Tiger Woods - is Golf Hero
Golf is one of the few sports that no one else can beat you, but yourself. Golf is where you take a four foot metal club with a head at the end, and try to get a ball that is one inch in diameter, in a hole in the ground that is 4 ½ inches wide in the fewest strokes possible. It may sound easy but as a golfer, it isn't always so easy to get the ball in the hole and no one did that better in our game more than Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer of all time. Tiger himself single-handedly changed this beautiful game of golf forever because he made the sport cool and he has had this impact on the game called the ¨Tiger Effect.¨
Not too many people play or even talk about golf that much anymore. ¨Golf is for old people.¨ is what I hear these days. In some cases, that may be true but if you know anything about golf, you know the name Tiger Woods. Everyone knows him, he is one of the worlds biggest names still today! But what people don't know, is the impact that Tiger Woods has had on the game of golf. There's nobody who has had a bigger influence than Tiger has had.
It has been 22 years since Tiger Woods first walked onto a PGA Tour course by playing the Nissan Los Angeles Open as a skinny teenager, and golf is now a totally different game now. Woods changed this beautiful game of golf by his dominance throughout years. As a matter of fact, I think Tiger Woods has had just big of an impact as Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali have had. In the world of golf, nobody comes close to having the same reputation as Tiger has had. One example of this is the called the ¨Tiger Effect¨.
In the video ¨Journalists Explain the Tiger Woods Effect on Golf,¨ Doug Ferguson says that ¨When Tiger comes to a tournament, he is the tournament.¨ Tiger Woods is just a different animal. He is not like anyone else and coming from a huge golf fan myself, I can vividly see that. The only reason I'm turning on that TV is to watch golf is to watch Tiger, and I know other golf fans can relate with me because it's true. This ¨Tiger Effect¨ happens due to that fact because of the attention he gets because of what he has accomplished for the game, what he has brought and the number of fans he has attracted. You guys know whenever it's Sunday and Tiger is playing, you are gonna watch it. You aren't going to miss anything in the world to see him play on Sunday at Augusta, anything! He makes a massive difference and when he is playing he is the story, he is the main event as he brings fans to the game who weren't watching before.
Woods made golf what it is today. It used to be a sport most Americans have never played. Now he has made golf into something cool, a sport that some many young kids want to play today. He is part of why I started loving the game of golf, we all just want to be like him, driving the ball 350+ yards, making birdies, club twirling and fist-pumping all the time. In the article, ¨How Tiger Woods made golf cool,¨ Orin Starn says 'Tiger embodied a kind of modern cool that golf hadn't seen before.¨What Starn is saying here is that back in the day, golf wasn't that ¨cool¨. Golf was basically just a bunch of white guys that all wear the same clothes who were old and unathletic, it was a ¨gentleman's game” as they call it. Today, golf is a game where all these young guys strive because they are all on top of their game 24/7, they have all this new state of the art technology to improve their game, they are working out to get stronger just like Tiger did. They all wear nice, athletic apparel and doing these club twirls just like Tiger does, trying to become that next great player like Tiger. Us golfers today, are doing some of the same things these pro golfers are doing as well, trying to be ¨cool¨
Tiger Woods is a rare athlete that has impacted our sport of golf over a generation. He made golf cool. He single-handedly turned golf into a sport, a big sport. He made it fun for people to watch, entertaining, and he changed this game. All Tiger did on the PGA Tour was win, win and win. He dominated the game of golf, just like Michael Jordan did for basketball. He is our hero. He is the guy everyone is now chasing to beat. He is a walking legend that everyone wants to see.
