Golf’s history books tell us that it was 20 years ago that Stanford University sophomore Tiger Woods won his third consecutive United States Amateur in late August, turned professional immediately thereafter, competed in the Greater Milwaukee Open, and signed a multi-million dollar contract with Nike that would secure his financial future.
Woods has had a stellar career, winning 14 majors, capturing 79 victories on the American PGA Tour and posting 106 wins worldwide. During his heyday he was able to make golf relevant to the casual sports fans. Golf’s television ratings were always sky high on Sunday afternoon when Tiger was on the leader board, especially at one of golf’s major championships. Woods was able to transcend the game. He was the heir apparent to Michael Jordan as the most recognizable athlete in the world. He also brought a boatload of new money into the PGA Tour, benefiting not only himself but the very golfers he was able to dominate during his era.
The PGA Tour of 1996 lacked a dominant personality or a noticeable rivalry to keep fans interested in the men’s professional game. Sure, there were a number of talented linksters on tour, but an aging trio of international superstars was nearing the end of its playing days and the timing was perfect for someone like Tiger to fill the noticeable void left by Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson. In May of that year, Watson would win Jack’s Memorial Tournament. It was Watson’s 38th win on tour and he would win one just one more two years later at the Colonial. Nicklaus, who had gone winless since he captured the 1986 Masters as a 46-year-old, was merely a ceremonial golfer who could, on occasion, pull a top 10 out of his hat at a major.
Seve Ballesteros spent the majority of his career in Europe, yet he had a worldwide aura as well as five majors to his credit. Yet by 1996 his golf game was in a serious funk. Greg Norman of Australia and Nick Faldo of England were the other two members of the game’s troika of the 1990s. Their paths would cross in the spring of ’96 at the Masters as Norman collapsed during the final nine holes and Faldo collected his third green jacket as well as his sixth and final major. Like Ballesteros, their careers were in the final years.
After Faldo won the first major of the year, a relatively no-name brigade of journeyman pros came through at the other three grand slam championships. Steve Jones won the U.S. Open at Oakland Hills where Davis Love III three-putted the final green. Tom Lehman broke through with a win at the British Open after finding ways to lose major titles during the previous three seasons. Mark Brooks had his 15 minutes of fame by winning the PGA Championship that August in a playoff over Kenny Perry at Valhalla.
Love III and Freddie Couples were perhaps the two most talented American golfers in the game at that time, but both were reluctant superstars. Couples was especially uncomfortable when he rocketed to No. 1 in the world rankings after winning the Masters in 1992. Love was still majorless in 1996. Both were enormous talents, but neither had the intensity of a Norman or a Faldo to become the game’s top dog.
There were some noted newcomers during the 1996 PGA Tour campaign. Steve Stricker would win his first two titles that year at the Kemper Open and the Western Open. Future British Open champ Justin Leonard won the Buick Open in Michigan for his first tour title. Other first-time winners included Lumpy Herron, Paul Goydos and Sacramento’s Scott McCarron winning back-to-back-to-back tournaments in March. Phil Mickelson continued his winning ways in Arizona when he won his sixth and seventh career titles that winter in Tucson and Phoenix. He would collect his third win of the season in May at the Byron Nelson. At that stage of his five-year career on tour, he had yet to win anything east of the Mississippi River.
Like today, the big money grab tournament of the year was the Tour Championship, a 30-man limited field event to conclude the PGA Tour season. In 1996 it had a $3 million purse and its winner, Tom Lehman, collected $540,000 for his efforts. This year the combined purse is $8.5 million and the champion will receive a check for $1.53 million. On top of that, the Tour Championship victor is normally an impact guy in the chase for the Fed Ex Cup. Last year’s winner, Jordan Spieth, not only took home the first-place check but he also picked up the $10 million bonus for his stellar yearlong performance. As an interesting sidenote, Greg Norman was the career money winner on tour in 1996 with a little more than $10 million in total earnings. Spieth took home more than that over the weekend at last year’s Tour Championship.
The money differential is most glaring with the game’s four major championships. Faldo received $450,000 for his Masters win out of the $2.5 million purse. This year, Englishman Danny Willett got exactly four times that amount ($1.8 million) and the total purse was also four times greater ($10 million) than it had been in 1996. The differences in the total purses at the U.S. Open, the Open Championship and the PGA Championship were even greater percentage-wise when one compares what they were paying out some 20 years ago.
The 1996 PGA Tour schedule did not have any World Golf Championships on its schedule and the Fed Ex Cup was still more than a decade away. There were tour events in very minor markets such Kingsmill, Virginia, Pleasant Valley, Massachusetts, and Endicott, New York. The post-PGA Championship tourneys that were contested in September and October were largely ignored by the game’s big names. Those tourneys included the Greater Milwaukee, the Quad Cities, the B.C. Open (named after the Sunday comic strip), the Southern Open, Las Vegas, the Texas Open, and the Walt Disney. Tiger used those events to get his beak wet in the world of professional golf and ended up losing at the end to Ed Fiori at the Quad Cities, beating Davis Love III in a playoff at Vegas, and then winning the Walt Disney in Florida two weeks later.
The world of professional golf was introduced to Tiger Woods some 20 years ago. His two-decade impact upon the game has been nothing short of dynamic, resulting in greater interest in the game, greater television viewership and greater spectator participation. The end result is that the game had its first true superstar since the conclusion of golf’s golden era in the 1970s. Along the way, pro golf made a boatload of money and that continues to this very day.
