Nike planned to roll out the “Hello World” commercial on CBS and ESPN during the Greater Milwaukee Open, which would be Tiger’s first golf tournament as a professional. Sitting in a hotel room in Milwaukee, Tiger was surrounded by bags of Nike gear—shirts, hats, shoes, sweat pants—and documents to sign. The first one was a retainer agreement drafted by John Merchant. It designated Merchant as Tiger’s lawyer and authorized him to act on his behalf. The next one, dated August 26, 1996, was a declaration of domicile, which changed Tiger’s official residence from California (a state with a 9.3 percent income tax in 1996) to Florida (a state with no state income tax). Tiger listed his new address as 9724 Green Island Cove in Windermere, a two-bedroom golf villa owned by IMG, which now officially represented him. IMG’s CEO Mark McCormack personally called the PGA of America and dictated a short statement saying that Tiger Woods was officially turning pro.
In an instant, everything had changed. Tiger no longer had to look to his father to figure out travel schedules, hotels, and budgets. Suddenly he was surrounded by lawyers, agents, and corporate heavyweights who made sure everything was taken care of for him. They were big golf fans and couldn’t wait to see him perform. “The world has not seen anything like what he’s going to do for the sport,” said Phil Knight. “It’s almost art. I wasn’t alive to see Claude Monet paint, but I am alive to see Tiger play, and that’s pretty great.”
While Tiger prepared for his pro debut, the final numbers were still being negotiated on his new endorsement deals with Nike and Titleist. One morning, Tiger was with his father in his room when Norton came in to share some news. He’d spent a long night negotiating, and he had Nike’s final offer: $40 million for five years. The gold-standard endorsement deal in golf at that time was Greg Norman’s arrangement with Reebok—a reported $2.5 million per year. Norton was giddy over what Nike was offering Tiger.
“Over three times what Norman gets!” Norton said with pride.
Tiger and Earl just looked at him.
“Guys, do you realize that this is more than Nike pays any athlete in salary, even Jordan?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Tiger mumbled.
“That’s it? ‘Mmm-hmm’?”
More silence.
“Let me go through this again, guys,” Norton said.
Tiger listened while Norton walked him through the numbers one more time: Nike had agreed to pay him $6.5 million per year for five years, with a $7.5 million signing bonus. In exchange for that, he would be required to film commercials, appear in photo shoots, make appearances, and wear swoosh-adorned shoes and apparel. Nike was also going to design a new line of Tiger Woods clothing.
“Guess that’s pretty amazing,” Tiger said.
Earl said nothing, but privately he groused. No matter how much money Tiger received, Earl thought it wasn’t enough.
The next day, Norton came back with Titleist’s final offer—$20 million for five years. Tiger would use the company’s clubs and balls, wear its gloves, and have its name emblazoned on his bag. Titleist was also offering to design an exclusive Tiger Woods line of equipment. He would do commercials, photo shoots, and appearances for the company.
Tiger had Merchant scrutinize every contract put in front of him. On paper, he was suddenly worth $60 million. “I just got rich,” Tiger told Merchant, “but I don’t have five cents in my pocket.”
Merchant called his banker in Connecticut and directed him to overnight Tiger a credit card with a $25,000 limit.
Tiger had come to see Merchant as a problem-solver, and Merchant relished the role. But he preferred to think of himself as someone who could help Tiger avoid problems before they arose. He felt the job of a good lawyer was really to anticipate potential trouble and offer advice on how to navigate around it. In Tiger’s case, he worried about those who might try to use him, and with that in mind, he warned Tiger to avoid two particular athletes: Greg Norman and Michael Jordan.
“I don’t happen to have a lot of respect for Greg Norman as a person, because Greg will take advantage of you to keep his name in the paper,” Merchant opined to Tiger. “He’s on the downside, and you’re on the up.”
