Tiger Woods: Golf’s ‘golden boy’

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New episodes of Good Bad Billionaire will be released weekly on Mondays wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes a week early first on BBC Sounds.

Welcome to Good, Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Lovely to be back in the room to see you again.

And in case you don't remember what we're about, every episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Zing Sing.

I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

And since our last podcast, Forbes Magazine, these are the authority on billionaires as magazine publishing company, which compile a list and rank billionaires, we've got some new meat.

Yeah, they've now actually listed 141 more billionaires than last year.

That means there are officially 2,781 billionaires on the planet.

That's a lot of episodes for future reference.

And who's currently top of the tree?

Bernard Arnaud, who's head of the LVMH fashion conglomerate.

We did a whole episode on him, so you can go listen to that right now if you haven't already.

We've got some big-name billionaires coming up this season.

Perhaps surprising, they are billionaires.

People like Jerry Seinfeld, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.

How do they get so rich?

We've also got the story of Google founder Sergei Brin, financier George Soros.

And we've got tons more of the world's wealthiest people lined up too.

But we've also got a superstar billionaire to kick off the season.

So who are we talking about today?

Well, we've got the man with the golden swing himself.

A man who really came to dominate a game where dominance is unusual.

The game of golf.

It is none other than Tiger Woods.

And of course Tiger is not his real name.

He was born Eldrick Tont Woods, but his father quickly nicknamed him Tiger in honor of a missing friend he'd served with in Vietnam.

And Tiger was a good name for a golfer who became one of the greatest golfers of all time.

He actually won 15 major golf championships and 82 PGA tour events.

Now for those of you who don't know what PGA is, it's the Professional Golfers Association, which organises the North American tours.

And 15 major golf championships is more than just about anyone else.

It's not the record.

A guy called Jack Nicholas has the record who dominated golf in the 60s and 70s.

But golf is hard.

There are so many moving parts that it's very unusual for people to win tournament after tournament after tournament.

It's not supposed to be possible, but he did it.

Are you a golfer?

I'm afraid to say.

I was going to say that was spoken like a man who must be.

Much to the amusement of my wife and two daughters.

So come to the present day.

He's 48 right now.

Tiger Woods is currently worth $1.3 billion.

And this is partly down to a long-running deal he had with Nike, which netted him $500 million over 27 years.

That's actually a very long time to be sponsored by a single brand.

It is.

And Nike came up in our other sports billionaire, Michael Jordan.

So Nike have made a lot of people very rich.

I am so shocked at how much money he made.

I knew he was successful, but not billionaire successful.

Neither did I.

I have to say, I was shocked that he made our list of billionaires, not least because, as we will find out, his career had a very interesting turn at some point.

I thought he would have lost quite a lot of his revenue-making potential when it was revealed that he had been having extramarital affairs.

It became a massive global scandal, and in fact, he continued to make big money.

We'll find out how.

I have to say, having affairs while still trying to be a championship golfer, I mean, where do you find the time?

But, you know, we'll get into that.

He's also been plagued by injuries.

Let's listen to a clip of him.

Let's hear the man himself speaking to the BBC as he prepared for the British Open, one of the major championships.

This is in 2022.

You asked me last year whether I'd play golf again.

All my surgeons would have said no.

But here I am playing, and I've played two major championships this year.

So I will always be able to play golf.

And whether it's this leg or someone else's leg or...

a false leg or it's different body pieces that have been replaced or fused.

I will always be able to play.

Now, if you say play at a championship level, that's just a totally different story.

And that window was definitely not as long as

I would like it to be.

That's him after a near-fatal car crash in which he almost lost his leg.

That's kind of wild, isn't it?

That you could be in your mid-40s and still be playing a sport at the top of your game.

So Tiger Woods, not only was he a colossus of the game, he's also an amazing comeback kid.

But we're going to wind all the way back to the beginning and figure out how he goes from having zero to his first million and then we're going to chart how he gets from a million to a billion which is a thousand times more than a million

So Tiger was born in 1975 in Orange County, California.

His dad was a retired army officer who met his mother in Thailand while he was stationed on duty there.

An interesting ethnic mix.

He actually coined a term called cablinasium to describe a mixture of Caucasian, black, Native American and Asian ancestries.

You know, that kind of interesting ethnic heritage is kind of what I think also made him massive because he was such an anomaly in sport.

Yeah, and reached across so many different divides.

It's worth saying that golf is a very white game,

certainly in North America, anyway.

