{"id":1176,"date":"2014-08-07T16:10:42","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T16:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/?p=1176"},"modified":"2014-08-22T16:10:44","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T16:10:44","slug":"sporting-intelligence-article-financial-impact-of-tiger-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/2014\/08\/07\/sporting-intelligence-article-financial-impact-of-tiger-woods\/","title":{"rendered":"Sporting Intelligence Article: Financial impact of Tiger Woods"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Golf_Blog\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Measuring the \u2018Tiger effect\u2019 \u2013 doubling of Tour prizes, billions into players\u2019 pockets<\/h2>\n

By Roger Pielke Jr. on August 6, 2014. <\/em><\/p>\n

With the final Major of the golf season starting on Thursday at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Kentucky, most of the talk in anticipation of the PGA Championship is about a player who almost certainly has no chance of winning, even if he were to play. I\u2019m of course referring to Tiger Woods.<\/p>\n

Woods reinjured his back last week at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational leading to questions about his future \u2013 not just this week, but as a professional golfer. With Tiger on everyone\u2019s mind, I thought it worth taking a look at his impact on the game, specifically Tiger\u2019s role in boosting purses and the corresponding financial benefits to his peers.<\/p>\n

From 1990 to 1996 the total purses on the PGA Tour increased from $82 million to $101 million, a respectable increase of about 3.4% per year. (All data in this post comes from PGATour.com<\/a> and is adjusted to constant 2014 dollars to eliminate the effects of inflation). Tiger burst on the scene as a professional in 1996, winning 2 of the 8 events that he entered.<\/p>\n

Before the Masters this year,\u00a0Phil Mickelson explained what Tiger\u2019s success and corresponding fame did to the game<\/a>:<\/p>\n

.<\/span>\u201cLook at what he\u2019s doing for the game the last 17 years he\u2019s played as a professional. It\u2019s been incredible. .. I remember when I was an amateur and I won my first tournament in Tucson in 1991, the entire purse was $1 million, first place was $180,000 and Steve [Loy, my agent] and I would sit down and say, \u2018I wonder if in my lifetime, probably not in my career, we would have play for a $1 million first-place check.\u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201c[Now] it\u2019s every week. It\u2019s unbelievable the growth of this game. And Tiger has been the instigator<\/strong>. He\u2019s been the one that\u2019s really propelled and driven the bus because he\u2019s brought increased ratings, increased sponsors, increased interest and we have all benefited, but nobody has benefited more than I have, and we\u2019re all appreciative. That\u2019s why we miss him so much; we all know what he\u2019s meant to the game.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

.<\/span>The numbers bear out Mickelson\u2019s observations. By 2008 purses totaled $292 million, representing an increase of 9.3% per year since Tiger joined the Tour. This difference in the growth in prize money from 3.4% in the years before Tiger joined the Tour to 9.3% in the years after can be called the \u2018Tiger Woods effect.\u201d\u00a0 I was curious as to what financial impact the \u201cTiger effect\u201d had on his peers, so I looked at the data.<\/p>\n

The results are astonishing. Tiger effectively more than doubled the prize money for every other golfer, adding billions of dollars to fellow players\u2019 pockets. How can we demonstrate this?<\/p>\n

Here is what I did. I considered all players who earned a pay cheque on the Tour in 2013. I then calculated their total earnings from 1997 to 2008 (176 players). I then calculated how much of those earnings were due to the \u201cTiger Woods effect\u201d under the assumption that golf purses would have grown at the earlier rate of increase. I then subtracted this value from what they actually earned leaving a residual due to the \u201cTiger Woods effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n

photo by New Brunswick Tourism<\/a>, Wikipedia Creative Commons<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Measuring the \u2018Tiger effect\u2019 \u2013 doubling of Tour prizes, billions into players\u2019 pockets By Roger Pielke Jr. on August 6, 2014. With the final Major of the golf season starting on Thursday at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Kentucky, most … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":1177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-publications"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-19 14:38:24","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2014\/08\/Golf_Blog.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1176"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1193,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176\/revisions\/1193"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}