by The announcement that Tiger Woods and Nike were calling time on their 27-year commercial partnership came as no surprise to anyone paying close attention. It’s been almost a decade since Nike, which said in a recent earnings call it will seek $2bn in cost savings over the next three years, stopped making golf equipment, including balls, clubs and bags. Due to Woods’ limited schedule following his exhaustive litany of surgeries, before and after his career-threatening car accident in February 2021, the 15-time major champion is less visible than ever.
But Monday’s conscious uncoupling, which came one week after Woods’ 48th birthday, marks the end of an era in the sports business: the death of the kind of all-encompassing athlete-brand marriage that was really under water. cultural mainstream. The obvious template is Nike’s union with Michael Jordan, a Leviathan deal whose fairly dramatic origins were playfully screen-playable last year. In fact, Phil Knight spent three years aggressively recruiting Woods based on Jordan’s proof of concept: that one charismatic sportsperson with divine gifts could take over an entire sports entertainment empire. “Everyone is looking for the next Michael Jordan and they were watching the basketball court,” said the Nike chairman at the time. “And he was walking down the fairway the whole time.”
Related: Tiger Woods and Nike complete $500m, 27-year partnership
Woods was already among the biggest names in the sport when, days after coming back from five strokes down to win his third straight US Amateur in 1996, he announced that he was leaving Stanford University and enter the paid ranks with two words: “Hello, world.” Given the current state of the newspaper industry, let’s just say Nike’s three-page spread in the Wall Street Journal wouldn’t make the same splash today when it announced its arrival.
He immediately lived up to the dizzying hype, winning four tour events in his first eight months, including the 1997 Masters which sent his already soaring profile into the stratosphere. Woods soon delivered a return on investment that exceeded the initial terms of $40m over five years. To call him the most dominant athlete in the world, which he was, only highlighted his wider significance. He was larger than life, the rarest chosen, not only together but exceeded all expectations and held the world in a frenzy, winning majors with record margins and conjuring one unforgettable moment after another.
Some of them could not have been scripted better by Nike behind the scenes, like his chip in from the rough during the final round of the 2005 Masters when the ball hung on the rim for more than a second, the company’s “swoosh” perfect logo in a frame, before falling into the cup.
The latest 10-year deal between Woods and Nike was reportedly worth around $200m, but the commercial iconography is what people will remember years from now. Nike’s creative partnership with advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy produced campaigns that transcended the transactional nature of pop art advertising. For every Juggle, the fun 30-second spot where Tiger played a little keepie-uppie with an iron before hitting the ball into the distance, or Golf’s Not Hard, which allowed him to flex his comic chops, people were another there to push. the limits of the mainstream and even flirted with the avant-garde, like the 60-second spot composed entirely of one swing in slow motion against a spartan black background. No, who came out ahead of the 2008 US Open (where he would have an extraordinary 19th hole victory) relied on a call from Tiger’s father, Earl, who had died of cancer two years earlier.
Even when they were overworked – like the famous I Am Tiger Woods spot, which borrowed liberally from Spike Lee’s 1993 magnum opus Malcolm X Codes – they were hardworking enough in their hyperbole to succeed with them. (That all of these carefully spun myths were shattered when Woods’ personal life became engulfed in one of the biggest tabloid scandals in history in 2009 made the work even stronger.)
People were excited when the new Tiger ad dropped, an enthusiasm fueled by their scarcity in the pre-YouTube age, when they happened across it on TV as the only way to see it. The golden age of the Woods-Nike partnership overlapped with the final days of American monoculture, giving their work a platform and reach that no longer exists. Traditional network television audiences were fragmenting even before they were eclipsed by the rise of streaming services. People don’t watch TV like they used to, especially young people. It’s unlikely that some of Nike and W+K’s biggest coups – whether the Brazilian airport commercial before the 1998 World Cup or the McIlroy-Woods spot that influenced them – would have been given the space to make the same impact on today’s media landscape.
The signs for this break have been there for years. In 2018, longtime Nike athlete Roger Federer – one of the few sports stars to be associated with a brand as enduringly as Woods – left Nike after 24 years for Japanese clothing retail chain Uniqlo in a 10-year, $300m deal. Elsewhere, there’s evidence that rappers and entertainers have gained ground if they don’t get past athletes as sneaker ambassadors, whether it’s Adidas going full Kanye West in its play on the youth market or, to a greater extent less, sharing billing with Jack Harlow. LA Clippers star Kawhi Leonard at New Balance.
LeBron James is a Nike for life, notable for his pervasive and disruptive embrace of athletes as individual brands. Kevin Durant, too. The same for David Beckham and Adidas. But they are the last of a dying breed in the changing media landscape and for all their wealth and untold wealth, none of them are I Am Tiger Woods.
