One sports career is in disheartening decline. The other is in exhilarating ascendance. Born in different centuries, Tiger Woods and Caitlin Clark are going in opposite directions.
Yet, while one is 26 years older than the other, they do have much in common. It’s as if their thrilling careers have been running on parallel tracks a generation apart.
How often over the past year and a half, since Clark’s rise to her immense popularity, has the rush to buy tickets to see her or national obsession to watch her on TV reminded us of someone else? And when we thought about it, and landed on who that someone might be, wasn’t it Tiger?
Woods, 48, brought millions of new fans to the game of golf. Clark, 22, is bringing millions of new fans to women’s basketball. In both cases, most of these fans never watched or cared about the sport before Woods or Clark arrived. Grandmothers who didn’t like golf started planning their Sundays around Woods’ final-round tee time. Grandfathers who usually scoffed at women’s sports began arranging their afternoons or evenings around tipoff of Clark’s Iowa or Indiana Fever games.
Quickly the masses realized these weren’t just terrific athletes, they were entertainers daring to pull off breathtaking shots (and in Clark’s case, breathtaking passes) that no one else in their sport could. And they were doing it in a way that particularly appealed to the newcomer to the sport: often set apart from the other athletes, appearing on the TV screen alone, so visually approachable.
The parallels don’t end there. While a good portion of the nation was falling in love with them, they both had their doubters: peers and pundits who couldn’t believe someone so young could rise to the top of their sport so quickly, make the leap from the amateur or college world to the professional ranks and succeed almost immediately.
Two-time U.S. Open champion and longtime golf commentator Curtis Strange was interviewing the 20-year-old Woods, playing as a professional for the first time in Milwaukee in August 1996, when Woods said he wanted “a victory” in his first pro tournament.
Strange smiled. “You’ll learn.”
In less than two months, Woods won his first PGA Tour event in Las Vegas. In April 1997, at 21, he won the Masters, the first of his 15 major titles.
“I said what the world was thinking at the time,” Strange said in a phone interview the other day. “I have to laugh now. I’m the first one to say, I was the one who learned. We all learned very quickly and we all admitted it.”
Woods had Strange; Clark had legendary WNBA veteran Diana Taurasi. At the 2024 Women’s Final Four, in which Clark led Iowa to its second consecutive NCAA final, losing to South Carolina, Taurasi looked ahead to Clark’s WNBA career and said, “Reality is coming.”
In the three and a half months since Taurasi said those words on ESPN, Clark has become one of the best players in the league while facing more defensive attention than any other WNBA player and playing the toughest schedule.
On Wednesday, she set the WNBA single-game assist record with 19. That’s not a rookie record. That’s the most assists in a game in league history. In that game, she scored or assisted on 66 points for Indiana, the most ever in a WNBA game. She is the WNBA leader in assists per game and is in the top 20 in the league in points, rebounds, blocks and steals per game.
After she and the Fever beat Taurasi’s Phoenix Mercury last month, Taurasi changed her tune.
“It’s amazing,” she said. “What Caitlin’s been able to do in her short career so far has just been nothing short of remarkable.”
It turns out reality was coming for the WNBA, not for Clark.
For Strange, who said he watches “every second” he can of Clark’s games, it’s easy to see what’s happening.
“Quickly the WNBA players are learning with Caitlin what we all learned with Tiger,” Strange said. “Both of them had tremendous resumes coming up but we all know the jump from amateur to professional is the largest leap of your life, so how was that person going to transform from that to that? In both cases they did it so well.”
Golf TV ratings soared for more than two decades with Woods and only now are falling back to earth. The story is similar for Clark — the soaring part, not the falling part — with women’s college and pro basketball, with a significant caveat: Men’s golf already was an established, mainstream sport pre-Tiger due to the popularity of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, among others. Woods then lifted it into the stratosphere. Women’s basketball has had great stars for decades but has been largely ignored by the male-dominated sports TV and media establishment. So this is all uncharted territory, led by Clark.
“It’s the whole package,” Strange said of Woods and Clark. “The TV camera likes them, which means we’re going to like them. It’s the smile, it’s the look, it’s the fitness, it’s the way they go about it. With Caitlin, she comes across mid-court and you can’t take your eyes off of her. It’s like going to a Mike Tyson fight, don’t go to the bathroom in the first round, you’re gonna miss the knockout. Don’t take your eyes off her when she crosses mid-court because it might go up from anywhere.”
Clark’s maturity is obvious as she tries to grow her sport
There also are some noteworthy differences between Woods and Clark, especially as role models. Until very recently, Woods never wanted to sign autographs before or after a round of…
