger said he wanted to turn pro. So they immediately signed him up for a five-year contract for$40 million with a$7.5 million signing bonus.

12:58So the second the Inc tried, he already won 7.5 mil. Yeah, and that was considered crazy money in the golf world at that time. So Nike was betting big. And the chairman at the time, Phil Knight, said what Michael Jordan did for basketball, Tiger can absolutely do for golf. The world has not seen anything like what he's going to do for the sport. That's a lot of pressure to live up to when people are billing you that. Worth talking about Nike as well here, because obviously they're very big in things like basketball, athletics, what have you. But they were not known as a golf brand. And golf is quite a lucrative thing to get into, because as somebody who's played from time to time, I can tell you that people spend a lot of money on their golf gear, you know, their clubs, their balls, their bags, their hats, their whatever.

13:41Because basically you want to have the best equipment because otherwise you have to blame yourself for how much you suck at it. What's your handicap out of interest? My handicap is 17, which is a bit higher than it used to be. But there we go. So that means I take on average take 17 shots more than I should. These guys, if they had a handicap, which they don't because they're professionals, they'd be somewhere like minus five or minus six. OK, right. It's a long time before you have to go before Nike sign you up. That's right. So this was seen by Nike as their way to break into a very lucrative sector of sportswear where people spend quite a lot of money and the people who tend to play it tend to be quite affluent.

14:18So in 1996, at the age of 20, Tiger Woods becomes a millionaire many times over. So he's made his first, second, et cetera million, but he's not yet a billionaire. Yeah, because what we now do is we take our plain old millionaires and look at how they become billionaires. Because as we've said in the past, a billion is a lot more than a million.

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18:10So Tiger Woods has made his first millions. But while he's making his millions, he's also getting this amazing reputation. So he wins the first major championship, the Masters, with an amazing 12 strokes, which is the widest margin of victory the tournament has ever seen. Yeah, I remember that tournament. And people were saying he cannot win by that much. That makes a mockery of everyone else because you're not supposed to win by that much. He just blew everyone away. It also made him the youngest Masters winner ever and the first of African or Asian descent, which is amazing. Yeah. I could tell you a bunch of golf names right now who are at the top of their game.

18:47No one would recognise them if they bumped into them in the street. But Tiger Woods became the face of this sport and brought it to an audience that had never seen it before. Right, because golf was very white, very, I would say, even upper class, right? Yeah, well, upper class, I would say it's definitely affluent, for sure. Golf club membership, buy the equipment, be able to take the time out to do it. There's a whole social atmosphere that goes with it. He actually said it would have been naive of me to think that my win would mean the end of the look when a person from any minority walked into some golf clubs, especially the private clubs.

19:22I only hoped my win and how I won might put a dent in the way people perceived black people. Yeah, and this is a horrifying fact to think about. Sometimes as a child, he couldn't buy a drink or change in the same locker rooms as friends in certain golf clubs in the US, which is incredible to think. It's really sobering, isn't it? So you really get a sense of how much a win like that and someone like Tiger changed what people thought about the game. Yeah. And in under a year, in just 42 weeks into his professional career, he became number one in the world rankings. And of course, all this makes him lots of money.

19:56In 97, he's the leading money winner on the PGA Tour. He's making$2 million, which is a record in earnings. And the game of golf itself is loving this. They call it the Tiger effect. In the early 2000s, the early noughties, for example, TV audiences would drop 30 % to 50 % when Tiger was not in the contention and near one of the leaders. If he wasn't there, I'm not watching. It's kind of like what Michael Jordan did for his team, you know, the similar kind of effect happened when Michael Jordan wasn't playing, people wouldn't tune in. Yeah, and bigger TV ratings, which he was driving, meant PGA Tour winnings were going up, sponsors were paying more money, putting more money in the prize funds.

20:33So Tiger Woods was single-handedly making golf more popular and profitable, not just for himself, but for all the other players and the game itself. But even though this prize money seems like a lot, and it was a lot, especially for the time, it was still absolutely put into the shade by his growing sponsorship deals. So in 2001, he re-signs a contract with Nike for$100 million for five years, and then he signs another big eight-year deal. He was also getting money from tons of other companies. He had endorsements, which include Gatorade, AT &T, the telecoms company, General Motors, Gillette, he was one of the faces, along with Roger Federer.

21:08I remember that. Do you remember that one? You know you've made it in sport when you're a face of Gillette. Yeah. There were video games of him as well. So EA Sports was paying him a lot of money. He also wants to capitalise on this brand Tiger himself, right, beyond just sponsoring stuff. So in 2006, he sets up his own company, a golf course design business called TGR Design, which is kind of slow to get off the ground. But, you know, we'll talk more about this later because it becomes more important. By 2009, just 33 years old, Forbes magazine calculated he'd made a billion dollars in career earnings.

21:40Now, that doesn't make him a billionaire any more than if you take all the money you ever made in your life. You don't add it all up and say, I've got that in the bank, right? I wish I could. Yes, I know. So here we are. He's standing like a colossus over this game of golf. And then it all comes crumbling down. Now, as a caveat, we usually cover our billionaires personal lives to some degrees, because, you know, obviously it reveals something about who they are as people. But I think with Tiger, this is an exceptional case because we have probably never had someone whose career was so impacted by something that was happening at home.

22:16And when I say at home, my God, it was a scandal to end all scandals. Literally in the backyard. Just to rewind just a little bit for some context. In 2004, Tiger Woods had married Ellen Nordgren. She was a Swedish former model, daughter of a politician and a journalist. and he had been introduced to her on a golf tour by a Swedish golfer who employed Ellen as a nanny. So it all seemed to be going great. You know, when they got married, they settled in this$40 million estate in Florida. In 2007, they had a daughter. In 2009, they had a son. And then in 2009, the same year their son is born, the US tabloid The National Enquirer publishes a story alleging that Tiger was having an affair with a nightclub manager and claimed she was currently actually with him in Australia where he was competing at the Australian Masters.

23:05Tiger flies home to his wife Ellen and denies the affair. The very next day on the 26th of November, he spends Thanksgiving evening playing cards at his local clubhouse. Afterwards, he drives home. He takes a sleeping tablet before going to bed. And his wife takes the opportunity to go through his phone and she calls this nightclub manager and confirms the affair. So she confronts a groggy tiger who runs the driveway, jumps into his car and at nearly 2.30 in the morning, crashes into a fire hydrant and tree in his own driveway. Oh, yeah. It's getting very messy. His wife smashes the SUV's back window with a golf club.