So he was a real trailblazer in many ways.

But he started, I remember seeing him as a child.

I think I must have been about 10.

And there was this little kid who came on to a TV show.

He was a child prodigy.

I think he started when his dad Earl was hitting balls into a net in his garage when an 11-month-old Tiger Woods got out a little plastic club and made an almost perfect swing.

Okay, so an 11-year-old child.

11-month-old?

An 11-month-old child.

That's when babies start to crawl, right?

I mean, I don't think I was walking until 12 months.

He became a media sensation.

He made this TV appearance age two.

This is one I saw on an American chat show, and he was putting against Bob Hope, famous American comedian at that time.

I actually looked this up on YouTube and you can still see it there.

I mean he comes on with this tiny little child-sized golf bag and executes this like perfect little swing.

It's actually very sweet but sort of scary to see a child do something so adult.

Yeah, it wasn't just for show though.

It wasn't just cutesy kind of stuff.

He was actually winning competitions from a very young age.

He won the World Junior Golf Championships in the nine to ten year old category when he was eight and he won the World Juniors six times in total.

I would say part of this is down to his dad, Earl, because Earl was a really tough coach.

And, you know, now we look back with hindsight and we can say that was more than just tough.

You know, apparently, Earl was verbally abusing him during training when he was a child.

He would swear at him during his backswing, say racist taunts to his own son to motivate him.

That's amazing.

I mean, these days, our hackles will rise at that really quickly.

That's more than being the pushy parent, right?

Oh, yeah, definitely.

I mean, that's bordering on something that if you heard someone talk to their child like that in public you'd probably try and ring someone.

You'd ring someone yeah.

But Tiger himself said it gave him great toughness.

He called it psychological training.

He said it helped him in ways that other people might think were hurtful.

Interestingly, right, they had a code word which Tiger was allowed to say if he couldn't take it anymore, but Tiger never ever used it.

Because in his words, I was never going to give in to him.

I was a quitter if I used the code word and I didn't quit.

I mean, you know it's pretty on the edge here when you have actually agreed agreed a code word if you can't take anymore.

That in itself tells you it's pretty out there.

And yet, psychologically, you feel like you can't use a code word.

I mean, that's the mind games on display here are kind of crazy.

We've had pushy parents before, haven't we?

Aren't good, bad, billionaire.

And sometimes the temptation is to think that this is a frustrated parent living out their own dreams through their child.

It's an interesting one, how much of the frustrations, the ambitions of the parent are expressed through the child.

When he was 14, he got asked what set him apart from his rivals and he said, my competitiveness.

When you have to make a putt, you make a putt.

You have to hit the shot, you hit the shot.

You have to block out everything.

And that's something that came through throughout his playing career.

When he would give press conferences, he would say, what really turns me on, what gets me going, is competing.

That's interesting.

You have to wonder how much of this was competing with his dad.

Yeah.

But he wasn't a one-dimensional kid.

He had good grades.

He was an A student.

He described himself as a nerd.

Apparently, I didn't know this either.

He had a stutter as a boy.

He took a class for two years to help manage that.

It's kind of unsurprising you didn't know about this because apparently people only found out in 2015.

He wrote a letter to a boy who contemplated taking his life after bullying.

And he said, I know what it's like to be different and to sometimes not fit in.

I also stuttered as a child, and I would talk to my dog, and he would sit there and listen until he fall asleep, which is quite sweet, really.

That's the kind of side tiger we don't usually see.

Yeah, he also said, as I was younger than most of the kids I competed against, and often I was the only minority player in the field.

But I didn't let it stop me and I think it even inspired me to work harder.

And I think it's hard to overemphasize just what a trailblazer he was in terms of ethnic minorities playing golf.

And even though he was at the top of his game when he was a teenager, he still graduated, age 18.

He was actually fought over by universities because they obviously wanted a talented athlete on their books.

He ended up choosing a golf scholarship at Stanford, which is an amazing Ivy League school, because he wanted to have a quality business education.

So, kid with his head screwed on.

Head screwed on.

It's worth saying here that the American college system and their relationship with sport is very different to in the rest of the world.

The college sport is almost as prominent as professional adult sport.

Yeah, Stanford clearly really wanted him because they actually created a customized economics program for him because their business program didn't include what he wanted, which was accounting.

Very glamorous of Tiger to want to take accounting.

Well, he's going to need something to be able to count all that money he made.

So during university Tiger was competing widely but only as an amateur and really only professionals can make money from playing golf.

