Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast and to the third installment of Frida Egg's Stories, our audio documentary series. Today's episode is about Tiger Woods's professional debut at the nineteen ninety six Greater Milwaukee Open, and today's sponsor, appropriately enough, is visit Milwaukee. Wisconsin is an
amazing golf destination. You have courses designed by Langford and Moreau, Pete die Corn, Crenshaw, David McLay kid, many of which are accessible within a few hours drive from Milwaukee Mitchell Airport, which itself is just eight miles from downtown. You can fly into Milwaukee and choose from an array of different courses that you can play in the same day. Now. The Greater Milwaukee area has also been the site of some really memorable golf tournaments and some big ones that
are coming up. You've got the Ryder Cup in twenty twenty at Whistling Straits. You've got PGA Championships two thousand and four, ten, twenty fifteen, also at Whistling Straits. You had the twenty seventeen US Open at Aaron Hills, and of course, for much of the twentieth century, you had the Greater Milwaukee Open at Brown Deer Park golf Course just outside of Milwaukee, where Tiger Woods said Hello World in nineteen ninety six. To learn more about golf in Milwaukee,
go to visit Milwaukee dot org slash golf. All right, let's get to the story. We're excited about this one. We've been working on it for a while. We talked to US Open champion Curtis Strange, journalists Timi Diaz and Gary Dematto. We talked to the Greater Milwaukee Open tournament director Tom Strong. We even talked to Jim Riswold, the guy who wrote that famous Hello World Nike ad, and they were all great, were really thankful to all of them.
And so, without further ado, here is Hello Milwaukee Tiger's pro debut.
Frida Egg requires a different technique. What you need to do is actually square the face so they'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out onto the green.
Here's the thing.
Playing out of a buried lion of bunker is completely different than playing out of a nice clean lion of green side bunker. You need to be aggressive on any shop, weather it's sitting cleanly or it's Friday eg well, we've all faced it the dreaded Friday.
It's not to be feared though.
It's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.
And tell you, this is the longest one footer he's ever.
Had, Pumpkin Rich nineteen ninety six.
I'm glad he's making them put it.
I'll tell you it's amazing the thoughts to go through your head at this position.
Right here, a golfer in red and black addresses a short putt.
Another Tiger come back completed, and with it golf.
History, three straight US Comitar Championships or Tiger Woods, the pearl Woods.
Coming in from mother and father.
There's a famous og where tears.
Will be exchanged.
It had been one of the most exciting final matches anyone could remember. Over the first nine holes, twenty year old Tiger Woods of Stanford University went four down to Steve Scott, a University of Florida sophomore who was playing tough inspired golf. But on the second eighteen of the day, Tiger willed himself back into the match, sinking several clutch puts, including an astonishing thirty five footer on the thirty fifth hole.
It's good, great speed, it's in are you serious?
He closed out the championship on the second playoff hole, but according to Haimi Diaz, the atmosphere on the green wasn't as jubilant as he might expect.
The crowd was almost exhausted from all the excitement that the comeback had entailed. And there I think there was a kind of a sense of inevitability that Tiger would win the playoff. So I'm not saying there was an excitement, but there was almost like a coronation feeling, as opposed to oh my god, he did it. There was a sense that, Okay, I've completed this mission and a new chapter was ahead.
And in the post round interview, Roger Malby asked about that new chapter.
Well, Tiger, we got to ask the question, what does this do to these to your feelings as to where the old term pro or stay in school.
I don't know right now. I just know one thing I'm going to celebrate, like hell tonight.
That was a dodge. Of course, the decision had already been made. Tiger was going to turn pro and his first tournament, the Greater Milwaukee Open, would start in four days. In this episode of Fridagg's Stories, We're focusing on one week in Tiger Woods's career, his professional debut in nineteen ninety six, and I'll tell you upfront, this won't be a story about what happened on the course, because with
a couple of exceptions, nothing much did. The most significant events occurred off the course, in the press room, in front of the cameras during commercial breaks. It was in those spaces that the public image of Tiger Woods, the myth of him as a professional golfer, began to be invented. And not everything went smoothly at first. Make no mistake. When Tiger arrived in Milwaukee on August twenty sixth, nineteen
ninety six, he was already a star. He had won three straight US Junior Amateurs and three straight US Amateurs. The press had been singing his praises for years, and yes, the golf world had seen its share of child prodigies come and go. But this fiercely competitive, fiercely talented half African American, half Asian American young man from Cyprus, California was different.
I just recall he always looked so poised over the ball.
He never looked like there was any tension in his jaw or anything that was like getting ready to load up and really kill it. It was more this kind of gathered speed at a really very fluid and I won't say leisurely, but at just a very controlled pace, and then the hips and the lower body just turned so fast. It was just a beautiful kind of swivel of the hips that was just so fast and so correct.
Jimi Diaz was a writer for Sports Illustrated and he had been covering Tiger since Tiger was fourteen.
