By Tom Leonard, for the Daily Mail
Within six minutes of his winning putt at the U.S. Masters, the sports clothing giant Nike had put out an advert celebrating Tiger Woods.
The chant of ‘Tiger! Tiger!’ from fans lining the green in Augusta, Georgia, was soon drowned out by the ringing of cash tills as delighted sponsors and golf industry bosses gleefully totted up their future earnings.
The pedestrian world of professional golf was once more ‘The Tiger Woods Show’ — far more exciting to advertisers, audiences and potential players.
Woods, who became the world’s first billion-dollar sportsman in 2009, made a fortune for himself and so many others.
Tiger feat: Woods and son Charlie, in matching Nike gear, celebrate his astonishing Masters win
Nike — which has sponsored Woods for 23 years — was estimated to have earned $22.5 million (£17.2 million) simply from its association with his victory on Sunday.
Its ‘swoosh’ logo was plastered not only over Woods — on his hat, shirt, trousers and shoes — but over his son, Charlie, who was dutifully wearing a Nike T-shirt and cap.
Charlie, ten, was beside the green with his sister Sam, 11, and grandmother Kultida, plus the golfer’s girlfriend Erica Herman, to hug Woods as the cameras swarmed around.
Amid the euphoria, it was seemingly forgotten that the last time Woods draped himself in his family, portraying himself as a devoted young dad and husband a decade ago, it turned out to be a gigantic fraud.
His personal life and career imploded in 2009 after it emerged that he had been cheating on his beautiful Swedish wife Elin Nordegren, the mother of his children, with a tawdry army of strippers, porn stars and nightclub hostesses.
Pictured: Police mugshot from 2017
The man hailed by some as the greatest athlete of the modern era sank as spectacularly as he had risen, his failings compounded by a later arrest for ‘driving under the influence’. Until Sunday, he hadn’t had a major victory since 2008.
Last year, a searing and exhaustively researched biography twisted the knife, painting Woods as one of the most odious men in sporting history — an entitled, arrogant egotist who treated almost everyone like dirt.
But Americans love a winner — particularly one who pulls off as spectacular a comeback as Woods. And the U.S. media did its best to accentuate the positive about him, breathlessly talking up the 43-year-old’s chances of beating Jack Nicklaus’s record 18 major competition victories and the incredible power of ‘redemption’.
His ugly past, if mentioned at all, was coyly skated over as ‘personal woes’ and ‘a painful period of his life’ for the ‘prodigal son’. Nike couldn’t have put the forgiving mood better than it did in a particularly cynical marketing slogan it dreamt up for Woods in an earlier comeback attempt — ‘Winning Takes Care of Everything’. It does seem to have done that — supporters believe that if he continues to play like this, he could make another billion dollars.
Yet the rekindled love affair with Woods isn’t entirely altruistic. Much of the golf world has been rooting for a comeback. Although he’s balding now under that Nike cap, as a young, attractive and mesmerising player, he single-handedly transformed the sport’s unathletic image and boosted its fortunes.
When Woods is on the leaderboard, interest in golf, attendance at tournaments and television viewing figures rocket.
Nike set a new record for sporting sponsorship when it gave Woods a five-year, $105 million contract in 2000. Sticking by him as other sponsors pulled out, it signed a new deal in 2013 for $200 million.
The U.S. company has an inglorious track record for standing by disgraced sportsmen, including the U.S. sprinter Justin Gatlin who was caught using illegal performance-enhancing drugs, and an American football star who was found to be running a dog-fighting ring.
Nike was being congratulated in the sports and marketing worlds yesterday.
The company’s latest advert, a montage of old footage of the golfing boy wonder playing as a child and an adult, claims: ‘It’s crazy to think a 43-year-old who has experienced every high and every low and has just won his 15th major is chasing the same dream as a three-year-old.’
Tiger Woods pictured with girlfriend Erica Herman last year
Some might say it’s one thing to acknowledge a remarkable sporting return to form, quite another to hold up Woods as a hero.
Much has changed in his life but Woods doesn’t appear to have gained a great deal more humility.
He revealed that after his latest victory he told his children he hoped they were proud of how he fought. And he certainly sounded his old smug self when he put on the victor’s green jacket for a fifth time and remarked: ‘It fits.’
There was a time when it looked as if the last golf club associated with Woods would be the one wielded by his furious wife when she was chasing his car one night in 2009.
As she smashed the vehicle outside their Florida home, he lost control behind the wheel and crashed into a tree. Woods was later seen lying on his back on the ground, shoeless and unconscious from an anti-insomnia sedative.
The previous night Ms Nordegren had looked through his mobile phone messages and found he had been lying when he publicly refuted claims that he’d had an affair with New York nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel.
It emerged that she was just one of at least 15 women (estimates of the total rose as high as 120) with whom he had cheated on his wife.
Several of them said the golfer, who suffered from insomnia, would stay up all night having sex. A New York madam claimed Woods had repeatedly used her services, sometimes hiring prostitutes two at a time and once paying $15,000 (£11,400) for a call girl.
His marriage collapsed and, as he was plagued by back injuries, so did his golf. However, his many friends and admirers in the sport never lost hope that he would recover his form and rehabilitate his reputation.
Tiger Woods reacts as he wins the Masters golf tournament Sunday, April 14, 2019
It was not a foregone conculsion. In 2017, Woods took another knock when police found him asleep at the wheel of his £180,000 Mercedes outside his Florida home at 2am one night. He told them he thought he was in California.
Woods blithely dismissed his humiliating state as ‘an unexpected reaction to
