How Tiger Woods and Nike’s Epic Partnership Fell Apart of

How Tiger Woods and Nike’s Epic Partnership Fell Apart

And why the TW brand failed to take off like the Jumpman.

That there could ever be a world in which Tiger Woods wasn’t sponsored by Nike seemed unspeakable. That was before April 3, 2022, the day when Woods arrived at Augusta National Golf Club, all 6′ 1″, 200 lbs of him (pins and nails included), and stepped on to the practice range in FootJoy shoes.

“That’s absolute sacrilege at a company like Nike,” says Jordan Rogers, a former brand marketing director at the company. Hindsight may be 20/20, but a seemingly spontaneous decision ultimately signaled the beginning of the end of the most celebrated brand/athlete partnership in the history of the game. The morning of January 8, 2024, Tiger Woods and Nike each confirmed what many had already suspected. “The days have been filled with so many amazing moments and memories,” wrote Tiger. “If I started naming them, I could go on forever.”

A decade earlier, the 2013 PGA Tour season was wrapping up, a year in which Woods won five times. The infamous cheating scandal of 2009 cost him deals with Gatorade, AT&T, Gillette and Accenture, but Nike stood by him through thick, thin and two winless seasons. Now Tiger was back on top of the world, and his reward was a 10-year extension worth a reported $200 million USD, the most lucrative in the history of golf. How did we get from there, to January 8? The answer, like many thing