It was in my head, certainly that we may be looking at perhaps the greatest golfer whoever lived in his formative years. Here to some people that felt like it was exaggerated or unjustified, but he had this intangible quality of playing his best golf under the most pressure, which was kind of transcendent. And Jack certainly had had that and not many others in history. And that's the thing
that made Tiger so special. I mean, he had all kinds of physical game, but when he had to do it, he entered this mental state that seemed to facilitate his best golf. I don't know, that's kind of the final level of golf greatness, and you do your best at the moments that are the biggest at the times that you want to do your best. That's usually an inhibitor to most people, and for him it was an enhancer.
Diaz's Sports Illustrated story about the Pumpkin Ridge Amateur Open This way Long odds are still available on Tiger Woods's achieving his goal of becoming the greatest golfer of all time. But after the breath taking away in which he made history on Sunday by winning the most dramatic US Amateur ever, would a wise man bet against him. Words like those and deeds that seemed to validate them gave Tiger opportunities
that other amateurs just didn't get. In April nineteen ninety six, he made his second appearance as an amateur at the Master's Tournament. There under one hundred and fifty year old oak that serves as a gathering spot at Augusta National, a reporter named Gary Dematto approached Tiger's father, Earl Woods.
I said, you know, mister Woods, the greater Wacke Open fellows by one week, the US Amateur champion and pre seeds Tiger returning for what would have been his junior year at Stanford, and I said, would you guys be interested if the tournament offered you sponsor's exemption to play in it? And he said, yeah, we definitely would consider that right away.
Demato, who wrote for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, called Tom Strong, the Greater Milwaukee Opens tournament director.
I said, you know, I would love to give him a spot, whether he turns pro or not. We had eight exemptions and four of them we could use unrestricted. So the week of the Masters, Glenn Greenspan was running the media center. So we sent a letter to Glenn and said, please give this to Earl Woods, and so he did, and Earl called me back that day when it was delivered, and at that point in time he said, we'd love to play.
And in that way, the Greater Milwaukee Open or GMO, became the site of Tiger Woods's professional debut. And so tell me about the GMO.
Well, it was nice that we had a PGA tour level event, you know, in Wisconsin. It was it had been around for a long time. We'd have maybe ten to twenty of the top thirty players to fifty players in the world coming to play at that time, and we had a great time with it. When a lot of people come on out and watch it and truly enjoyed it. It was it was fun to run, to be real honest.
So it was an event that the community kind of supported.
You know.
It wasn't like a massive market event, but they kind of got behind it.
Yeah, they got behind it a lot, and that's it's kind of what Wisconsin's all about.
But according to Gary Demato, the GMO did have its issues.
It was not certainly not among the upper echelon of tour events.
You know, it had smaller.
Purse, It had bad dates, usually around our opposite the British Open in the summer, and then for a while it moved to Labor Day weekend, which was good for some reasons, but it also bumped into the start of packer season and you know, University Wisconsin football, so football sort of overwhelmed it. When it was on the Labor Day dates, it sort of bounced back and forth. It never had a title sponsor until the last few years of its existence, so the tour kind of pushed it
around a little bit. But it was a nice summertime staple event in Milwaukee that attracted a pretty good field, you know, considering the person a date for a week.
In August nineteen ninety six, However, Tom Strong saw the GMO go from a quiet, small market event to the center of the golf universe.
It definitely notched up to what i'd call electric. It just didn't ticket sales. We sold out everything we could possibly sell when we announced he was coming, and then on top of that, the impact on just dollars and cents.
It was three to four hundred thousand dollars just an extra ticket revenue that we took in from his announcement over and above, And it was very easy to track based on kind of how we looked at it from the previous year, which was the field was pretty much the same, other than him cooming in and being part of the event, just having him there, just all the buzz everything going on him announcing. People just wanted to come off and see him, and it drove our numbers
through the look. We were busy. I can tell it all.
Over in the press tent. Gary Demato noticed another kind of shift.
There were media types that I saw at the Masters, in the US Open and the PGA Championship, but never in Milwaukee, so it was definitely a different scene. Typically the Greater Milwaukee Open was covered by a couple of newspapers, a couple of radio stations. The media center was sort of a sleepy little tent where not much was happening. But that week certainly things changed. People magazine came in, The New York Times, the Washington Posts, LA Times, NBC
Nightly News was had someone there. So yeah, there was a field certainly that the event was much much bigger because Tiger was coming.
On Wednesday. After the pro am, Tiger was going to hold a press conference. By now, everyone had a pretty good idea of what he planned to announce, and Tom Strong had a pretty good idea that they'd need a bigger tent.
Probably around nine in the morning that time frame, we started talking more with our media officials and what our options would be. The next thing I know as I get a call from Forget the media official at that time, but said Tom, we're up over one hundred and fifty to two hundred media that want to come and cover this. And then all of a sudden, I think it was ABC that really kind of pushed it over the edge and said we're bringing in our crew and everything else
and where we're going to host this. They just wanted to take over the media center, and they said, well, we can't really do that, so we worked out the details. They said, look, I've got a pavilion over here that's ten thousand square feet. It's just straight by the range. It's very easy to do well. Mid afternoon, we were pushing over three hundred that wanted to come cover it, so it was coming from every angle.