The distinction between being an amateur and pro is rigorously maintained.

So he wasn't actually making money from winning any of these things.

There are probably about 150 professional golfers in the PGA tour.

That is the North America tour.

By the mid-90s, the top nine winning about a million dollars per year.

That's just the prize money.

That's excluding sponsorship.

I mean, it's a lot of money, which makes it understandable as to why Tiger wanted a piece of this because after just two years at Stanford, he dropped out to turn pro and earned that money.

And his pro debut was one of the most highly anticipated moments in golf.

Unsurprisingly, Nike was poised to strike the second that Tiger said he wanted to turn pro.

So they immediately signed him up for a five-year contract for $40 million with a $7.5 million signing bonus.

So the second the ink dried, he already won $7.5 mil.

Yeah, and that was considered crazy money in the golf world at that time.

So Nike was betting big, and the chairman at the time, Phil Knight, said, What Michael Jordan did for basketball, Tiger can absolutely do for golf.

The world has not seen anything like what he's going to do for the sport.

That's a lot of pressure to live up to when people are billing you that.

Worth talking about Nike as well here, because obviously they're very big in things like basketball, athletics, what have you, but they were not known as a golf brand.

And golf is quite a lucrative thing to get into because as somebody who's played from time to time, I can tell you that people spend a lot of money on their golf gear, you know, their clubs, their balls, their bags, their hats, their whatever, because basically you want to have the best equipment because otherwise you have to blame yourself for how much you suck at it.

What's your handicap out of interest?

My handicap is 17, which is a bit higher than it used to be, but there we go.

So that means I, on average, take 17 shots more than I should.

These guys, if they had a handicap, which they don't because they're professionals, they'd be somewhere like minus five or minus six.

Okay, right.

It's a long time before you have to go before Nike sign you up.

That's right.

So this was seen by Nike as their way to break into a very lucrative sector of sportswear where people spend quite a lot of money and the people who tend to play it tend to be quite affluent.

So in 1996, at the age of 20, Tiger Woods becomes a millionaire many times over.

So he's made his first, second, et cetera, million, but he's not yet a billionaire.

Yeah, because what we now do is we take our plain old millionaires and look at how they become billionaires.

Because as we've said in the past, a billion is a lot more than a million.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hosted.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two.

What if you could have all three at the same time?

That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud.

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OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high-availability, consistently high-performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.

How is it faster?

OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.

Cheaper?

OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.

Better?

In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.

This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.

Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free.

Head to oracle.com/slash strategic.

That's oracle.com/slash strategic.

So, Tiger Woods has made his first millions.

But while he's making his millions, he's also getting this amazing reputation.

So, he wins this, the first major championship, the Masters, with an amazing 12 strokes, which is the widest margin of victory the tournament has ever seen.

Yeah, I remember that tournament, and people were saying he cannot win by that much.

That makes a mockery of everyone else because you're not supposed to win by that much.

He just blew everyone away.

It also made him the youngest Masters winner ever and the first of African or Asian descent.

Yeah.

Which is amazing.

Yeah.

I could tell you a bunch of golf names right now who are at the top of their game.

No one would recognise them if they bumped into them in the street.

But Tiger Woods became the face of this sport and brought it to an audience that had never seen it before.

Right, because golf was very white, very, I would say even upper class, right?

Yeah, well, upper class, I would say it's definitely affluent for sure.

Golf club membership, buy the equipment, be able to take the time out to do it.

There's There's a whole social atmosphere that goes with it.

He actually said, it would have been naive of me to think that my win would mean the end of the look when a person from any minority walked into some golf clubs, especially the private clubs.

I only hoped my win and how I won might put a dent in the way people perceived black people.

Yeah, and this is a horrifying fact to think about.

Sometimes, as a child, he couldn't buy a drink or change in the same locker rooms as friends in certain golf clubs in the US, which is incredible to think.

It's really sobering, isn't isn't it?

So, you really get a sense of how much a win like that and someone like Tiger changed what people thought about the game.

Yeah.

And in under a year, in just 42 weeks into his professional career, he became number one in the world rankings.

And of course, all this makes him lots of money.

In 97, he's the leading money winner on the PGA tour.

He's making $2 million, which is a record in earnings.

And the game of golf itself is loving this.

They call it the Tiger effect.

In the early sort of 2000s, the early noughties, for example, TV audiences would drop 30 to 50 percent when Tiger was not in the contention near one of the leaders.

