Photo by James Gilbert/TGL/TGL Golf via Getty Images
Sports heroes face inner demons as the rest of us do but sometimes have to deal with them publicly.
By the time Wayne Gretzky retired from the National Hockey League in 1999 as the greatest player ever, Michael Jordan had amassed six National Basketball Association championships and 10 scoring titles. That same year, Tiger Woods won his 15th professional golf tournament and his second major championship, and he was only getting started. Over the next two decades, Mr. Woods won 67 more times on the PGA Tour—including 13 more majors—and joined Messrs. Gretzky and Jordan as the face of their sports.
My generation got to witness all three in their prime, but only in hindsight can we fully appreciate their accomplishments. Mr. Gretzky’s trade in 1988 from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings brought Tinseltown attention to the NHL, which eventually spread to other warmer climes. It’s difficult to imagine hockey today in Florida or Las Vegas without the Great One’s influence. Mr. Jordan likewise brought worldwide popularity and revenue to basketball that has since grown. Four of the past seven NBA most valuable player awards have gone to international players.
Neither man, however, matched Mr. Woods’s impact. I started playing golf as a teenager in the 1980s, long before Mr. Woods turned pro, but he’s the reason I began watching golf tournaments regularly on television. Apparently, I’m not alone. Demographic groups that traditionally perceived golf as a country-club activity were suddenly tuning in. At the height of Mr. Woods’s career, golf surpassed the NBA and even the National Football League in television ratings. Corporate sponsorships spiked and tournament prize money grew by a factor of five. In the process, biographers Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian wrote, Mr. Woods “helped make multimillionaires of more than four hundred Tour pros.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
______________________
Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
