THE SOUND OF MONEY

By John F. Stacks

The experts say Eldrick ("Tiger") Woods strikes a golf ball so hard that the sound it makes in flight is unique--a kind of whining swoosh, occasionally accompanied by the crack of a club head caving in. The balls that emit this signature sound routinely travel farther than those of any other tournament player.

Certainly the swooshing sound made last week when Woods, 20, a junior at Stanford, decided to join the pros was unlike that made by any other young player joining the tour. That sound was money, most of it from the Nike Corp., fluttering down on the young phenom, who is suddenly the richest golfer never to have won a professional tournament--in addition to being one of the very best players ever to enter the game.

He also happens to have dark skin and an incandescent personality. The prospect of his success in a nearly all-white sport gives him a marketing potential as remarkable as his distance off the tee. Thus Nike and the golf-ball maker Titleist combined to guarantee Woods a reported $43 million during the next five years for product endorsements. While other golfers like Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Greg Norman have parlayed their championship standings into huge fortunes made off the course, Woods has the potential to take that money-spinning skill to a new level. Even though golf lacks the mass popularity of basketball, Woods could be Michael Jordanesque in the world of sports marketing.

To be Jordanesque, however, a player in any sport has to be like Mike: the best ever. Woods just may be. By the time he turned pro last week, he had set a ton of records in amateur golf. Two weekends ago he won his third straight U.S. amateur title, a feat never before accomplished, and he did it dramatically. The final was a 36-hole, match-play affair--meaning the golfers played to win each hole against a single opponent rather than accumulate the lowest score for the total field. As he began the last 18 holes, Woods was down five holes to his even younger opponent, Steve Scott, 19, from the University of Florida. With three holes remaining, he was still two down. He birdied 16 and 17 to square the match and then beat Scott on the second extra hole. Victory in golf is often the result of an opponent's failure. In the amateur, however, it was Woods' own stone-cold determination and excellence that produced the unprecedented victory.

This third U.S. amateur title was the culmination of a youthful career like no other in the history of golf. At age three, Woods was beating 10-year-olds. In the second grade he won an international match against other kids. At 11 he was undefeated in 30 Southern California youth events. At 16 he became the youngest person ever to play in a Professional Golf Association tournament (as an amateur, of course). He won three United States Golf Association junior titles, the first when he was 15. By last week there was nothing more for him to do in amateur golf.

So with a promise to his parents that he would one day return to Stanford to get his degree, Tiger turned pro. It was the logical next step in a life tailored by his father and mother to make him exactly what he is. "This is the first black intuitive golfer ever raised in the U.S.," Earl Woods, a Vietnam veteran, told SPORTS ILLUSTRATED last year. "Before, black kids grew up with basketball or football or baseball from the time they could walk. The game became part of them from the beginning. Tiger knew how to swing a club before he could walk."

Earl is actually half black, one-quarter American Indian and one-quarter Chinese. His wife Kultida is half Thai, one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter white. She complains about press descriptions of Tiger as black when he's half Asian, but Earl's market-wise formulation is that when his son is playing in the U.S. he's black, and when he's playing in Asia he's Asian. His dark skin makes Tiger (whose nickname was taken from Earl's Vietnamese army buddy Nguyen Phong) all the more appealing in the world of golf, which not only has few nonwhite players but is also played on courses across the country that have systematically excluded minorities. That Tiger could not only crash the party but eventually dominate it is quite delicious.

Certainly Phil Knight, co-founder and chairman of Nike, thinks so. His up-front money offer to Woods, if not equal to Jordan's current compensation from the shoe company, is huge by any standard. In his first pro tournament last week at the Greater Milwaukee Open, Woods showed up with a Nike hat and Nike shirt, while sports television covered every hole of his first day. When a kid becomes a pro, there is always the question of whether he can handle all the attention, let alone the demands of the game. At a press conference after he announced his pro status, Woods opened by saying charmingly, "Well, I guess it's 'Hello World.'" Only later did the press learn that this is the tag line of a Nike ad campaign, which magically appeared on TV two days later. Swoosh!