At the press conference, as expected, Tiger declared that his amateur career was over. With his father sitting in an easy chair beside him, he read a prepared statement and answered questions from the assembled media. But the one thing everyone remembers from that day happened at the very beginning, when Tiger walked up to the microphone instant the crowd of reporters, laughed a little to himself, studied his notes for a second, and then greeted the room with a confident smile.
I guess, hello world, huh.
Thank you.
It was a striking opener, and it got a variety of reactions. Here's Tom Strong.
I kind of sat maybe six feet away from him in the front row and got to hear the Hello world. You know, did that that little statement right there? Will never never leave my memory banks. It was so cool to watch.
And here's Curtis Strange, two time US Open winner and one of Tiger's competitors at the ninety six GMO.
All I remember is Hello World. I don't remember anything else about the It was probably the most routine press conference after that. But when he opened it with that that and myself to me, I might I was immediately thinking, well, I don't know if I have said something like that, you know, that kind of thing. So, and I'm sure most other tour players now speaking on behalf of the
tour players. I have no idea what the general public was thinking, but you know, it's he hadn't hit a professional shot yet, so we were just going to wait and see how good this kid really was.
While it may have irked some of his new colleagues, Tiger's Hello World quip was a hit with almost everyone else. It seemed spontaneous, but it actually wasn't. The next day, in newspapers and on TV, Nike rolled out it's now iconic Hello World advertisements. The campaign was the brainchild of Jim Riswold, a writer at the agency Widen and Kennedy and the go to guy for its Nike account. If you are a sports fan in the nineteen nineties, you'll recognize many of his ads instantly.
I am not a role model, you.
Know, Lars Blackman, And there's my main man, Michael Jordan. Oh no, it's baseball, Hey Glan, hey Gan, who'd you expect.
Riswold also happened to be a single digit handicap, and he had been following Tiger's exploits on the amateur circuit for years.
And I thought it was pretty good. And I see that guy play and I go, I'm a frickin' hack. That's exactly how I felt. He made good golfers and great golfers feel like hacks. And I believe I pestered Nike quite a bit that this guy should be a Nike athlete.
About a month before the US Amateur Riswold got word that he would be developing Tiger's first Nike campaign. Initially, Riswold considered the slogan I Am Not a Token, but decided that was too on the nose. Then came the idea for the soundtrack. He shows dramatic choral music with vaguely exotic percussion on the screen. Images of Tiger's triumphs, along with short bursts of text, Hello World, I shot in the seventies when I was eight. I shot in the sixties when I was twelve. I won the US
Junior Amateur when I was fifteen. Hello World. I played in the Nissana Open when I was sixteen. Hello World. I won the US Amateur when I was eighteen. I played in the Masters when I was nineteen. I am the only man to win three consecutive US Amateur titles. Hello World, there are still courses in the US. I am not allowed to play it because of the color of my skin. Hello World. I've heard I'm not ready for you? Are you ready for me? It was goosebump
inducing but also something of a risk. The ad put Tiger's racial identity front and center, and it portrayed the golf world is more racially prejudiced than the rest of society. It was pressing on a sore spot. Race has always been a powder keg in America, but it was particularly so in nineteen ninety six. It had been just six years since Hall Thompson, the founder of Shoal Creek Club in Alabama, set off a national controversy by saying we
don't discriminate in every other area except blacks. It had been four years since south central Los Angeles, not far from Tiger's childhood home, was rocked by riots in response to the acquittal of the police officers who had beaten Rodney King, and it had been less than a year since O. J. Simpson was found not guilty of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. The tactics of Simpson's attorneys had brought the notion of the race
card into public discourse. To play the race card, it was said, was to bring up the issue of race in order to manipulate people's feelings and gain an advantage. And Jim Riswold knew that the Hello World ad could easily be accused of race carding.
And you know, I wasn't sure if it was the right thing to do. And I showed the script to my boss, Dan Wyden, and he said, this is the only thing we're going to do. And then Phil Knight was involved in approval of this ad. I went that high and he says, of course, because you know, they like to poke the bear. They liked to be irreverent, and it was pretty easy to poke the bear at golf at the time pretty lily white. You know, a man of color changing the game. I don't think golf
was ready for it. You know, Nike likes to be an iconic class in tennis. They challenged the tennis norms with players like McEnroe and Agacy. You know, it's essentially the same. We're going to challenge the status quo and the norm with not only a man of color, but a man who played the game at a far different level, you know, mentally and physically than anybody had seen before.
Yet, Reswald denies the charge that the ad was just trying to be provocative.
A lot of advertising tries to shocking for shocking sake. You know, whether you think this as shocking or not, that might be a bit much. But it came from the truth. It wasn't just made up hull baloo. Sports is part of the fabric of this country, and as part of the fabric of a country, when social issues arise within sports, they should be discussed, or they it becomes just this little, exclusive, little island that only a few people are allowed to be on.
