Woods wins Augusta by 12 shots at 21. Golf’s country-club walls look smaller overnight, and a generation picks up a club because he did.
Tiger Woods is 21. Augusta National has a history it does not like to discuss on Sunday afternoon. Woods shoots 18-under and wins by 12. It is not a tight Masters. It is a coronation. Green jacket, fist pump, a father in the gallery who has been building this since the boy could walk.
Golf had been a country-club sport with a handful of exceptions. After 1997 the driving range looks different. Kids who had never been inside a clubhouse want a driver. Sponsors who had never thought about golf want Tiger. The PGA Tour’s ratings and purses follow him for a decade.
The later years are complicated. The first jacket is not. It is the moment a Black and Thai-American kid from Cypress, California, makes the most exclusive tournament in golf look too small for him.