Merchant felt even more strongly about Jordan. “Michael can play basketball as well as anyone who’s ever played the game,” he told Tiger. “There isn’t anything else that Michael is good at doing. Nothing! And he’s had too many years of being out there in public. So he’s going to try to use you.”
Tiger listened but didn’t say much. Whether or not Merchant was right, keeping Norman at arm’s length wouldn’t be difficult, but Jordan was another story. Tiger had idolized him throughout his teenage years, and now he and Jordan were the top two athletes under the same Nike umbrella. Not only was it exciting that he shared Jordan’s elite status but Phil Knight even saw Tiger as Jordan’s equal. When asked whether Tiger was comparable to Jordan, Knight said flatly: “You bet your ass.” And shortly after Merchant warned Tiger to avoid Jordan, the world’s most famous athlete publicly stated that his “only hero on earth is Tiger Woods.” It was a pretty heady compliment for a twenty-year-old.
Tiger wasn’t sure he could avoid Jordan. Nor did he want to.
Legally, Tiger was too young to drink or rent a car. But with two strokes of a pen, he had secured $60 million before playing his first round of golf as a pro. No athlete in the history of American sport had accumulated so much wealth so fast. Making good on his promise to his half sister, Royce, for doing his laundry for four years at Stanford, he telephoned her two years early from Milwaukee and sent her into a state of hysteria when she picked up: “Go find your house.” Then, wearing a green-striped polo shirt, Tiger stepped to the podium inside the press tent at the Milwaukee Open. Pausing, he looked at the throng of media and grinned. Earl sat behind him in a cushioned, high-backed chair.
“I guess, hello, world,” Tiger said, smiling.
The media didn’t get the reference, and Tiger didn’t bother bringing them up to speed. They would figure it out soon enough when Nike began its advertising blitz. Reading from a prepared statement, Tiger paid tribute to his parents, telling them he loved them and praising them for all the sacrifices they’d made to get him to this point. With Kultida noticeably absent, Tiger reached back and clutched his father’s hand. Then he fielded questions.
“What would make this a successful tournament for you?”
“A victory.”
“Nothing less?”
“In my life I’ve never gone to a tournament without thinking I could win. I’ve explained that to you guys before. That’s just the mind-set I have.”
Over a twenty-minute period, he told reporters that he had no fear about turning pro, he had no intention of sharing his goals with anyone, and he actually enjoyed the mobs and all the attention.
“Tiger, not too many people begin with a news conference like this,” a reporter said. “How are you going to keep your head on?”
“How’m I gonna do that?” he said, grinning. “I’m gonna play it one shot at a time. And I’m gonna have one hell of a good time.”
Sometime after the press conference, two-time US Open champion Curtis Strange, who was working for ABC, asked him what he expected when he first teed it up as a professional. Tiger repeated what he had already said—that he entered every tournament to win.
“You’ll learn,” Strange told him.
Tiger shrugged off Strange’s skepticism. He knew what he was capable of.
At 1:36 p.m. on August 29, 1996, Tiger Woods hit his first shot as a pro, driving it 336 yards straight down the middle of the fairway at Brown Deer Golf Course. And with that swing, the most publicized debut in American sporting history was under way. Legendary sportswriter Leigh Montville compared it to the Beatles’ first concert in the US at Shea Stadium. Record crowds turned out in hopes of seeing Tiger do something magical, something electrifying.
And he didn’t disappoint. On the final day of the tournament, Tiger stepped to the par 3 fourteenth tee and launched a shot that traveled 188 yards, took a couple of hops, and rolled into the cup. The hole in one sparked a thunderous roar from the gallery, and the crowds lining the fairway sent cheers echoing across the course as Tiger walked from tee to green, beaming and tipping his cap. Then he retrieved his ball and tossed it into the crowd, touching off another loud, prolonged outburst from fans. It was exhilarating to be so good.
