The announcement that Tiger Woods and Nike have called time on their 27-year commercial partnership came as no surprise to anyone who has been paying close attention. It has been nearly 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. Woods’s limited schedule after his exhaustive litany of surgeries, before and after his career-threatening car accident in February 2021, have made the 15-time major champion less visible than ever.
But there is a specific finality to Monday’s conscious uncoupling, which came one week after Woods’s 48th birthday, that signals the end of an era in the business of sport: the death of the sort of all-encompassing athlete-brand marriage that truly flooded the cultural mainstream. The obvious template is Nike’s union with Michael Jordan, a leviathan deal whose modest origins were playfully dramatized for the screen last year. Indeed, Phil Knight spent three years aggressively recruiting Woods based on the Jordan proof of concept: that a single charismatic sportsperson touched with divine gifts could shoulder an entire sports-entertainment empire. “Everybody has been looking for the next Michael Jordan and they were looking on the basketball court,” the Nike chairman said at the time. “And he was walking down the fairway all the time.”
Woods was already among the biggest names in sport when, days after roaring back from five strokes down to win his third straight US Amateur in 1996, he announced he was dropping out of Stanford University and entering the paid ranks with two words: “Hello, world.” Given the present-day state of the newspaper industry, let’s just say Nike’s three-page spread in the Wall Street Journal announcing his arrival would not make the same splash today.
He immediately made good on the dizzying hype, winning four tour events in his first eight months, including the epochal 1997 Masters that launched his already soaring profile into the stratosphere. Woods soon delivered a return on investment that far exceeded the initial terms of $40m over five years. To call him the world’s most dominant athlete, which he was, only undersold his broader significance. He was larger than life, the rare chosen one who not only met but surpassed all expectations and held the world in his thrall, winning majors by record margins and conjuring one unforgettable moment after another.
Some of them Nike could not have scripted better on a backstage lot, like his chip-in from the rough during the final round of the 2005 Masters where the ball hung on the edge for more than a second, the company’s “swoosh” logo perfectly in frame, before dropping into the cup.
The most recent 10-year agreement between Woods and Nike was reportedly worth about $200m, but what people will remember years from now is the commercial iconography. Nike’s creative partnership with the Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency created campaigns that managed to go beyond the transactional nature of advertising into the realm of pop art. For every Juggle, the playful 30-second spot featuring Tiger playing a bit of keepie-uppie with an iron before finally whacking the ball into the distance, or Golf’s Not Hard, which allowed him to flex his comic chops, there were others that pushed the boundaries of the mainstream and even flirted with the avant-garde, like the 60-second spot consisting entirely of one swing in slow motion against a spartan black background. Never, which debuted before the 2008 US Open (where he would stage an extraordinary 19th-hole playoff win), relied on a voiceover from Tiger’s father, Earl, who had died of cancer two years previously.
Even at their most overwrought – like the famed I Am Tiger Woods spot, which borrowed liberally from the coda of Spike Lee’s 1993 magnum opus Malcolm X – they were earnest enough in their hyperbole to succeed. (That all these carefully spun myths would be shattered when Woods’s personal life imploded in 2009 in one of the biggest tabloid scandals in history makes the work all the more compelling.)
People got excited when a new Tiger ad dropped, an enthusiasm only boosted by their scarcity in a pre-YouTube age, when happening across it on television was the only way of seeing it. The golden age of the Woods-Nike partnership overlapped with the final days of the American monoculture, giving their work a platform and reach that does not exist any more. Traditional network TV audiences were fragmenting even before getting splintered to oblivion by the ascent of streaming services. People simply don’t watch TV like they used to, young people in particular. It is unlikely that some of Nike and W+K’s biggest coups – whether the Brazil airport commercial before the 1998 World Cup or the affecting McIlroy-Woods spot – would have been afforded the space to make the same impact in today’s media landscape.
The signposts for this break have been there for years. In 2018, longtime Nike athlete Roger Federer – one of the few sports stars whose association with a brand felt as permanent as Woods – left Nike after 24 years for the Japanese clothing retail chain Uniqlo on a 10-year, $300m contract. Elsewhere, there is evidence that rappers and entertainers have gained ground if not surpassed athletes as sneaker ambassadors, whether it is Adidas going all-in on Kanye West in its play for the youth market or, to a lesser extent, Jack Harlow sharing billing with LA Clippers star Kawhi Leonard at New Balance.
LeBron James is Nike for life, which is notable given his overarching 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 a changing media landscape and for all their reach and untold riches, none of them have an I Am Tiger Woods.
