Welcome to The Signal, Box Score’s Wednesday newsletter. This week, we continue our series on the GOATs of the sports economy. We started with Lionel Messi and how he continues to be a one-man bull market in the world of soccer. Then we looked at how LeBron James lifts whole regional economies wherever he plays. After LeBron we moved to Tom Brady, who took less money during his playing days to help build seven Super Bowl champion teams, but has been making up for lost time.
Now we shift to Tiger Woods, who turned down hundreds of millions of dollars from a Saudi-backed upstart tour to help save the PGA Tour and make it more prosperous and healthy. LIV is on life support, the PGA Tour is richer than ever, and Tiger’s influence and his many businesses continue to grow.
Muhammad Ali put GOAT into the sports lexicon by calling himself “The Greatest” early in his career, when he was still known as the “Louisville Lip.” Then in 1963, six months before he beat Sonny Liston to become the heavyweight champion of the world, Ali released a comedy and spoken-word album called I Am The Greatest! On one track, Ali tells America, “I'm the resurrector of the fight game. I'm going to save boxing! I'm going to bring boxing back to life! Fighting was dull until I came along, because The Greatest wasn't around.”
We remember the fights—the Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman and the three epic battles with Joe Frazier—and what he had to overcome to return to the ring after being banned for over three years for his refusal to be inducted into the Army during the Vietnam War.
But less mentioned is how he revolutionized the business of boxing by starting a company that promoted his fights and marketing fights as global spectacles with multimillion-dollar purses on closed-circuit TV. For his 1971 “Fight of the Century” with Joe Frazier, each fighter was paid $2.5 million, the largest purse in boxing at the time. It sold a record 2.5 million closed-circuit tickets in theaters and grossed $45 million.
In the decades since, Jordan, LeBron, Messi, Ronaldo and Brady, among others, have entered the conversation in their respective sports. Tiger belongs in this group of GOATs. At his peak between 1999 and 2009, Tiger Woods won 64 tournaments, including 13 majors. Only Ben Hogan’s 53 wins during the 1940s come close to Tiger’s sustained dominance in the game of golf. But like these other greats, Tiger’s dominance exceeds any single performance, scoring record or championship, and even his status as the first golfer to make the Forbes Billionaires list.
Approaching his 51st birthday on December 30 in a year in which he lost his driver's license for five years for a reckless driving incident, Tiger has evolved more into a business mogul than the Gandhi-like figure who his father predicted in a 1996 Sports Illustrated article would "do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity."
His estimated $1.5 billion empire includes a golf course design firm, an event production company that manages golf tournaments, TGL, the indoor golf league he co-founded with Rory McIlroy, the Sun Day Red apparel line and the youth foundation he started with his dad in 1996.
With a shrewd knack for commanding value and attention both as a player and dealmaker, he’s made the game richer and better across an ecosystem that includes the PGA Tour and its players, sponsors and investors and the global golf industry in a way that’s continued to grow despite a string of injuries and personal travails that have kept him off the course for much of the last seven years.
Helping the PGA Tour beat back the LIV threat
LIV Golf filed a plan to liquidate last week. Despite the persistence of long-shot resuscitation efforts, LIV’s fate was likely sealed in April 2026 with the Saudi Public Investment Fund announcing it would withdraw its funding for the upstart tour, which began play in 2022.
That the PGA Tour outlasted the LIV threat owes much to Tiger’s rush to shore up his tour’s future. Former LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman said in 2022 that LIV offered Tiger between $700 and $800 million to join their tour. Instead, Tiger helped produce the PGA Tour's elevated, higher-purse events—its first real counterpunch to LIV's guaranteed money.