Despite finishing tied for sixtieth place and earning just $2,544, Tiger absolutely dominated the headlines, thanks in large part to his new Nike commercial. As Riswold had hoped, the ad’s racially charged message hit a nerve. Golf pros and golf writers saw the ad as disingenuous and questioned its accuracy. Were there actually courses in America that would not let Tiger Woods play because of the color of his skin? A columnist from the Washington Post put that question to Nike. The company conceded that no such place existed, adding that the words in the ad weren’t intended to be taken literally. That response only fueled the controversy.
Nike didn’t mind all the fuss. Market research revealed that the company’s core demographic—consumers between ages eighteen and twenty-nine—thought the ad was “very effective,” and the phrase Hello world instantly became part of the American vernacular. The commercial ended up being nominated for an Emmy.
But Tiger wasn’t prepared for the backlash. Some pros on the Tour quietly took potshots at the ad for being so sensationalized. Such criticisms were no doubt fueled by envy. Nonetheless, they stung Tiger, who was the newest and youngest face on the Tour. In an interview with ABC News’s Nightline during the tournament, he tried to defend the commercial. “I feel it’s a message that has been long awaited because it’s very true,” he said, “and being a person who is, I guess, how you could say, non-wanted, I had experienced that, and the Nike campaign is just telling the truth.”
“What do you think that America’s not ready for?” he was asked in a follow-up question.
“That’s why the ad is very good,” Tiger said. “You’ve got to think about it. Nike ads don’t think for you. They’ll make you think a certain way. You have to think for yourself.”
One problem was that Tiger hadn’t had much opportunity to do any thinking for himself before the commercial began airing. Swept up in the experience of seeing himself in such an edgy Nike ad, he hadn’t contemplated how it might be interpreted. He really hadn’t had time to contemplate anything. The entire week had been a blur.
There was another problem: everyone who covered golf knew that Tiger had been previously on record as saying, “The only time I think about race is when the media ask me.”
Suddenly, he was being asked on national television to explain himself in the context of a commercial about race.
“What’s your message?” he was asked on Nightline.
“I’m not going to tell you,” he said. “That’s very private.”
Tiger also wasn’t prepared for the criticism generated by his father’s actions. Earl had taught Tiger to say very little to the press, but he rarely practiced what he preached. After Tiger ably handled his introductory press conference before the start of the Greater Milwaukee Open, his dad hung around the press tent and started spouting the gospel according to Earl.
“There is no comprehension by anyone on the impact this kid is going to have, not only on the game of golf, but on the world itself,” he said. Earl went on to compare Tiger’s killer instincts to those of a “black gunslinger.” “He’ll cut your heart out in a heartbeat and think nothing of it,” he said. These statements only stoked resentment toward Tiger, who already faced a monumental task—he had just seven tournaments left in the 1996 season to try to earn his card to qualify for the 1997 PGA Tour. “It’ll be very difficult for Tiger to make $150,000 [in that amount of time],” said fellow pro Justin Leonard. “That’s a lot of pressure riding on a twenty-year-old’s shoulders.”
Leonard was putting it kindly. Some members of the national press were more direct. After Tiger’s debut in Milwaukee, sportswriter John Feinstein wrote a feature story on Woods in which he labeled Earl “a pushy father” in “pursuit of publicity for himself and every dollar possible.” Feinstein also went on Nightline and compared Earl to Stefano Capriati, the infamously overbearing father of teenage tennis star Jennifer Capriati. “Like Stefano,” Feinstein said, “Earl hasn’t had a full-time job since 1988, ‘sacrificing’ to be at his son’s side. Earl Woods says he won’t travel full-time with Tiger. That would be a bonus.”
Feinstein’s words infuriated Tiger, who felt like he was getting hit from all sides. In his view, criticizing his parents was an unpardonable sin, something he took personally and would keep fresh in his memory. Yet on September 16, 1996, after spending the first three weeks on the PGA Tour with his father at his side, Tiger said good-bye to Earl and put him on a flight back to Los Angeles. Then he got on a chartered flight with Hughes Norton and Norton’s associate at IMG, Clarke Jones. A short time later, they landed in Binghamton, New York, and Tiger checked into his own room at the Regency three days before the start of the B.C. Open at Endicott. It marked the first time that Tiger had been separated from his father while on the road.
