Tiger Woods

Eldrick "Tiger" Woods turned professional in August 1996 at twenty, and Nike's "Hello World" campaign was on the air about two days after his first press conference, part of a Nike-and-Titleist package that ranked as the richest endorsement deal in golf history to that point. He was Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year before he had played a full season, and on April 13, 1997, he won the Masters by twelve strokes, the youngest champion in the tournament's history at twenty-one. Two months later he was the world's number one, the fastest climb to the top the ranking had ever recorded.

The peak came in 2000 and 2001. He won six consecutive PGA Tour events, the longest streak since Ben Hogan in 1948, and took the 2000 U.S. Open by a record fifteen strokes, a performance widely called the greatest in golf history. That year he became the youngest player to complete the career Grand Slam, at twenty-four. When he won the 2001 Masters he held all four major titles at once, something no one had done before; because the four fell across two calendar years it was christened the "Tiger Slam." From August 1999 to September 2004 he sat at number one for 264 straight weeks, courses including Augusta National added yardage in a strategy the press called "Tiger-proofing," and Nike, which had gone from a start-up golf brand to the biggest apparel name in the sport on his back, re-signed him in 2000 for $105 million over five years, the largest endorsement package any athlete had signed at the time.

The Sunday red was his mother's doing. "I wear red on Sundays because my mum thinks that that's my power colour," he said, "and you know you should always listen to your mom." The decade's defining image came at the 2008 U.S. Open, when he returned from April knee surgery, dueled Rocco Mediate through an 18-hole playoff and then a sudden-death hole, and won. Kenny Perry said he had "beat everybody on one leg," and two days later Woods announced more surgery and the end of his season; he called it "my greatest ever championship."

The run ended with the infidelity scandal of late 2009, which cost him sponsors and sent him on an indefinite break. Four back surgeries followed between 2014 and 2017, and then the 2019 Masters, his first major in eleven years, a comeback most of the sport had written off. He was the Associated Press Athlete of the Decade for the 2000s, and his totals, fifteen majors and 82 tour wins, trail only Jack Nicklaus on one list and tie Sam Snead on the other. In 2024 he launched an apparel line with TaylorMade and named it Sun Day Red.