phil is so much cooler than the robot aka Tiger Woods

That was amazing. Funniest thing I've seen on a golf course maybe ever.

Phil. f tha haterz baby.

64 66 65 65...lose by 4...cheers

Nice final round by Piercy, 10 birdies and 8 pars

Pretty sick for Snedeker to shoot 64-66-65-65 and then lose by 4. Just says how much of a groove Phil was in all week.

Well, Johnny is the best desert golfer ever. He might know what he's talking about regarding that nasty cactus.

Personally, I'd want to put on a rain jacket before attempting it. Although those needles can go right through Gore-Tex as well.

BO

Tiger beats Sneds by 4 at Torrey, Phil beats Sneds by 4 at Phoenix. Therefore Tiger = Phil.

BO

Great first two weeks of the PGA Tour. Tiger and Phil might win every event this year.

Maybe...

Something like 12 wins for Tiger and 2 for Phil?

A Tiger vs Phil in the match the play or at Augusta is still so much better than Tiger vs Rory

PGA couldn't have asked for a better start for the New Year.

Wholeheartedly agree. I love watching golf in Hawaii.

BO

^^^^ NIT

It stands to reason that Tiger added a lot of money to golf.

But I think when you cite 1997-2000 numbers and dub them the "Tiger Effect" you also need to account for all the corporate money that skyrocketed from the Dow going from like 5k in 1997 to 10K by early 2000. So much god damn false wealth was created in America in the last few years of the '90s it's absurd. 1982-1999 was one of the sickest economic growth stretches in our country's history, with the late '90s being almost comical.

I'm guessing that has a lot to do with the 28% annual spike in money.

Stop talking. You are wrong. The other players on tour cite Tiger for the increase in the purses. Don't do that thing where you say something uninformed and then defend it to the death. Just don't.

Good job, good effort. Good talk.

You realize your post said "Yeah, I guess you could say that but here's what really happened."?

No it actually didn't. I think both things happened. A bunch of corporate money was created during those years in the market and Tiger brought a lot of it to the tour.

But attributing 28% to Tiger, if that's what he's doing, would be totally short-sighted.

If Tiger came on the scene during a huge financial downswing there's no way we see a 28% spike in tour money averaged across 3 years.

Take a look at NWC's number he cited for 2000-2007: 4.6% per year. Do you think that has to do with the fact that Tiger stopped GOATING and people lost interest in him, or with the fact that the market totally ****ing tanked in the first half of the 2000s?

Hint: Tiger didn't stop GOATING until 2009.

So I guess we should see disproportionate spikes in prize money in tennis during that period because it was fueled in part by a booming economy.

At Wimbledon, Men's Singles Champion (in pounds):

1997: 415,000
1998: 435,000
1999: 455,000
2000: 500,000

A 28% rise per year would have been:

1997: 415,000
1998: 531,200
1999: 679,936
2000: 870,318 (This counterfactual amount actually exceeds the actual prize for the 2009 champion.)

US Open Tennis Actual: (U.S. Dollars)

1997: 650,000
1998: 700,000
1999: 750,000
2000: 800,000

U.S. Open Tennis Counterfactual:

1997: 650,000
1998: 832,000
1999: 1,064,960
2000: 1,363,148 (an amount that exceeds the amount awarded in 2006)

But somehow that didn't happen despite the amazing economy that was fueling the business world and the amounts spent on sports by those businesses.

So, in other words, good job, good effort. Nice talk.

Why would he continue to bring people to the game after the initial surge? Imagine Jordan going to some crappy NBA franchise in the middle or start of his career (like Lebron to Cleveland). There's going to be a massive spike in popularity in the first couple years, then it will flatline.

People got really excited about Tiger for the first few years, and the popularity of the PGA tour basically doubled (or more) in 3 years. It has remained at those heights since.

Also, if it were tied directly to the market, don't you think people would play/watch less golf when the market tanked? What about other great booms in history, what'd those do to golf ratings?

Okay, I'm going to have to make a real reply I guess. First of all, for the sake of rational thoughts and sound statements, there's a difference in saying "I think X was a factor," which doesn't assign a value to the weight and "I think a lot of what you see can be attributed to X," which assigns the majority of the weight to X. The former could mean it has a minuscule finite affect on it or a huge affect, so it would be hard to say that you'd be wrong. But that's not what you said. You said a lot of the increase in prize pool is "I'm guessing" attributed to "all the corporate money that skyrocketed from the Dow...creating so much god damn false wealth". I'll stop there on that point and go where I really wanted to go with this:


I can't find the numbers, so hopefully someone will know where to look. I would be far more interested to see the correlation of the golf viewership statistics over said years and the increase in prize pool. I mean, the sponsors aren't dumping more money into the prize pool just because their company is worth more on the stock exchange. They're paying more money because they are getting more advertising out of it, whether directly through viewers or other streams of benefit. Tiger increased viewership. Prize pools went up. It's not because companies were so rich that they didn't know what to do with their money and the only thing they could think of was to make the prize pools in golf bigger.

The only way for what you said to be remotely possible is that people had so much much "false wealth" that huge numbers of people that didn't watch golf before could finally afford to be interested in watching golf on TV.


*edit* okay, some awesome points made while I was typing. Now you can take the easy road and say "Okay guys, sometimes I just type as the thoughts run through my head and I don't necessarily filter them before it comes out. Once I click 'Post', I sometimes feel the need to defend what I said for some reason I can't put my finger on. I realize this is why a lot of posters get angry with me sometimes. I'm sorry."

I am attributing most of the 28% to Tiger. It's not really short sighted.

Your right that from the late 80s thru the early 2000s was an amazing growth period for America. However, from 1970-1990, adjusted for inflation the Dow Jones was basically flat but golf still grew at almost 5%. Then from 1990-1997 the Dow Jones returned 7.5% per year, but golf's growth shrank to just above 3%. Then from 97-2000 the market returned 15% per year, and golf exploded up 28%.

It would be silly to say "oh the economic growth in america is what really drove golf from 97-2000" while ignoring that the economy was growing plenty from 90-97 but golf's growth actually shrank in comparison to the previous 20 years of economic staleness. The economy definitely played a role in the amount of money that COULD be thrown around, but they weren't throwing it at golf until Tiger came about and then they piled in.

I will concede that Tiger in the hunt in any tournament and his dominance those years brought in the viewers. Thus ratings were higher bringing in more dollars and purses increased. Though Phil also had that effect though not as huge.
Still to this day Tiger or Phil will draw in more viewers when in the hunt. Heck If John Daly was leading the Masters he would draw in more viewers

The Waste Mgmt open demonstrates how the fans will come out if they can have fun. The guy dancing on the 16th to gangman style turns him into an instant fan favorite. Who didnt like seeing the caddy races?

I didn't see this. Did Shooter McGavin come out swinging and yelling "Damn you people, this is golf, not a rock concert!"?

.

Oops. Well, thank you for that; I enjoyed it. But I didn't realize I got more than just the part about the caddy races in the quote