Lonely and bewildered, he welcomed the opportunity to hang out with Jaime Diaz, who was covering Tiger for Sports Illustrated. To Tiger, Diaz felt more like a family member than a journalist. They were making small talk in Tiger’s hotel room when Norton showed up. He was fresh off a conversation with Mark McCormack, and Norton had a proposition for Tiger to consider.
“Mark thinks you should do a book,” Norton said. “Just like Jack did. Just like Arnie did.”
Tiger was blindsided. A book?
He’d been a pro for a whopping three weeks. He hadn’t even won anything yet, and was still trying to qualify for the 1997 Tour. What was Hughes thinking?
“It could be an instruction book,” Norton continued. “It could be a biography.”
Diaz didn’t say anything, but it sounded to him like Norton hadn’t just come up with this idea overnight. This had been in the works.
“So what do you think?” Norton pressed.
Tiger didn’t know what to think. He was a golfer, not a writer. And an autobiography went against his nature. He didn’t even like telling the press what he had eaten for breakfast, never mind going on for hundreds of pages about his life.
“Arnie did it?” Tiger asked.
Norton nodded.
“And Jack did it?”
Norton nodded again.
“I don’t know,” Norton said, turning to Diaz. “Jaime?”
Diaz looked at Norton and then at Tiger. He’d never written a book, but he was immediately intrigued by the prospect of teaming up with Tiger on a big project. After some more back-and-forth, Tiger reluctantly agreed to go forward with the idea. He at least liked the thought that Diaz would be involved. Norton told Diaz to come up with a number.
From a financial standpoint, Norton’s idea was smart. Tiger was riding a wave, and it was a good time to approach the fickle publishing industry, which was keenly interested. The book proposal touched off a bidding war between several top New York City publishing houses. In the end, Warner Books won an auction by agreeing to pay $2.2 million for a two-book deal: an instructional book that Tiger would write right away, and an autobiography that he would write years down the road. From IMG’s perspective, this was a good thing. A couple more million dollars had been added to the bottom line.
But Earl wasn’t happy. He had already secured his own book deal with HarperCollins, and he was angry when he learned that IMG had persuaded Tiger to do a book. It went without saying that Tiger’s book might undercut sales of Earl’s. Plus, Earl thought that every business opportunity for Tiger should be run past him first. Hughes had violated a cardinal rule by going directly to Tiger.
Citing exhaustion, Tiger abruptly withdrew from the Buick Challenge in Pine Mountain, Georgia, on September 25, 1996, one day before it started. He was scheduled to be honored as the college golfer of the year for the 1995–96 season at the annual Fred Haskins Award dinner during the tournament, but instead of attending, Tiger went home. More than two hundred guests were in town for the dinner, which had to be canceled. Once again, John Feinstein pounced.
“When you are the game’s Next One and you know your presence in a tournament has been promoted, you really should show up,” he wrote. “And when the sponsors of a major college golf award have scheduled their awards dinner to suit you at a time and place where you have told them you will be, you don’t blow off the dinner and go home.”
Tiger couldn’t stand Feinstein, and he had no trouble dismissing him. But he also received unexpected criticism from fellow pros, which he couldn’t shrug off. Tom Kite said he couldn’t remember being tired when he was twenty. Peter Jacobsen said it was no longer appropriate to compare Tiger to Nicklaus and Palmer, because they never walked out on people. The words that stung the most came from Palmer himself. “Tiger should have played,” Palmer told a reporter. “He should have gone to the dinner. The lesson is you don’t make commitments you can’t fulfill unless you’re on your deathbed.”
I thought those people were my friends, Tiger thought after reading the barrage of criticism. Alone and feeling like a target, he suddenly missed Stanford and the cocoon that it had provided. Everyone was beating him up for pulling out of a tournament and skipping a dinner, but no one knew what he was dealing with back home.