Of course, it should be said that this ideal was well aligned with his client's business interests, the wider golf's appeal, the more product Nike you would sell. Besides, as much as the ad was sure to anger some people, it was bound to appeal to many more. For most of its runtime, it focused not on Tiger Wood's race, but
on his accomplishments, the scores, the wins. So the story it told was actually one of merit overcoming obstacles, and in that way, the Hello World campaign was even somewhat conventional. It was about the American dream. Just hours after Tiger beat Steve Scott on the thirty eighth hole to win the US amateur Riswold walked into a room in Pumpkin Ridges Clubhouse carrying a tape. Tiger was there, along with his mother and father, his coach, Butch Harmon, and Nike CEO Phil Knight.
And film makes an introduction and I think he made some joke about me and said he's done a lot of ads that I like for me. He thinks this is one of his best ones. And we play it and it's silent, and Phil asked Tiger, well, what do you think? And Tiger goes, can I see it again? And then we played again and there was Hooper in and holler, and I think his dad said, Bobby Jones is turning over in his grave. You know, Earl was not one to hold his and I just remember getting
to drink out of the trophy with Tiger. That was pretty cool. But Charman said he pulled me aside and said, I think that's the best golf ad I've ever seen.
Hello World aired four days later during the first round of the GMO. The public response was about what Riswold had expected and what Nike had hoped for.
I remember I almost had to change my telephone number at home. I was getting some calls from people that didn't appreciate the ad, called me names and stuff. And then you know, the next week, it's not only on television, it's on the news everywhere, which you can't ask for better than that within reason. Phil Knight adores negative publicity within reason. I mean, this created a conversation. Everybody was talking about.
That act, and behind the scenes at the GMO, some people weren't saying very nice things. On the driving range and in the press tent there were mutterings about sensationalism in the race card. Some doubted there were any courses in the US that would bar Tiger from playing just because he was black. A Washington Post reporter actually ended up posing that question to Nike, and Nike admitted that the claim wasn't to be taken literally.
Well, that seemed to be a bit nitpicking. I mean, it was a general station about color in the game of golf. Of course, Tiger Woods could play anywhere he wanted to, but not the next Tiger was. I mean, I'm sure he wasn't playing certain clubs when he was eight year twelve years old.
Jim Riswild felt and still feels, that the ad conveyed a truth about golf's exclusivity, and the customers Nike was trying to reach tended to agree. According to market studies, young people found Hello World very effective, So Nike wasn't too concerned about blowback from traditional sectors of the golf world. In fact, the company welcomed the controversy and the additional attention that came with it. Still, Riswold did have one concern.
I look back on that ad, you know, I'm surprised that people still want to talk about it. But the thing, you know, did I put too much pressure on a kid to carry that mantle or that Torch.
Unlike his father, Tiger had never been eager to discuss racial issues publicly. He had even said that the only time he thought about race was when the media asked him about it, and now here he was appearing in a commercial that invited questions about exactly that subject.
I don't think he was terribly comfortable talking about race, but I do think that he carries that sense of a mission that you know, he's representing a disadvantage group of people. He hates the unfairness of racism, and I think golf for him was a way of making a statement. But I don't think he likes being a public figure or a public symbol of that battle, of that social movement. He was a golfer, he wanted to play his best. He wanted to have a private life. He didn't want
a lot of baggage. And you know, I think in an efficient.
Way, maybe a cold way.
Maybe he got more socially conscious later, but I think he thought of it as a distraction that was only going to hurt his performance, and in the end he was going to be judged by his performance.
Nonetheless, Jimi Diaz believes that Hello World did touch on some real feelings that Tiger had.
He used to talk about it, getting the look when he'd come to a go play at a junior event at a country club that perhaps didn't have African American members or very few, and he always felt that he'd be stared at in a way that made him uncomfortable.
You know, Nike's very skillful.
I mean they knew what buttons to push, and I don't think that was an artificially trumped up button.
It was a real thing, maybe too real in other words, too personal, too private, distracting from his central purpose.
He's like, Okay, I can be I can be a social warrior here, but what's it going to do for what I have to do here, which is play the best golf I can. And I don't like the feeling of being criticized and being having all every word I say parsed.
It's too much. So he given his his personality.
I consider him an introvert who had had enough coverage and enough exposure.
He wasn't looking for more attention. He was looking for less attention.
But that too subjected Tiger to criticism at first.
At first it was like, Oh, he's going to be He's going to play the race card.
You know, Okay, we don't like that, and he got criticized for that, and then you know, it was like, oh, he's not doing enough. You know, he's in the position to do to make a big difference, and he's not doing enough, and he's not doing as much as other athletes.
Some seem to want Tiger to be a political firebrand in the mold of Muhammad Ali, but he was more inclined to be like Michael Jordan, focused on his sport, measured in public and reluctant to weigh in on controversial issues. Of course, it would be unfair to say that Tiger hasn't made an effort in the social domain. He formed the Tiger Woods Foundation in November ninety six and ever since it has worked to help underprivileged students.
I think the foundation was the way that he could answer in an organized way that could not be questioned in terms of the good it was doing and the motive that he.
Had for it. And again, just like his clubs did the talking, so did the foundation did the talking.
But Tiger himself has declined to take partisan stances or really to speak out as a representative of any particular minority. Jim Riswold's second Nike campaign for Tiger was more in line with this attitude.
