Frank Thomas

Woods Notable Sports Figures
Awards and Accomplishments
1991-93 U.S. Junior Amateur Championship
1994-96 U.S. Amateur Championship
1996 Las Vegas Invitational
1996 Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic
1996 Named PGA Tour Rookie of the Year
1996 Named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year
1997 Asian Honda Classic
1997 Byron Nelson Classic
1997 Motorola Western Open
1997 Named Player of the Year by the Golf Writers Association of
America
1997 Given Sports Star of the Year award
1997-2002 Named PGA Tour Player of the Year
1997, Named PGA of America Player of the Year
1999-2000
1997, 2000 Mercedes Championship
1997, 2000 Named the Associated Press’s Male Athlete of the Year
1997, Masters
2001-02
1998 BellSouth Classic
1998, 2000 Johnnie Walter Classic
1999 Deutsche Bank Open
1999 Memorial Tournament
1999 National Car Rental Golf Classic
1999 The Tour Championship
1999 World Cup of Golf (with Mark O’Meara)
1999 Wins Vardon Trophy
1999 Buick Invitational
1999-2000 PGA Championship
1999-2000 Named Player of the Year by the Golf Writers Association of
America
1999-2001 WGC-NEC Invitational
1999, 2002 WGC-American Express Championship
2000 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am
2000 British Open
2000 Bell Canadian Open
2000 EMC World Cup (with David Duval)
2000 Named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year
2000-01 Won Vardon Trophy
2000-01 Memorial Tournament
2000-02 Bay Hill Invitational
2000, 2002 U.S. Open
2001 Deutsche Bank-SAP Open
2001 Players Championship
2002 Buick Open
On to College
Stanford University started recruiting Woods in 1989,
and in the fall of 1994 he enrolled there and joined their
golf team. The eighteen-year-old Woods was still the best
amateur golfer in the country: that summer he became
the youngest winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship
in the event’s ninety-four year history. Woods hoped that
year to become only the third player to win both the U.S.
Amateur and the National Collegiate Athletic Association
(NCAA) Championships in the same year (the others
were Phil Mickelson and Nicklaus), but he was
suffering from several injuries and performed poorly.
Woods repeated his U.S. Amateur Championship victories
in 1995 and 1996. By the summer of 1996, Woods
had still failed to win an NCAA championship, but other
1802
The Nike Golf Ball Juggling Commercial
Woods’s skills were clearly demonstrated, even to those who couldn’t
tell a birdie from a bogey, in a famous Nike commercial from 1999. The
original plan for the commercial was for Woods and several other people on
a driving range all to be swinging in unison, but the director was having
trouble getting everything to come together. The commercial was being
filmed at the Orange County National Golf Club in Orange County, California,
in the middle of the summer, and it was deathly hot. Woods, trying to lighten
the mood, started to juggle a ball on the face of one of his clubs during a
break. The director saw this and decided that it would make a better commercial
than the original idea.
It only took four takes to shoot the final thirty-second commercial,
which featured Woods dancing the ball on his sixty-degree sand wedge
forty-nine times. He bounced the ball behind his back, between his legs,
and even caught and balanced the ball on the club face’s grooves. Then
Woods bounced the ball into the air, wound up, and hit it like a baseball,
120 yards out on the driving range. No camera tricks were used, and the
footage was not digitally altered. “It’s really not as hard as you might think
if you grew up playing baseball,” Woods told the media after the commercial
aired. “Hand-to-eye coordination—same principle.”
than that he had achieved all of the goals that he had set
for himself as an amateur. He had been playing in professional
events, including the U.S. and British Opens and
the Masters, for several years. He had not performed up to
his expectations in any of them, but the amount of time
that he was forced to spend studying in the spring cut into
his practicing time and, he thought, left him ill-prepared
for those competitions. Although he had promised his
parents that he would finish college, in August of 1996
Woods withdrew from Stanford and turned professional.
Rookie Season
Woods got sponsor’s exemptions to play in seven
tournaments in 1996, between the time he turned professional
in August and the end of the season. In order to be
a member of the PGA tour in 1997, he needed to win
enough in those seven tournaments to place him among
the top 125 money winners on the tour for the year, or to
win at least one event outright. He finished sixtieth in his
first competition as a professional, the Greater Milwaukee
Open, but from there his performances only improved.
The next week he finished eleventh in the
Canadian Open. The week after that, he was ahead by
one stroke in the Quad City Classic going into Sunday.
Golf reporters from across the country abandoned the
more prestigious Presidents Cup, which was being held
the same weekend, and flew to Illinois to cover what they
expected to be a Woods win, but Woods had two bad
holes on the last day and fell to fifth. In his next competition,
the B.C. Open, he finished third, which placed him
128th on the money list with four more events to go.
Woods caused a major controversy the next week when
he withdrew from the Buick Open and skipped a dinner
that had been planned to honor him there. Woods said that
he was exhausted from his rough schedule—even before
turning professional, Woods had played in several challenging
amateur events that summer. When he realized