If he wasn't there, I'm not watching.

It's kind of like what Michael Jordan did for his team, you know, that similar kind of effect happened when Michael Jordan wasn't playing, people wouldn't tune in.

Yeah, and bigger TV ratings, which he was driving, meant PJ Tour winnings were going up, sponsors were paying more money, putting more money in the prize funds.

So Tiger Woods was single-handedly making golf more popular and profitable, not just for himself, but for all the other players and the game itself.

But even though this prize money seems like a lot, and it was a lot, especially for the time, it was still absolutely put into the shade by his growing sponsorship deals.

So in 2001, he re-signs a contract with Nike for $100 million for five years, and then he signs another big eight-year deal.

He was also getting money from tons of other companies.

He had endorsements, which include Gatorade, AT ⁇ T, the telecoms company, General Motors Gillette.

He was one of the faces along with Roger Federer.

Do you remember that one?

You know, you've made it in sport when you're a face of Gillette.

There were video games of him as well, so EA Sports was paying him a lot of money.

He also wants to capitalise on this brand tiger himself, right?

Beyond just sponsoring stuff.

So in 2006, he sets up his own company, a golf course design business called TGR Design, which is kind of slow to get off the ground, but we'll talk more about this later because it becomes more important.

By 2009, just 33 years old, Forbes magazine calculated he'd made a billion dollars in career earnings.

earnings.

Now, that doesn't make him a billionaire any more than if you take all the money you ever made in your life, you don't add it all up and say, I've got that in the bank, right?

I wish I could.

Yes, I know.

So here we are.

He's standing like a colossus over this game of golf.

And then it all comes crumbling down.

Now,

as a caveat, we usually cover our billionaires personalized to some degrees because, you know, obviously it reveals something about who they are as people.

But I think with Tiger, this is an exceptional case because we have probably never had someone whose career was so impacted by something that was happening at home.

And when I say at home, my God, it was a scandal to end all scandals.

Literally in the backyard.

Just to rewind just a little bit for some context.

In 2004, Tiger Woods had married Ellen Nordgren.

She was a Swedish former model, daughter of a politician and a journalist.

And he had been introduced to her on a golf tour by a Swedish golfer who employed Ellen as a nanny.

So it all seemed to be going great.

You know, they got married, they settled in this $40 million estate in Florida.

In 2007, they had a daughter, 2009 they had a son.

And then in 2009, the same year their son is born, the US tabloid, the National Inquirer, publishes a story alleging that Tiger was having an affair with a nightclub manager and claimed she was currently actually with him in Australia where he was competing at the Australian Masters.

Tiger flies home to his wife Ellen and denies the affair.

The very next day on the 26th of November he spends Thanksgiving evening playing cards at his local clubhouse.

Afterwards he drives home.

He takes a sleeping tablet before going to bed.

And his wife takes the opportunity to go through his phone and she calls this nightclub manager and confirms the affair.

So she confronts a groggy tiger who runs to the driveway, jumps into his car and at nearly 2.30 in the morning crashes into a fire hydrant and tree in his own driveway.

Oh yeah, it's getting very messy.

His wife smashes the SUV's back window with a golf club.

She claims to police later on she's trying to get an unconscious tiger out.

Yeah, that was not the impression that the newspapers gave at the time, I can tell you that.

Anyway, so he withdraws from his next tournament.

He says he's got injuries.

He releases a statement saying it's a private matter, hoping that the whole thing would blow over.

And, you know, maybe if it had just stayed there, it would have definitely blown over.

But then numerous women, and we're talking a lot of women, then start talking to tabloids about their secret relationships with Tiger.

These include a porn star who claimed to become pregnant twice while his wife was pregnant herself, a cocktail waitress who claimed she had a 31-month affair with Tiger and that she'd met him two months before the birth of his first child.

Yeah, there are nearly 20 women came forward, although some websites claim the number was higher than that.

You know, just a thing about golf as a sport, you spend a lot of time flying around the world, you're away from home an awful lot, and so there are ample opportunities, if you like to sort of engage in this kind of extramarital behavior I mean god that it is a lot of affairs though I would say I think if it had just been the one affair people would have but this was like so this is a kind of pattern you know the golfing audience is quite a kind of prudish lot I can't imagine just going down well at the country club exactly to be clear I think in any sporting discipline these are big numbers yeah big numbers for a guy who clearly played around a lot and tried to get away with it yeah I think played around was used a lot by headline writers at the time because it was on the front page of just about every newspaper.