I'm Tiger Woods, I'm Tiger Woods.
I'm Tiger Woods.
Unveiled during the nineteen ninety six Skins game. It alternates between shots of Tiger and footage of children, boys and girls ranging from tiny to teenage, from white to Asian American to African American to Latina, all reciting the same montreal.
I'm Tiger Woods, I'm Tiger Woods.
In this commercial, Tiger was no longer the outsider disrupting the status quo. Instead, Tiger was everybody, and everybody was Tiger. Anyone, no matter their ancestry, could identify with him, even identify as him. After his ninety seven Masters victory. In a famous appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Tiger took a similar approach.
When we get this straight, what do you call yourself?
Do you call yourself African American? I know you are your your father's half black.
Quarter, Chinese, quarter American, Indian mother's hatie quarter Chinese.
And quorter white.
So you are That's why you are America.
So you are American? Yeah?
I guess two things?
Is that I guess now that I'm on the Ryder Cup team, which we get to go over and play in Europe in September, that I won't be representing the United states'll be representing United Nations A little different, right, A little funny thing is growing up.
I came up with his name.
I'm a Comblainasian, a Comblinasian cough Ocasian blue black Indian Asian comblamation.
That's what you call yourself?
Yea, yeah, well coming up.
On the one hand, this was no doubt a genuine sentiment. Tiger is referred to as African American far more often than he's referred to as Asian American, even though his mother is Asian. This is part of that long American tradition of categorizing any person with the proverbial one drop of African blood is black. So surely no one could blame Tiger for refusing to accept that oversimplification and for
reclaiming his identity on his own terms. On the other hand, encouraging everyone, including white people, to see themselves in him, was a savvy strategy, even if it wasn't consciously a strategy. If Hello World was a challenge, are you ready for me. Then I am Tiger Woods was an embrace. I am you, you are me. Let's all wear Nike. So back to Milwaukee, Thursday,
August twenty ninth, Round one. The atmosphere around Tiger was vibrating with hype, and some of the other pros that the GMO had started to grumble.
Yeah, And I think that's when probably players sat up a little bit. Why was this kid getting so much more attention than some other star coming out? But again I can't speak for everybody, but there was Chadder. I will say this, there was enough attention that I played like two or three groups behind him on Thursday mid morning, and when he went to the first two, there was eight or ten. I was putting, getting ready to go off.
You know, we will go off one in ten two people around and everybody stopped to watch this guy ta off. And that speaks volumes when you know about the tour.
In nineteen ninety six, Curtis Strange was a well respected forty one year old pro in the latter stages of his playing career. He was seven years removed from his back to back US Open victories, and although he still had some game, he was preparing for his next step. In addition to playing at the GMO, he was helping out with ABC's coverage and he figured he had the connections to land the biggest one on one interview of the week.
So I had the same agent as Tiger and Susan Norton and so, and I know Tiger pell. I played with Tiger in the Masters when he was still an abler in the second round, kind of knew him and knew a little bit of him and knew the lead up. And I was in my third or fourth year at ABC, and I don't know why they agreed to this, but I went to my producer since I knew Tiger a little bit, I wanted to do the interview, and so they said okay, and then Tiger and his people said
sounds good to us. So it came together in the last couple of days. In fact, I saw Tiger on Tuesday and I ran over to him. I said, Hey, can you do a Can you work with us Thursday night after you finished planning, I'm going to do the interview. When we talked to us, he sees Sharon Op. That's probably the last time he ever answered an interview request like that.
In spite of all the excitement around Tiger, Strange was by no means certain that he was about to sit down with the greatest golfer since Jack Nicholas.
But I didn't know much about him, I tell you, if it wasn't for we had the same agent back at that time, and if it wasn't for me knowing him and through some other really close people in the amateur game, I wouldn't have known he'd won three juniors
and three ameters in a row. And I suspect more than half of the PGA tour players didn't know that either, and the other half probably didn't care because that's just the way the tour is, and it's a hard game out there, and you got enough to take care of in your own self worry about some other kid coming out. But they all knew Tiger was going to be good. How good, we had no idea, And as I said, most players didn't know he was such a phenomenal ameterur player.
So I guess what I'm saying is it just wasn't much talked about, was much said about him until maybe that particular week at the GMO.
Strange, like many of his fellow pros, since to mismatch between how little he knew about this twenty year old and how much attention he had attracted. So going into the interview, Strange was determined not to be another fanboy. He was going to ask real questions.
And I worked hard.
I was playing that week, so I was trying to do that as well. I worked with Trico, work with Jack Graham, our producer, on getting the questions right, getting them in sequence, getting them in order. Of course, a lot of it is ad lib going off his answer, and we found out how that can be during the interview.
It took place in a darkened room with Curtis Strange and Tiger Woods sitting across from each other. Here's the key moment.
What would be a successful week here at Milwaukee.
To two things.
I think if I play four solid rounds, went off to a good start today. If I can do that for three more days, and I'll be very happy. And a victor would be an awesome nice too.
