“Hello World”

With two words and three syllables, one man changed the face of the game forever. Aged 20, and having just completed a hat-trick of US Amateur titles and signed endorsement deals of $40m with Nike and $20m with Titleist, Eldrick Tont Woods arrived at the Greater Milwaukee Open on August 29, 1996 in a blaze of hype and expectation.

There to make his professional debut, flanked by an 11-man entourage of managers and sponsors, Tiger stepped to the podium inside the press tent, stared down on the media throng beneath him and delivered his line. “Hello world.”

What meant very little to the massed media at that moment – his Nike ad campaign hadn’t even aired – rang loud into every corner of the globe. Tiger had arrived, a force of nature unlike any previously seen in the game, and the PGA Tour would never be the same again.

That event he finished T60, earning $2,544, but this wasn’t about that day or those four rounds. This was about the future. “The world has not seen anything like what he’s going to do for the sport,” predicted Phil Knight. “I wasn’t alive to see Claude Monet paint, but I am alive to see Tiger play, and that’s pretty great.”

As it turned out, over the course of the next two decades on Tour and beyond, “pretty great” didn’t even come close.