In fact, it was on the front page of the New York Post for 20 consecutive days, which beat the record set by the September 11th terrorist attacks.

When you think about that, it puts everything into perspective.

Yeah.

On the 11th of December, he released a statement said he was taking an indefinite break from golf and he checked into a sex addiction clinic.

Sex addiction discuss.

Well, Donald Trump commented at the time: this whole thing with sex rehabilitation, I'm not sure I'm a believer.

Well, and let's leave it out there.

Yeah, let's leave it there.

But I will say that it has become a bit of a trend for celebrities when they're outed for having extramarital affairs to immediately claim sex addiction.

Anyway, in February of 2010, he left treatment.

He made a public apology at the PJ Tour headquarters in Florida.

Dozens of US TV networks actually interrupted their schedules to broadcast a 14-minute statement.

This was national news.

And as you can imagine, his sponsors were not happy about the negative press attention.

Gillette, ATT, Gatorade, General Motors, they all ended their deals of Tiger Woods, and that cost him around a region of $50 million.

That's why I'm surprised he did make it to a billion, because I thought that he'd scuppered so many of his sponsorship deals that his earning power had diminished very significantly.

But a couple of brands stayed with him: Taghoya, the watch company, and most importantly, Nike stuck with him.

I'm curious to know why Nike stuck with him.

I would love to know the calculations in the boardroom.

Yeah.

It's an interesting one.

If someone's become infamous, you know, the old adage there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Maybe there is.

True.

I mean if someone's become a toxic brand, do you step away or do you choose to stick with them because you truly believe that he will go down in history as the number one player?

I think that's the thing, that there is no one else like him.

It's not like you've got a bunch of people to choose from and in balance, because of their personal behavior, we'll take this one over that one.

There's no one else like him.

You're either all in or all out.

However, somebody does leave him, and that's his wife.

That divorce settlement is worth a reported $100 million.

Now, Tiger...

doesn't run away for the rest of his career, as you'll find out.

He returns to golf, but he's a kind of a changed man.

A diminished stature, yeah.

There's something about the indestructibility, the invincibleness of him, which has slightly been tarnished.

He's knocked off the number one spot.

He's failing to win tournaments with the regularity he used to.

Rory McEroy, who is another pro-golfer, actually said, I think there was always that aura of invincibility around Tigers, so that showed a little bit of a vulnerable side to him.

Yeah, and that it started impacting his bank balance.

He was the highest paid athlete for an entire decade, but in 2012, he fell off the top spot.

The New York Times even reported problems for his golf course design business.

Its first course, Trump World Dubai, was permanently shelved.

Others were facing issues.

And this was a big moment.

In 2015, EA Sport, which is Electronic Arts, they're the video game makers, replaced Tiger with Roy McElroy as the new face of their PGA tour video game.

When you know you're falling off the video, the box of the video game, that's when you know your cultural currency is diminishing.

Now in his 40s, he's also been struggling with a bunch of injuries, which he's been dealing with for some time.

He'd had multiple surgeries to correct knee, neck, back problems.

There's something about the way you swing a golf club quite common in golfers.

They start getting back problems, knee problems, whatever.

and because he swung the club faster and harder than anyone else he was prone to some of these injuries interestingly his former coach also revealed in a book that tiger was obsessed with the military and he actually trained with navy seals which understandably hurts both your back and your knees yeah u.s sport network espn reported that in 2006 he'd started secretly training with navy seals he shot guns learned combat tactics did free fall skydiving made friends with some but others complained that he was only playing playing at it, doing the fun stuff and never the brutal parts.

So whether it was down to this kind of Navy SEAL training or cosplay, if you want to be mean about it, or something else, you know, Tiger was physically weakened.

Yeah, in 2017, he needed a back fusion operation if he was going to have any hope of playing again.

And to cope with the pain, he was taking a cocktail of painkillers and sedatives.

A month after that surgery, he was found at 2 a.m.

by police in his neighbourhood, asleep at the wheel of his Mercedes, stationary in a traffic lane with its engine running.

Yeah, he was arrested for DUI, driving under the influence, and in his system was a cocktail of drugs, including powerful sedatives like Vicodin, like Xanax, like Ambien.

His mug shot was on every newspaper, and a video of him went viral.

I actually remember this.

He was slurring as he was arrested and pulled out the car.

Yeah, and he was prosecuted for reckless driving.

He was ordered to do community service.

So I would say this is his maybe his lowest point.

