Why did professional golf stake so much of its revenues on Tiger Woods?
They invested way too much with one man.
If you look at the income-generation and TV revenues of tournaments with Tiger Woods, they are up to 66% higher than tournaments without Tiger Woods.
That is an enormous gap that was not seen before the late 90’s.
Why hasn’t professional golf built up other stars and personalities who have similar popularity to Tiger Woods? Why has pro golf simply dumped all of its publicity resources onto Tiger, and let the other guys go unnoticed?
This would protect them from downturns when Tiger isn’t on the course.
You put your money where you get the best return.
Simple, Tiger Woods played great golf and was exciting to watch. Plus he changed golf. Before all the people who played pro were overweight. Tiger was one of the first to workout and be fit, and thats why Tiger is a staple in the game of golf. Have you seen how many tourny winning putts he’s had.
Tiger Woods made golf cool and he has brought in millions for the PGA Tour. He brought the big time TV contracts pretty much by himself by his success and popularity. This made the Tournament purses huge and made guys that are finishing 50th on the PGA Tour millionaires and the top players multimillionaires. A lot of those guys are flying around in their own jets and they have their abilities to thank for that along with Tiger Woods. If somebody was winning as much as him then there would be bigger personalities right now. The PGA Tour didn’t invest in Tiger, they have been raking in the money since he got there.
They don’t know how to do that. Their only business model is “ride the cash cow till he dies. Then resuscitate him, and keep on riding”. They found out how bad they were when TW was injured for the last half of ’08, and they STILL didn’t learn anything. It’s like some kind of weird denial thing.
It doesn’t help that fair-weather fans (not true golf fans, but Tiger-only fans) and most of the media crucify people that either have a negative opinion of Tiger, or aspire to be #1. Once the backlash subsides, they’re basically saying “Screw it, I’ll keep to myself” and that hurts everyone… but it’s understandable. That’s why it seems that there are so many robots on Tour… why say something, when either not enough people are going to care, or you might face some serious heat?
You’re completely off base.
Tim Finchem is tasked with growing the game economically for the PGA Tour…it’s why he has a job.
When it became clear as day that Woods was a ratings-driver for the Tour, Finchem used that leverage in renegotiating contracts with the tv networks.
People like Woods for a myriad of reasons, and the PGA Tour doesn’t exactly over-expose Woods because they don’t have to.