Nacho Garcia |
Miami (USA), Jan 27 (EFE).- The relay is guaranteed. Charlie Woods is 13 years old. He is a great promise. Tiger’s son aims to continue his PGA legacy and inherit his endorsements. Meanwhile, his father still billed 68 million dollars out of competition in one year.
His participation in the last three editions of the PNC Championship with his father have placed him in the ‘spotlight’ for specialists, professionals and amateurs in the world of golf. Tiger himself confessed in ‘The Match’ in December, on top-rated national television, that his son had already surpassed him playing a few weeks ago.
In recent months there has been an obvious interest on Tiger’s part to expose ‘his cub’, but at the same time he protects him from the inevitable comparisons that can only bury the boy’s potential.
He always encouraged him to practice other sports but, once he has decided on golf, he even publicly suggests that he not imitate his swing: “Don’t copy me, copy Rory (McIlroy), he is number one in the world , you will never see him unbalanced in a shot and you can hit him as hard as you want”.
They say that Tiger Woods’s medium-term plans include retiring from the professional field, continuing to enjoy the fields in Florida and focusing on training his son.
At the same time, he wants to pamper his new projects, such as the restaurant chain ‘The Woods’, or TMRW Sports, the project in which he has joined Rory McIlroy with the aim of building new technologies related to sports, the media communication and entertainment.
Knowing how to invest is one of the keys to great athletes who generate fortunes and Tiger is the golfer who has won the most money in prizes as a professional, currently close to 120 million dollars. But this figure represents only 7.6% of his total earnings.
It is estimated that with sponsorships it has exceeded one and a half billion dollars. He picked up a pace very quickly, and it is that he billed his first 100 million dollars a few months after turning professional at the age of twenty, thanks to the contracts signed then with Nike, American Express and Titleist.
But his biggest challenge will be to prevent a slab of pressure from falling on Charlie. In sports it is a chimera to think that he can come close to what Tiger achieved, but it is much more difficult for him to reach his level of income and social recognition.
Tiger Woods continues to be one of the three members of the select group of billionaire athletes, a ‘club’ that he shares with Michael Jordan and LeBron James. The only ones who, with recognized income, have managed to reach ten figures in their fortune.
He has achieved this milestone without having to accept the dizzying number that LIV Golf put on his table from Saudi Arabia. Greg Norman himself confessed to The Washington Post that the proposal was in nine figures, approaching ten.
If the origin of all his fortune is broken down, barely 10% comes from his activity and triumphs in golf. The vast majority of the millions that Tiger Woods invoices annually are from commercial agreements with brands such as Gatorade, TaylorMade, Rolex or Nike.
They are sponsorships that remain valid regardless of whether or not you participate in tournaments, and that are not affected by long absences to recover, such as the one you are currently immersed in.
These brands want to be associated with Tiger because he is not just a successful athlete, he is much more. The bulk of his followers are not golf fans, they admire him as a public and social figure, as an icon of the sport, one who managed to succeed in a sport that was elitist at the time.
His impact not only benefits his own pockets, but also those of the other players in the tournaments in which he participates. It is the so-called ‘Tiger Effect’, which raises television audiences by 30-50%, and consequently also what brands pay to appear.
Over the last year and a half of recovery, in which he can barely flex to tee the ball, he is estimated to have generated close to $68 million in out-of-competition revenue and ranks 14th one of the highest paid athletes in the world.
In the golf environment, many think that some of these brands would already be willing to ‘accompany’ Charlie Woods, but there are regulations that prohibit this type of commercial ties with adolescent athletes.
At the moment, the child only faces the sporting part of the challenge, and it is not the only case, but it is the most popular one. While some golfers like the British Ian Poulter share the progress of their little ones on social networks, others like John Daly has already won the famous PNC Championship with his 19-year-old son John Patrick, considered another promise with the PGA as a destination.
Tiger is considered the best golfer of all time, the one who has won the most prize money in the history of the PGA, who holds the record for the most weeks at number one in the world (683), the most victories in tournaments on the American circuit ( 82), the youngest to win the Grand Slam at 24 and also at Augusta at twenty-one.
Now, instead of discreetly playing with his son on private golf courses and maintaining his anonymity, Tiger has decided it’s useful to get his son out onstage and let the world see him club in hand. Is it part of a strategy to promote Charlie?
Time will tell. The truth is that the only one who can inherit that iconic red polo shirt from the big events, as well as the multimillion-dollar advertising contracts, is Charlie Woods.