Yeah, for sure.

But miraculously he manages to turn it around.

In 2019 he wins the Masters again.

It's his first major championship win in 11 years.

Nobody thought this would ever happen again.

It was probably one of the most astonishing sporting achievements I've ever seen.

Astonishingly, though, he would have one more car crash.

In 2021, he survived a near-fatal one.

It mangled his ankle, his lower right leg.

He needed to have his 10th surgery.

Yeah, but he once healed, he went back to playing golf.

I remember seeing him hobbling around.

He came back to do the British Open and at one point he was actually in the lead, but you could see that he was really beginning to suffer and actually getting round an entire round of golf, which is about four or five miles.

It's tough if you've got a leg which you've almost lost.

Rory McElroy actually said, I think it shows his character, his mental capacity, his grip that he can come back after all these mishaps, whether it be personal life, I mean that's slightly downplaying it, Rory, or the physical injuries that he's had to endure.

But the brand tiger, after all of these, these accidents, these infidelities, whatever, the brand tiger, which was so dominant, has now changed.

Yeah, I think, you know, when he first came up, people were like, who is this wonderkind, right?

He's a genius at the sport, born to play it, born to dominate, a natural.

And then after all these...

controversies, these scandals, these accidents, it kind of became a different kind of story.

Yeah, the tiger of old would be someone who would always put on this bright red shirt on the last day of the tournament and you knew that he was in charge and he was coming for you and now he looks like a slightly tragic diminished figure but still someone like a wounded old lion or something right rather than a tiger

kind of like coming back into the savannah to play one last time yeah to roll the dice yeah exactly sort of do i still have it in me for one last burst of speed i mean it's a very compelling narrative that's the thing i'm surprised they haven't made a movie out of it yeah so anyway he's made a lot of money out of golf he's clearly not getting any better at golf his best days are very clearly behind him.

But we still need to get him to a billion to include him in our list.

Yeah, so as well as his lifetime winnings and sponsorship dues, he starts leveraging that fame and fortune by taking equity stakes in a number of businesses.

Yeah, remember, he's got a golf course design business called TGR Design.

He opened his first complete golf course in 2014 in Mexico, and today it's grown to 13 courses.

Quite a big business, golf course design.

So he's also set up TGR Ventures and he's invested in other companies, including golf technology training tools, group of clubs and resorts.

He's got a restaurant in Florida called The Woods where you can pick up a filet mignon for $65.

Yeah, quite a lot of people do this sort of thing.

They take little ventures and things.

You know, some of our other billionaires, you remember Jay-Z actually made quite a lot of his money through his alcohol brands.

So it's not unusual for them to sort of dabble in these other things.

But all of this actually means that in 2022, Tiger Woods is declared a billionaire by Forbes.

But less than 10% of his billion comes from enormous golf winnings.

The majority comes from brand news, especially the deal with Nike.

Yeah, for nearly three decades, Tiger made around half a billion from Nike alone.

They stuck with him despite years of falling sales at his golf division.

So the big gamble for them, in a way, didn't work because they've actually stopped making golf clubs, balls, and bags in 2016.

They still make the clothes, Nike clothing, but the actual equipment itself, they're not in that game anymore.

And at the start of 2024, after 27 years together, Nike and Tiger parted ways.

But it's slightly different than with Michael Jordan, because Nike didn't turn Tiger into a brand in his own right.

For example, you know, Jordan's became a thing, Air Jordan.

That became a brand in itself.

Now, a former Nike marketing director actually said about the whole Tiger Woods sponsorship, Tiger is at his core a socially awkward introvert.

He was this nerdy Stanford kid who was really good with a golf ball, who didn't have a lot of friends.

Does this sound like someone who's going to set a vision, hire a team of people and sample tons of products?

That's a really interesting assessment of his character.

And do you remember when I said that Nike stuck with him?

I wonder if you could wind back the clock after the big scandal, I wonder whether they would have made the same calculation.

Because like I say, Nike's big bet on breaking into golf in a big way with Tiger didn't actually work.

Because when you sponsor someone, you kind of expect them to behave and act like a superstar celebrity, like charisma, a charm.

You can hear them say, we think this person represents our values.

Exactly.

What they mean is the person looks great on television and knows how to do a press conference.

By the way, there was one other thing before we start judging

what we think of Tiger Woods, because he actually turned down a fortune.

Because right now, there is a huge schism in the game of golf, whereas Saudi Arabia have sponsored an alternative tour and are throwing billions at it.