A victory do you think to me that comes off as a little cocky or brash, especially talking to the you know, the other guys on tour that have been out here for years and years and years and you know, certainly an incredible I'm in a record, But what do you say to those guys, Well, when you come out here, you're first, you know what I'm saying, your first pro tournament, as you say, you know I can win.
I understand that. I've always figured that why go to a term if you're not going there to try and win, There's really no point in even going. That's attitude have had my entire life, and that's attitude I will always have.
As I would.
Explain to my dad's second sucks, the third's even worse. It's just a feeling on.
Tour that's not too bad.
Sometimes that's not too bad.
But I want to win.
That's just my nature.
You'll learn. I'm just kidding. I'm sorry.
I had to say that.
My job that evening was to get inside tiger Woods a little bit, not so much as golf game, but get inside you this young man who's getting ready to embark on a long, difficult career in golf. And I tried to listen really hard to come back with some good follow ups, and then he came out with you know, the shocking answer to a question of mine is that, you know, I expect to win, Second sucks, and third
is even worse. Well, quite frankly, how this all came about when that When I heard that, it shocked me, and I think you can see it on my face that well, that's a little cocky, I'm thinking. And I asked him, I said, do not think that that sounds
a little brash to all the other tour players? Yes, I do, but that's the way I think, which was a fair enough answer, and then we all chuckled and I said the infamous You'll learn, and what I meant by that is you'll learn that sometimes second doesn't suck, because if you play your ass off and somebody else on tour plays a little bit better, then I always looked at it as well, you can't beat yourself up
for that. If you finish second by not finishing well or not performing well sometime in the tournament where you really kind of messed up, then you can get upset at yourself. But if you play your best golf, and which you can do on tour, and get beat by one or two by a better player that week, I don't think you should beat yourself too badly because you're going to be able to have that opportunity plenty in
the company years on tour to beat yourself up. So that was my point, and it was also a little bit of just and also a little bit that you're going to learn that it's a little bit harder than you think it is, pal and that was the end of that.
Periodically, the interview resurfaces on the Internet, and the replies aren't always kind to the interviewer. Here's a sampling, and that, kids, is what we call putting Curtis Strange in a body bag, clear case of you don't know who the f you're talking to, open mouth, insert foot Curtis. What we forget, though, is that the tiger Woods sitting in front of Curtis Strange that day wasn't yet the tiger Woods we now know.
Amateur success, even amateur dominance, didn't always translate to the PGA tour, and the pros tended to believe that you had to earn your bravado.
Every player on tour that heard that or saw that agreed with me. You know, Jesus is just you know, of course nine's one eighty two tournaments. So he proved us wrong. You know, at the time of the place he hadn't hit, but he hadn't played but run round of golf in his life professionally. So give me a fucking break. What they what they lose in these twenty some odd years is that this was a young man. He'd been professional four or five days, and we didn't know how good he was, and we were soon to
find out. But being honest, and he was being honest, and it wasn't any disrespect whatsoever. I'm proud of it. I'm proud that I got the interview. I'm proud that we did it. I think we at ABC did a nice job putting it together. And if somebody takes it out of context twenty three years later, then they're not educated. It's as simple as that. I guess it wasn't a bad thing if they're still talking about it.
Strange. Also acknowledges that what he experienced is brashness in nineteen ninety six turned out to be a key to Tiger's greatness.
That attitude did taking the just unbelievable heights, not accepting anything but perfect, not accepting anything but a win. You know, I dare say that he won tournaments and wasn't happening. That's what made him so good to have that attitude, but you also had to back it up with tremendous ability too. So and as well as he showed us he can play in the next couple of years, the second really probably does suck to this.
Kid, you know.
And so what I thought he didn't understand was out how good the tour players were. What we didn't didn't understand is now actually good and better than anybody else he was.
In the end, According to Haimi Diaz, Tiger didn't really take offense to Stranger's questioning.
Well, I know he had a lot of respect for Curtis, but I also I think he knew John Cook has a saying about Tiger.
It's very simple, but he knows who he is.
He's fully aware of how great he is and what his capacity is, and how that to some people is a little bit incomprehensible. Uh that there, you know, he's ahead of the curve, and he understood why Curtis was skeptical.
But I think it just the way the way he answered those questions, I remember it was he didn't do it in a connoisanting way, but it was almost like he just don't understand you don't understand how good I am, and I'm not going to brag about it, but this is why I believe I can do it every week, because I am that good.
And you know, it's hard to take.
If you're a pro who's hardened and know that the game is mostly about defeat, to see that kind of seems like brashness.
So, all things considered, the interview was quite revealing, not only about Tiger's mindset, but also about how other pros on tour felt about him. There was plenty of laughter between the two men, but there was also some tension, some awkwardness, some doubt about what they would say next. In future years, we'd hardly ever see Tiger in a media situation as unpredictable or as honest.
You know, I just think it was an extension of extreme fame.
I don't think he had any sort of, as I said, an innate dislike of the media, but the media machine became something he couldn't control, and the more famous he got, the less control he had. Obviously, the questions got more and more probing as he became a bigger celebrity and a bigger figure ofuriosity, and with that he felt his private life. He had an innate sense that losing your private life was dangerous, so he was cautious.