For twenty years—his entire life—he and his parents had lived together in the same house in Cypress. But now Tiger had moved out, and his parents were splitting up. John Merchant had been tasked with finding a new home for Kultida, one that was big enough to accommodate her relatives when they visited from Thailand. He had located a 4,500-square-foot house with five bedrooms and six baths in a gated community in Tustin, California, for $700,000. Tiger had agreed to pay for it, and the closing had been set for early November. The situation between his parents was more bewildering than anything he was encountering on the Tour, but he wasn’t about to admit that. Better to just take the heat for bailing at the last minute.
On October 6, one week after skipping the Haskins dinner, Tiger won his first PGA Tour event, outdueling Davis Love III at the Las Vegas Invitational. The pace of his success was mind-boggling. In just his fifth PGA tournament he had emerged victorious.
“Did you ever see yourself doing this so soon?” a journalist asked.
“Yeah,” Tiger said matter-of-factly. “I kind of did.”
Hughes Norton pointed to the win as proof that Tiger had done the right thing by bowing out of the Buick Challenge, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d left sponsors and hundreds of people high and dry, or assuage the hard feelings because of it. One of the hardest things for Tiger to do was admit wrongdoing and apologize. But something had to be done. Golf writer Pete McDaniel, who was working with Earl on his forthcoming book about raising Tiger, was assigned to ghostwrite an apology for Woods.
No golf writer knew more about the history of African Americans in golf than McDaniel. And although Tiger wasn’t the first black golfer, he was the first game-changer, the one who was shattering the glass ceiling. With that in mind, McDaniel was eager to help Woods navigate the rough waters. He crafted an apology, and it appeared under Tiger’s byline in a column published in Golf World days after his win in Vegas. “I didn’t even think about the dinner,” it read. “I realize now that what I did was wrong. Even though I know I did the right thing in getting away, I should have stayed long enough to attend the dinner and then go home. But hindsight is 20-20.”
The piece did the trick. The people in charge of the Fred Haskins Award banquet rescheduled it for early November, and Tiger and Earl flew back to Georgia to attend. Tiger was gracious and humble in his acceptance remarks. But Earl’s introductory speech left a much bigger impression. Choking back tears, he said:
Please forgive me, but sometimes I get very emotional when I talk about my son. My heart fills with so . . . much . . . joy when I realize that this young man is going to be able to help so many people. He will transcend this game and bring to the world a humanitarianism which has never been known before. The world will be a better place to live in by virtue of his existence and his presence. I acknowledge only a small part in that, in that I know I was personally selected by God himself to nurture this young man and bring him to the point where he can make his contribution to humanity. This is my treasure. Please accept it and use it wisely. Thank you.
The entire audience rose to its feet in applause as Tiger put his arms around his father.
Tiger was still smarting from the fallout of missing the Haskins dinner when he won his second PGA Tour event, beating Payne Stewart head-to-head to win the Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic by one stroke. The $216,000 purse raised Woods’s earnings to $734,794 in his extremely shortened season, qualifying him for the 1997 Tour. Remarkably, he had won two of his first seven professional tournaments.
After his obligatory press conference, however, he was in no mood to talk to reporters in a less formal setting. When a few of them trailed him to the locker room in hopes of getting a few more quotes, Tiger instructed the security guards not to allow any media inside, and the press was promptly told to leave. But under PGA Tour rules, the locker room had to be accessible to the press. Wes Seeley, who was in charge of PR for the Tour, told security to open it. “The Tour makes the rules, not the kid,” Seeley said. “Regardless of what he and his people think, he’s not the fifth Beatle.”