They are taking pretty ordinary players and giving them $100 million to go and play on their tour, the Saudi Arabia-sponsored tour.

They wanted Tiger Woods there, of course, and reportedly offered him around a billion dollars.

So

he could have doubled his money if he'd gone with the Saudi tour.

And in April this year, it was reported that as a thank you for staying loyal to the PGA tour, they would give him a $100 million equity payment.

So that's kind of thanks for sticking with us.

Here's $100 million for turning down nearly a billion.

And obviously, you know, the PGA tour are also not very happy about the fact that these alternative leagues are being set up.

Yeah, it's caused a massive row in the game.

Well, so it's very much a live issue.

Yeah.

So it's quite the story of a sporting giant brought low by personal circumstances, but still one of the most recognisable faces in the world of sport.

This is the point of the show where we judge them by a bunch of categories.

Right, so we're going to...

list a bunch of categories and then we're going to judge Tiger Woods out of zero to ten.

In each one.

So we're going to start with the simple one, wealth.

He's currently worth $1.3 billion.

Sounds like a lot, but that doesn't put him anywhere near the top of the tree.

That makes him number 2,309 in our billionaires list.

Yeah, I mean, he's languishing at the bottom of the billionaire stakes.

Yeah.

Well, from when we look at the wealth category, we tend to say, how do they wear their wealth?

How do they spend it?

Are they splash it around?

He does do that.

He's got a yacht, private jet, massive mansion.

But then again, you know, path of course for billionaires, right?

We're looking for rocket ships to rate them highly on.

Okay.

Little details which tell you something about them.

He's rumoured to replace all the furniture in a house he rents during a tournament with his own furniture, even if he's only there for a few days.

I would say

it's quirky.

It's like Rihanna brought her nail person out.

Yeah, exactly.

She flew them out to Natalie just to sort of do things just the way she liked it.

Same mentality.

Same mentality.

But I wouldn't judge him that highly on wealth, to be honest.

I'm going to give him a...

Given the riches that we've discussed in the past and we will look at again, I would give him a two.

You know what?

I would give him a one out of ten just because he could have doubled it and he didn't.

That's true.

That's true.

Not the mentality of a billion.

So that marks you down in that category.

Maybe it gives you points in other categories.

What about rags to riches?

This is one of my favourite categories, this, because it's how far did they come from where they were born with, you know, with a silver spoon in your mouth?

Or did you come from being dirt poor like Oprah Winfrey?

Ragster Riches, not a bad story, this one.

I'm kind of torn on this one because the fact that Tiger's dad already played golf and, you know, know, was pushing him, you know, clearly they came from quite a comfortable family.

If they even could play golf to begin with, could go to these golf clubs, I would say just maybe four out of ten.

Four out of ten.

Okay, I'm going to be a bit more generous on this because actually, being of African-American descent, starting out in the world of golf, it must have been pretty hard because it was not an ethnic minority sport in any way, particularly

when he was starting the game.

So I'm going to give him a six out of ten for a while.

So we're differing on that.

But Now we come to, interestingly, my favourite category, villainy.

Are they a billionaire who's a kind of almost James Bond super villain type?

Have they screwed people over in the course of making all their billions?

How should we judge tigers' life?

Well, we can't ignore the extramarital affairs, which clearly you can't put in the good category.

They not screwed people over, but certainly screwed a lot of people over.

And, you know, the Navy SEALs that he interacted with didn't have great things to say about him.

They accused him of being cheap.

Apparently, they went for lunch and the seals were forced to ask for separate checks, even though Tiger Woods was sitting with them, obviously a billionaire.

That's a pet hate of mine.

If you're the richest person in the room, you're actually invading somebody else's space, training with them on their territory.

You pick up the check, I'm sorry.

Yeah, in the words of one Navy SEAL, he's a weird guy.

There's something wrong with you.

So when ESPN reported that the Navy SEALs were less than impressed with his behaviour, Tiger Woods' camp declined to comment.

And also, I've witnessed this, if you watch him on the course, he's got a vicious temper.

He can spit, he throws his clubs,

a few expletive words often come out.

Many a time there'll be a commentator saying, apologies for that language if you're listening at home.

So how would you judge him on villainy?

He's not the worst guy in the world.

No, he really isn't.

Even though, you know, by normal standards, he's behaved atrociously.

Yeah, I'm going to give him seven on villainy.

I will actually give him a six out of ten.