In that regard.
And remember doing a story for him, a story on him for a travel on.
Leisure Golf, and he talked about his core.
He had to keep his core private and you know, inward and not let too many people see that or touch it. And some of the media was part of that. But anyway, I'm saying a lot of things that probably just add up to one thing, which is basically, as he got more famous, he got less willing to open up his life.
And maybe that's part of why when Strange came up with the idea of doing a sequel interview twenty years later, it never came together. He did follow up with Tiger, but not in front of the cameras.
About eight or ten years later, we were having a beer somewhere and it was just he, I think it was he and I and his agent, and I said, you know, I won't tell you something. Remember that interview. I see we all learned. I just so you didn't learn we all learned. And he kind of smiled and said, yeah.
I said at the beginning of this episode that this wouldn't be a story about what happened on the golf course at the ninety six GMO, but there are a few things we should remember. Before the Wednesday pro am, Jerry Dematto of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was standing by the first tee at brownd Ear Park golf Course and he saw Tiger arrive almost late for his tea time.
I remember Tiger started rushing to the first tee for his pro am and on the way his caddy, Fluff Cowen, ran out of the Brown Deer Clubhouse with a brand new Titleist staff bag still wrapped in plastic, and Tiger and Fluff sort of hurriedly ripped the plastic golf and transferred his clubs from a I think it was a
Stanford carry bag to a Titleist staff bag. I was standing there white with maybe four other people, in the shade of a tree, and I thought, I honestly thought, boy, this is sort of the symbolic moment where he has just become a professional golfer.
The motto was back at the first t the next day when Tiger hit his first shot as a professional.
You know it was a special vibe. It was a crowd of five deep where typically a newly minted pro on the first p it during the Greater Milacke Open might attract you know, his family and twenty curious spectators, Tiger obviously had. It was different. He had a huge gallery, you know, four or five deep, many of whom I believe followed him for all eighteen holes, probably just to say that they, you know, witnessed his first round as
a professional. So there was definitely an excitement and a vibe in the atmosphere, in the air that that typically wouldn't be on the first pe for almost any group death Greater in Wachie Open.
Throughout the week, Tiger's groups attracted galleries the likes of which tournament director Tom Strong had never seen at the GMO, which had its positive and negative sides.
You know, when he went out and played, it didn't matter if it was the poem or it was the first round. They were seven deep following him, and it was every hole. People just wanted to see him. I think we all know was something special. But at that point, I think the other thing I can tell you that that's probably the first time I really saw players get interrupted, is Tiger finished putting. He was and there's still people
to put on the green. All of a sudden they started rushing to the next hole, and so then you had that that interruption that kind of came around. It really wasn't a lot our Marshalls could do at that point other than you know, kind of say holp, you know, stand please and whatever. But they were just going to try and position for the next hole.
Nowadays, Tiger has been known to mark his ball instead of tapping in so that his playing partners don't have to deal with the commotion. To tom Strong, though, the most remarkable thing about the galleries wasn't there size or excitability, It was who was in them.
What I saw was a lot more kids, a lot of peopleeople who didn't even play the game I think were out there. It was just it was a mix of people that just wanted to come out. You had your avid golfers to those just knew this was kind of special. You had Bucks players and wanting to come out and see him. The interest level and wanting to be at the program and just be around him. It just kept building an entire week.
And that emotion came pouring out whenever Tiger did well.
Just about anything that didn't matter whether he made a birdie, whether he made her, people were just flapping and hooting and hollering. Like you just it gave you chills at times, just with what was all going on.
So when Tiger did something truly spectacular, the crowds were primed.
That final round when he made the whole one on fourteen, this is six.
On, they were.
Right the ninth, all over one.
So Tiger Woods, and I don't know if you've ever been to Brown Ear, but it's a really big park. So I was probably a good eight hundred to one thousand yards away from that hole because I was back at my office, you know that I had the window open and stuff like that, and all of a sudden, I hear this roar and there was there was only one person that they were streaming for at that point in time. And then immediately right over the radio comes Tiger just aced fourteen, and the place was going nuts.
But for the most part, Tiger's week at the GMO wasn't about extraordinary golf. He played fine, opening with a sixty seven, getting derailed by a third round seventy three. I never quite finding that extra gear. We would soon find out he had. He ended up tied for sixtieth. This is where my own memory kicks in. I remember watching bits of the GMO telecast and following the scores. I was twelve and a big fan of Wisconsin native
Steve Stricker, who placed third. But I was intrigued by this good looking, cool looking, powerful young player that everyone seems so excited about. So when Tiger made the cut and shot three rounds in the sixties, I thought, Hey, pretty good, he can compete. What I didn't know, What no one really knew except maybe Tiger himself, was that T sixty was about the worst his talent would allow him to do. It would be another nine months before
he finished that low in another PGA Tour event. Over the next thirteen years, he would finish worse than T sixty a total of nine times. Now, if you're a golf fan, you know the rest of Tiger's trajectory. In ninety six and ninety seven, eleventh place at the Bell Canadian Open, fifth place at the Quad City Classic, third p at the BC Open, and then a win at the Las Vegas Invitational, another win at the Walt Disney World Classic. In less than a quarter of a season,
Tiger had qualified for the Tour Championship. Five months later, he won the Masters by twelve strokes. Tiger Mania was in full effect and a new era in professional golf had begun. But history, like memory, is all about point of view. When we tell ourselves the story of the rise of Tiger Woods, we tend to adopt the perspective of the public. That is, a perspective trained on Tiger himself wherever he happened to go. And that's reasonable. But of course the places Tiger visited and the people he
encountered went on existing after he left. This is one advantage of stopping to examine a single moment in history. You can remember some of the things that usually get forgotten because they occurred after the spotlight moved on. In nineteen ninety seven, Tiger was on his now familiar minimalist schedule about twenty events per year, selected with an eye to sponsors per sizes in major championship preparation. The Greater Milwaukee Open didn't fit and he never returned. Here's Gary Demata.