But he had become the rock star of golf. His fame was transforming the game and wreaking havoc on the rules of etiquette at tournaments. The crowds at his first seven Tour events were twice or, in some instances, three times the normal size. Fans were trampling over the ropes to get to him. Women were approaching him on the range and proposing marriage. More than once he had had to escape to the clubhouse after playing to evade overzealous spectators. David Letterman and Jay Leno were clamoring to have him on their shows. Bill Cosby was willing to compose an episode of the Cosby Show around Tiger just to get him to appear on the top sitcom on television. GQ was offering to put him on the cover. Pepsi was ready to put up big money for him to film a commercial. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of Tiger. It had gotten to the point that whenever he saw Norton approaching, he knew that this guy or that guy wanted to know when they could interview him.
“Tell them to kiss my ass!” he would tell Norton.
“All right,” Norton would say. “And after that, what should I tell them?”
“Tell them to kiss my ass again!”
By the time he arrived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for The Players Championship at the end of October, Tiger had had it with all the pestering and intrusiveness of the press. Nobody realized this more than Earl, who was traveling with him. On the evening after the first round, Earl was in his hotel suite enjoying a cigarette when Newsweek senior writer John McCormick knocked on the door, introduced himself, and talked his way inside. But after explaining that his magazine wanted to do a feature on him and Tiger and put them on the cover, McCormick hit a wall. Earl said he wasn’t interested, which meant Tiger wasn’t interested. Determined to change Earl’s mind, McCormick pulled out his wallet.
“Look,” he told Earl, “I’m going to show you the reason I really want to do this story.”
“Money?” Earl said.
“No, this,” McCormick said, removing a photograph of his two little boys and handing it to Earl. “That’s why.”
Earl had developed a soft spot for children. Despite being wary, he ended up talking to McCormick for three hours, filling the reporter’s notebook with plenty of quotes and anecdotes about Tiger. It was midnight by the time McCormick finally left Earl’s room. About two hours later, Tiger was awakened by a phone call from his mother, who informed him that Earl had just been taken to the hospital in an ambulance after experiencing chest pain. Roughly ten years earlier, Earl had undergone a quadruple bypass in response to arteriosclerosis stemming from cholesterol buildup. Knowing his father’s history, Tiger went directly to the hospital, where doctors had administered an EKG and given Earl medication to stabilize the situation.
“It’ll be okay,” he told Tiger. “Don’t worry about it. Go on out and play.”
Tiger didn’t say anything, but he was too worried about the health of his sixty-four-year-old father to concentrate on golf. After spending the rest of the night at the hospital, Tiger shot a 78 the next day, his worst round since turning pro. “I didn’t want to be here today,” he said afterward, “because there are more important things in life than golf. I love my dad to death, and I wouldn’t want to see anything happen to him.”
He ended up finishing the tournament tied for twenty-first at eight over par. Weeks later, he visited Earl in Cypress. While Tiger was in town, Earl agreed to another interview with McCormick. This time he went to Earl’s home, where he hoped to also talk to Tiger. Ten minutes, he told Earl, would suffice. Without making any promises, Earl called Tiger and handed the phone to McCormick, who made his pitch.
“No,” Tiger told McCormick.
“Okay, just to be clear,” McCormick said, “this is a story about your dad and how he raised you. I’m not trying to do a cover story about you.”
“No,” repeated Tiger.
McCormick was taken aback. “He wasn’t unpleasant,” McCormick recalled. “It was just no.”
Although Tiger wasn’t interested in being on the cover of another national magazine, his corporate sponsors liked the idea. So he reluctantly agreed to pose with Earl for a Newsweek photographer. A few weeks later, they appeared together on the cover—Tiger wearing Nike gear and holding a Titleist golf club, Earl wearing a Titleist hat—under the headline “Raising a Tiger: The Family Story Behind Golf’s $60 Million Prodigy.” The nine-page article portrayed Tiger as “so gracious that he signs autographs for half an hour after tourney rounds” and “gives clinics to inner-city kids.” It also claimed, without any evidence, that Tiger had endured “years of racist treatment at golf courses.” But the thrust of the story arose from a question: “How did the parents pull it off?”
