Tiger Woods Could Leave Nike After 27 Years

Tiger Woods could be making a huge move very soon. According to the No Laying Up golf podcast (per Front Office Sports), Woods could be leaving Nike next week after he takes part in the PNC Championship. The podcast also reported that fellow golfers Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy could be on their way out as well. 

Woods has been representing Nike since 1996 when he was only 20 years old. Front Office Sports says Nike is believed to have paid Woods hundreds of millions since signing him  27 years ago. When Woods was competing at the Hero World Challenge last week, he was spotted wearing a pair of FootJoys shoes. According to Golf.com, it's not the first time Woods has worn FootJoys as he was seen with him during the 2022 Masters, something that Nike knew about and was okay with since it was the first tournament since the 2021 car accident. 

Back in 2017, Nike co-founder Phil Knight said in a Bloomberg Television interview that Nike began recruiting Wods three years before he turned professional. "You could see him coming from way back," Knight said, per Golf Digest. "He had won three U.S. Juniors and then went on to win three U.S. Amateurs in a six-year span from the time he was like 15 'til 20. He would play occasionally in the Portland area and we'd always invite him and his father out to lunch. We were working on that probably for three years before we actually signed him."

When Woods won the Masters in 2019, Knight showed his support for the 15-time major champion. "It wasn't just a major, it was the Masters and that gave me goosebumps and to be perfectly honest a few tears," Knight said, per Fox News Radio. "That was a long hard struggle but he did it and I knew how hard he worked and how hard he tried and it was, for me, one of the great moments in sports. You know Michael Jordan 55 points when he had the flu and just a bunch that rise up but that was one of the really great ones."

Woods, 47, finished 18th out of 20 players in the Hero World Challenge. It was his first tournament in more than seven months, and according to ESPN, Woods said he hopes to play in one tournament a month in 2024.