I'm surprised you're softer on him than I am.

I feel

it's a funny one because my first impressions of Tiger were the infidelities.

That's what I remember him most.

He kind of became a laughing stock because of, you know, taking the Ambien and, you know, driving and

crashing into his home.

He became a kind of almost like a viral joke.

Yeah.

And I don't know.

I guess maybe the intervening years, you know, how what he's done to kind of come back after such a low point in his life, maybe that softened me towards him.

Yeah, he's certainly got grit and staying power and incredible resolve and competitiveness.

And in the grand scheme of billionaires, when we're judging people like El Chappell, who trafficked cocaine that probably killed millions of people,

extramarital affairs and throwing tantrums on the course.

You're right.

We have had sort of arms dealers and drug people who've killed people with their bare hands and we gave them nines and tens.

Yeah.

So giving Katigra a seven, you're talking me down here.

You're talking me down.

Okay, six.

Okay, I've mounted a persuasive case.

Yeah, you have.

Philanthropy, how generous have they been to others?

What have they done with their wealth, which we can admire?

So, Tiger founded the Philanthropic TGR Foundation in 1996 with his dad O to empower students to pursue passions through education.

Yeah, the foundation supports science, technology, engineering, maths programs, and scholarships.

But it's tricky to find out how much Tiger has actually put into the foundation himself.

Right.

So in 2005, the Washington Post reported the foundation received $5.6 million in direct gifts from the public, but couldn't find out how much of that amount was from Tiger, whose income that year was over $100 million.

But it was reported he gave the foundation $12 million in 2012.

So if he's giving 12, let's say he's giving somewhere between 5 and 12 million out of a annual earnings of 100 plus.

I don't know.

It's not great, but it's not terrible.

Okay, so it's of average.

I'm going to give it a five.

I agree with you.

A cool five out of ten.

Power is one of our categories.

Can they influence the world in many ways?

You know, like a Rupert Murdoch can decide elections through his newspaper coverage.

Mark Zuckerberg can change the algorithm, so it changes what things that we can see and what goes viral.

And I don't think he's in that league at all.

No, I don't think so.

I actually think he scores quite low on power for me.

I would say maybe if he hadn't had all those controversies, all the affairs, he would have been much more influential in sport.

But I would say in terms of power, he's actually quite a diminished figure.

I would give him a maybe a one out of ten.

I think within the sport, he had a lot of power at one point.

He kind of transformed the game, made it much more popular, increased the prize money, gave it a profile.

But I agree, outside of that small world, not much.

So I'm going to give him a two.

Now, legacy.

I actually think I feel quite differently about this category because we're talking about what kind of legacy he's going to leave behind after he's gone.

Yeah well his playing record it's hard to see anyone having that kind of dominance again so certainly within within sport his legacy is I would give him an eight or nine.

And I think you know the very fact that he came from a background and had a heritage that you just never saw in the sport of golf and he was on magazine covers, he was on video game boxes.

That scores him quite highly because he literally changed the face of sport, like a single sport and that's quite a big legacy.

Yep, yeah.

yeah.

Okay, I'm going nine.

Yeah, I would give him a nine for this.

Okay, so in total, putting all that together, do we think he's good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Ooh.

You're the golf fan.

Yeah.

What do you think?

Well, I think, you know, as a sports person, you've got to rate him.

What the Williams sisters did for young black girls playing tennis, he's done the same, I think, across the world.

So I think on balance, his has been an extraordinary contribution.

So I'm going to say he's a good billionaire.

Even despite everything, I'm going to say he's good.

Yeah, I would say with enormous caveats around his personal behaviour, both on and off the golf course, he is good just because, I mean,

you know, Michael Jordan changed the face of basketball, but he didn't do it while basketball was dominated by a kind of conservative white mentality.

True.

Tiger Woods did.

Yeah.

So I think that edges him into good for me.

Yeah, and Michael Jordan was every bit as bad-tempered and difficult and competitive.

And okay, so congratulations, Tiger Woods.

You are a good billionaire.

But maybe stop swearing on the golf course so much.

So who do we have next episode?

We have the man who revolutionized the way that we search for information online.

He might even have been the reason why you found this podcast in the first place.

He only invented a verb and that verb is to Google.

It's Sergei Brin, the seventh or eighth richest man on the world, depending on what day it is.

And co-founder of the ubiquitous search engine.

This podcast was produced by Hannah Hufford.

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For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Cat Collins, and the podcast commissioning editor is John Minnell.

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