The commercial of the year

Golf Digest, Jan, 2000 by Dave Kindred

Dawdling during a lunch break last summer, Tiger Woods thought to entertain the crew on hand to film a Nike television commercial. So he bounced a golf ball on the face of his sand wedge. Bop-bop-ba-bop, casually. Or he'd pop it up and off his chest, there to drop onto the grip cap, where he'd bounce it a couple times before letting it fall down to the clubface.

No big deal to Tiger, just a way to pass time. Between symphonies, might not Mozart hum?

One man on the set knew exactly what he saw. He saw genius at play. Kel Devlin, Nike Golf's director of sports marketing, went to creative director Hal Curtis and producer Vic Palumbo. He told the Wieden & Kennedy advertising-agency bosses, "Hey, Tiger's really good at this Hacky Sack thing."

In the kid's game called Hacky Sack, a small ball is bounced from person to person, off a thigh, off a knee, off ankles, off any body part except the hands. The Wieden & Kennedy men had already had in mind to use Hacky Sack as the theme of a TV spot touting Nike's new golf ball.

With computer digitalization and all that jazz, the Nike ball would bounce from this player to that, maybe off a tree, a golf cart, a cartpath and--who knows?--off Tim Finchem's head before settling down in a ball washer, all shiny and smiling.

Because a union lunch hour lasts an hour after the last union worker fills his plate, Curtis and Palumbo had time to think about Devlin's advisory. They thought: Why do fantasy when you can do reality? Why use a computer to generate magic when Tiger Woods can generate it himself? Why do a faceless commercial when the most famous face in golf is at lunch in the next fairway?

So Curtis asked Devlin, "Do you think Tiger would do the Hacky Sack stuff for us on film?" The Nike marketing man put the question to Tiger, who said, "Sure, that'd be great."

As we now know, it was better than great, it was serendipitous. The resulting 30 seconds of film bedazzled all eyes. The national buzz burned the images of the Nike brand into the pop-culture psyche. Golf World reported that, coincidentally or not, Nike soon doubled Tiger's pay to maybe $80 million in the next five years.

Seeing the spot for which they'd add sound, musicians at the Digihearit? studios in Santa Monica, Calif., were skeptical. "They went, `This is computer, right?' " said producer Jeff Elmassian. "I told them, `Definitely not, no editing, no com-puter-enhancement.' Once they got over their amazement, they were inspired."

From Elmassian's original score--a '40s big-band sound inside a '90s rhythm, "tieing Tiger's two worlds together"--four percussionists and eight horn players recorded the music in two sessions lasting 11/2 hours.

"We also had thought, `This is going to be a nightmare,' " Elmassian said. "But Tiger did that spot with impeccable timing and rhythm. It's scary how in-rhythm he is, to control the club, the ball and his body. It's so rhythmic, it's almost like he's playing an instrument."

So, by now, we've all tried to play Tiger's music. If you haven't, put down the magazine, get a wedge, get a ball. We'll wait.

Hmmm, hmmmmm.

Hmm-de-hmmm-hmmmm.

You're back, so how'd you do?

On the best of a dozen attempts, I bounced a Titleist on the face of a Hogan sand wedge seven times before the ball caromed off the hosel and wound up under the Jeep. Tiger bounced his ball 49 times.

The height of my bounces may have reached six inches. Tiger's best came eye high.

Not once did I catch the ball on the clubface, soft as a butterfly's landing, and then start it dancing again. Nor did I do any of this behind my back and under my legs and between my legs while switching the club from my left hand to the right.

And though I whacked the ball at the end, as Tiger did, my whacking came in a lunge at keeping the thing alive, while Tiger's swing was as gorgeous as a sunrise. He caught the ball flush on the clubface, 110 yards, a nice little draw on it.

Now, as to why one man's Fred Astaire is another's Fred Mertz, we could say it's a matter of practice.

"I've been doing tricks since I was pretty young," Tiger said. "Maybe 6, 7 years old . . . out of boredom." Yes, on tee boxes across America, waiting his turn to hit, the prodigy first taught a Titleist to dance.

But the fuller explanation is as simple as it is maddening. The great athletes come with better wiring. They're put together from a higher grade of materials with more precise fittings. God also gave them a jillion extra gigabytes in their gray-matter computers; for them, thought becomes action before they think to act.

Ivan Lendl could catch a serve on his racket. From 60 feet Wayne Gretzky could slap a puck 100 miles per hour through a hole an inch bigger than the puck. Michael Jordan could float with his back to the basket and flip the ball off the board and in. Muhammad Ali could keep his face a hair's breadth from an opponent's fist.

Ben Crenshaw has said Seve Ballesteros "is better with a 1-iron from a greenside bunker than I am with a sand wedge." Seve also could stack three golf balls on his palm. (I'd ask you to try that, but you'd come back weeping at the realization of your trembling liabilities. Even Seve came to say, "Oh no, no more, too old, the hand, it shakes." He was then 32.)