What It was Like When Tiger Woods Made His Pro Debut at the Greater Milwaukee Open
The PGA Tour’s Greater Milwaukee Open, until its demise in 2009, was a fun community event which rarely attracted the biggest names in golf, barely registered on the national radar and was covered annually by a dozen or so members of the media.
The exception was the 29th annual GMO in 1996, when Brown Deer Park Golf Course became, for one week, the epicenter of the golf universe.
Tiger Woods, fresh off his third consecutive U.S. Amateur victory, had accepted a sponsor’s exemption into the GMO and, according to reports, would leave Stanford University after two years and make his professional debut in little ol’ Milwaukee.
Twenty-five years later, I still remember the buzz when Tiger showed up, along with a national media contingent. The GMO’s media staff hurriedly set up a backdrop and podium in the hospitality tent leased by Saz’s, a local restaurant, because the media tent was too small to handle the crush of reporters and TV cameras on hand for Woods’ initial news conference.
At 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 28, Woods, then thin as a 1-iron, briefly held the hand of his father, Earl, before stepping to the podium, smiling broadly and saying, “I guess, hello world, huh?”
No one assembled in the tent that day could have predicted the impact Woods would have on the game, though Earl forewarned a few reporters who stuck around after the formal news conference that his son would be a “messiah” and would change not only golf, but the world. We glanced at one another, wondering what Earl was smoking.
I was among the fortunate few to witness the symbolic moment Tiger turned professional. Earlier Wednesday, he’d played in the GMO pro-am. As he strode from the practice range to the first tee, his then-caddie, Mike “Fluff” Cowan, emerged from the clubhouse with a black-and-white Titleist staff bag, still wrapped in plastic. With fewer than 10 curious people looking on, Woods and Cowan ripped off the plastic and transferred Woods’ clubs from a Ping carry bag to the new Titleist bag.
On Thursday, I positioned myself along the gallery rope next to the first tee and watched Woods hit his opening shot as a professional (there is a commemorative plaque on that tee today). I was stunned at the number of spectators; never at a GMO had I seen the gallery four deep around the first tee and lining the rope all the way down the fairway to the green. A number of people in the crowd were African American. I had previously seen few Blacks in the crowd at the GMO, and I saw this as a positive development.
Brown Deer Park, short at 6,739 yards and with tree-lined fairways and doglegs that took driver out of Woods’ hands, really didn’t suit his game. As I recall, he hit a lot of 2-iron stingers off the tee.
He would go on to shoot a 67 in the first round and followed with rounds of 69, 73 and a 68 that included a hole-in-one to foreshadow his flair for the dramatic. He finished in a tie for 60th place, 12 strokes behind playoff winner Loren Roberts. The $2,544 he won is to this day his smallest paycheck in an event in which he made the cut.
Twenty-five years, 15 majors, 82 PGA Tour victories and countless tabloid headlines later, Woods is generally regarded as one of the two or three greatest players in the history of the game.
It all started in Milwaukee. And, by the way, he never came back.
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