In other words, how did Earl and Kultida raise such a “fine young man”?
“Every move has been calculated to make him the best person he can be,” Earl told Newsweek. “You have your priorities. Your priority is the welfare of the child first. Who he is, and what is going to make him a good person, has priority over making him a good athlete.”
Earl’s comments were self-serving. But from a marketing standpoint, Nike and Titleist could not have been happier. Even the photographs taken by Newsweek were carefully staged to feature Nike gear and Titleist equipment while simultaneously projecting Tiger and his family as idyllic. One image in particular portrayed Earl and Kultida standing side by side, smiling, arms around each other as if in a state of marital bliss. It was taken outside the family home in Cypress, which Kultida had just moved out of to live on her own.
Although he never talked to Newsweek, Tiger was always willing to do everything his powerful sponsors wanted from him. “But there won’t be much more than that,” Tiger said at the time. “I have no desire to be the king of endorsement money.”
IMG, however, was determined to change his mind.
Tiger knew he needed advice on what to do with his money. He also knew that finance and investment strategy weren’t his father’s strong suits. Instead, Tiger turned to John Merchant, whom he was looking to more and more for advice. Merchant’s first call was to his old friend Giles Payne, a superb attorney specializing in estate planning and trusts. Payne had been responsible for getting Merchant onto the USGA executive committee, and Merchant couldn’t think of anyone more qualified than Payne and his partners at Brody Wilkinson, a boutique law firm based in Southport, Connecticut, to guide Tiger through the complicated opportunities and pitfalls presented by instant wealth. Payne and his law partners Seth O. L. Brody and Fritz Ober—both of whom were also exceptionally skilled—began working with Tiger right after he turned pro. On November 19, 1996, the firm created Tiger Woods, Inc., a Connecticut-based nonprofit that designated Tiger as chairman and Earl as president.
Weeks later, Tiger’s new team of Connecticut lawyers were summoned to Florida to meet with him and his corporate partners Nike and Titleist. The group arrived at Bay Hill Club & Lodge in Orlando feeling triumphant. The joint marketing influence of both companies was paying off in spades. In addition to the Newsweek cover story, Nike had just aired another tour de force commercial written by Riswold—“I Am Tiger Woods”—that featured one child after another, most of them minorities, staring into the camera while repeating the phrase “I am Tiger Woods.” With everything clicking, Tiger and his team planned to spend two days mapping out plans for how to fund Tiger’s newly formed nonprofit, as well as discussing ways to use it as a vehicle to expand golfing opportunities among minority youth.
Before getting down to business, the group played a round. Tiger was paired with John Merchant, and they joked and ribbed each other for eighteen holes. Tiger could not have been happier with Merchant’s contribution during his transition from amateur to pro. Merchant had been watching Tiger’s back at every crucial step, and he had brought in a team of financial and legal advisors that Tiger fully trusted. As a gesture of how much he respected Merchant, Tiger asked him to run the strategy session that was scheduled for later that evening. It was a responsibility that Merchant gladly accepted. After all, he had hand-picked half the men who would be seated around the table.
But after leaving the course, Merchant first met up with Earl for a drink. Both men were feeling on top of the world. One drink led to a second, and then a third. Before long, they had each downed five martinis. By the time Merchant and Earl wandered into the conference room for the appointed six p.m. strategy session, both were hammered.
Merchant found his seat between Wally Uihlein, the CEO of the Acushnet Company (corporate parent of Titleist), and Craig Bowen, the first African American sales rep for Titleist. Merchant had introduced Tiger and Earl to Bowen back when Tiger was still in high school, and that introduction had gone a long way toward cementing Tiger’s decision to sign with Titleist. It had also paved the way for Titleist to help write the bylaws of Tiger Woods, Inc. Others at the table included Phil Knight; Fritz Ober; Giles Payne, whom Merchant affectionately referred to as Tiger’s “money man”; and Earl.
