Opinion | Why golf's new 'big three' of Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth and Jason Day owe a huge debt to Tiger Woods
World's leading trio can now claim to rule the international roost, but it was the sport's superstar who helped put them there
The heavy lifting has been done; you can relax now Mr Woods. The progeny have officially arrived.
Whatever you might think of Tiger Woods these days, and as a playing professional it admittedly cannot be much, the debt the sport of golf owes him is simply immeasurable and growing by the second. By the time Australian Jason Day captured his first major title at the PGA Championship in the gloaming of Wisconsin's Whistling Straits last Sunday, Tiger was long gone, having missed the cut two days earlier. His fingerprints, however, were all over the moment.
It's a completely moot point now because all three readily admit Tiger was the reason they became consumed with the game
Fifteen years ago, Day was a bitter and broken 12-year-old who had just lost his father to cancer. He was running with a bad crowd in his small Queensland home town and his mother, who migrated from the Philippines herself some years earlier, was admittedly at wits' end. "He was drinking and listening to his peers, instead of his parent," Dening Day told Brisbane's The Courier Mail. "But he was committed to his sport. Golf saved him."
A large part of that commitment was to his idol Tiger Woods. Fifteen years ago, Woods was at the apex of his storied career, winning five majors in six starts. Like Tiger, Day was not of the manor born, growing up in a largely impoverished household.
Also like Tiger, Day was multiracial playing a sport that most definitely was not. To bring the mainstream into one of the least mainstream sports, Woods had to be transcendent and he was.
How else could someone of Day's background ever be suitably inspired to dream of playing golf for a living? Tiger put the game in front of millions of young people who never before dared to dream of a career in it. Fifteen years ago, an 11-year-old kid in Northern Ireland was hypnotised by everything Tiger did, while a precocious seven-year-old in Texas was equally smitten. I