It was just one huge here when Milwaukee was sort of the epicenter of the golf universe, and then when it went back after that very quickly to being just another small town stop, one a few remaining on the PGA Tour. And I know to this date there's still a lot of people around here who are I wouldn't say bitter, but I guess disappointed as a better word, that Tiger didn't start to repay the GMO's exemption and
return at least once just to say thank you. I've heard that over the years people have griped that he never came back. And I asked him in over the you know, over the intervening years, if he'd consider coming back to Milwaukee. He was also vague, always vague about
his answer, which was understandable. You know, he'd ask me when when the tournament was on this schedule, even though he probably knew, and he tried that sort of thing, but he got the impression pretty quickly that, you know, he really wasn't going to come back.
Even as Tiger Woods's popularity infused the PGA Tour and the sport at large with new energy, the GMO declined.
As time went on. It sort of sort of lost that prestige. The last few years, US Bank sponsored it and it was called the US Bank Championship in Milwaukee, and by the end of its run for whatever reason, whether it was a lack of marketing, muscle or other things.
On the summer calendar. You know, the Milwaukee Brewers were started to be a big draw and built a new stadium, and we have a big event called Summerfest in the middle of our summer and a lot of a lot of ethnic festivals, and I think it sort of got lost a little bit on the summer calendar, and by the last couple of years it was not attracting very big galleries.
Unfortunately.
I think if you had to put a finger on the biggest reason why the tournament went away, it was sort of a lack of overall communities for corporate and community and civic involvement in the tournament just seem to wan in those last couple of years, and certainly the economic downturn was a factor.
In two thousand and nine, Bo Van Pelt won the final edition of the Greater Milwaukee Open. After that year, US Bank, Withdrewett sponsorship in the event, dissolved. The GMO had been part of the PGA Tour for forty two years, but today outside of Wisconsin, if people know about it at all, it says the answer to a trivia question, where did Tiger Woods debut as a professional? Where did Tiger Woods say Hello World? Where did Curtis Strange tell
Tiger Woods You'll learn? Where did Tiger Woods make his first professional hole in one? This is the way with someone as legendary as Tiger cross paths with him once play one small role in his continually retold biography, and it may end up being the main thing people remember about. You consider Jim Riswold, who by any measure, has had an exceptional career as one of the great admin of
the past thirty years. When I sent him an email asking to interview him, he replied, sure, I can talk about Hello World for the million time.
I mean, Garrett, it's hysterical. I you know, I it makes me feel old. It's just like, do you know who I used to be? That guy that did these ads that people are talking more about now than they did.
When they ran today. Riswold is a full time artist.
Or I'd like to say, I've gone from a career selling things that people don't need to making things that they don't want. I eat my art, but it keeps me happy. I mean, I had to leave the business because I got quite ill, and I was supposed to die, and you know, because Lukemi is a killer. And then I got another cancer after that. My boss Dan White quipped when I finally retired the second time, you can't do anything right, including dying. Yeah, So I happily hear,
you know. And I still freelance every once in a while, but advertising a young person's game, and I am not a young person.
I heard versions of that sentiment a lot in my interviews for this episode. Man, we were younger back then, and boy have we gotten old. It's tried to say, mend obvious, but crucial. Those of us who remember Tiger erupting onto our TV screens in nineteen ninety six and
ninety seven are now twenty three years older. Even the youngest of us are in our thirties, So recalling the Tiger of that time becomes at least partly an exercise in nostalgia and recalling not just who Tiger was, but who we were and what we've seen and been through in the years since. We've all come a long way, and so has he.
I just I'm marvel at noan Tiger all these years and work in TV since that first day he played golf on tour, watching him and talking about him so much, and dissecting everything which we do, which is what unfair is held, that's what we do. I marvel at what he has been able to achieve in this day and time. Pretty phenomenal stuff. Now, how can you dominate the best of your sport by that much that it doesn't come along very often? And we're just lucky to have that
guy that came along happened to be a golfer. I just don't think you can put it to words, how hell big a factor he's been in our game the last twenty three years.
This was the third episode of Frida Egg Stories. It was created and hosted by me Garrett Morrison, with mixing and engineering from Jay Eric. Our executive producer is Andy Johnson. Thanks for listening.