Once everyone was present, Merchant opened the meeting by talking about Nike, which was going to help fund Tiger’s foundation with $1 million of his $40 million contract. But Merchant, his tongue loosened by alcohol, objected when he learned that Earl would be in charge of overseeing the distribution of the money for “junior golf efforts.” As far as Merchant was concerned, putting Earl in charge of $1 million was a license to steal.
“This is not how it should be,” he boomed. “I don’t give a shit how important Earl is. He can’t deal with junior golf all by his damn self. Just because Nike throws money at him, that ain’t gonna get it done. Earl could take that money and spend it.”
A deafening silence fell over the group. Instead of spelling out his vision for how to help advance the cause of minority golf in the United States, Merchant had created an incredibly awkward situation. The meeting was abruptly adjourned. Without saying a word, Tiger got up to leave.
Craig Bowen followed him out. “Tiger,” he said, “you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right. I know my dad, and I know John. This is not going to be good.”
It was obvious that Merchant and Earl had both had too much to drink. The thinking was that it would be better for them to sleep it off and get a fresh start the next day, but there were two things about Lt. Col. Earl Woods that were in play: he never remembered to say thank you, and he never forgot a slight. He had a very cold, ruthless side. Tiger once said that his father could “slit your throat and then sit down and eat his dinner.”
When everyone reconvened in the conference room the following morning, there was a table with breakfast food. Refreshed, Merchant set his briefcase down at his seat between Bowen and Uihlein and headed to the table for a cup of coffee. Earl intercepted him and asked him to step outside the room. Then he fired Merchant.
Dumbfounded, Merchant just stared at his friend. After all they’d been through together? After all the money he’d raised to finance Tiger’s amateur career? After all the pro bono work and all the trouble he’d been through with the State of Connecticut? After everything he’d done to set Tiger up with the lawyers from Brody Wilkinson? What the fuck?
“It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” Earl said, feigning pain.
“Why?” Merchant whispered.
Earl said nothing.
“What’s the problem?” Merchant pressed.
Still nothing.
Merchant felt like the room was spinning. He couldn’t get his bearings. Effective immediately, he was no longer Tiger’s attorney.
Without saying another word, both men returned to the conference room. Earl sat down and ate his breakfast, while Merchant picked up his briefcase and walked out. Within an hour, he had checked out of his room and left for the airport.
It was an awkward situation for Merchant’s trusted friends Giles Payne and Fritz Ober, but they took over all of Tiger’s legal and business affairs. As Tiger’s new personal attorneys, they stepped in right away and helped execute a deed that transferred a property in Isleworth from IMG to Tiger, listing Tiger’s mailing address as 135 Rennell Drive, Southport, Connecticut (the address of his new law firm). They would also go on to establish the Tiger Woods Revocable Trust, which named Earl and Tiger the sole trustees.
Retaining Brody Wilkinson was the single most important piece of advice that Merchant ever gave to Tiger. The firm would go on to handle Tiger’s resources for decades, enabling him to build a vast fortune and avoid the mistakes made by so many celebrated athletes who earn millions in their early twenties only to end up broke after retirement.
Two weeks later, Merchant received an envelope in the mail from Earl. It contained a check for two weeks’ severance pay. He sent it back with a message: “Shove it up your ass!”
Merchant figured he would never get to the bottom of what had truly motivated Earl to fire him. But months later, he ran into Kultida at a golf tournament. The two of them had always gotten along well, and she seemed truly remorseful that he was no longer a part of Tiger’s life. In a private conversation, she confided her thoughts on the matter—namely, that Tiger had always listened to Earl. His whole life was listening to Dad. And suddenly he had started to listen to somebody else on matters of finance and investments. The competition bothered Earl. “The parent always wins,” Kultida told Merchant.
Merchant never heard from Tiger again. The last words Tiger ever said to him were spoken as they were walking off the eighteenth green at Bay Hill, when Tiger looked at him, smiled, and said, “I love you, man.”