Day one of the 1997 United States Open.        

At exactly noon, Tiger Woods, once known as Eldrick, now known as golf's
messiah, stepped onto the first tee at the Congressional Country Club with
playing partners Steve Jones and Tom Lehman. Jones was the defending Open
champion. Lehman was the reigning British Open champion. Among the
thousands pressed against the gallery ropes, five and six deep from tee to
green, there might have been a hundred who were there to see the two Open
titleholders.

Everyone else had come to see Tiger. He was twenty-one years old, a
multi-multi-millionaire, and already a one-name athlete, as in Michael or
Shaq, Deion or The Shark. Only, at that moment Tiger was bigger than all
of them. Even Michael. He was nine weeks removed from one of the most
stunning performances in the history of sports, a twelve-shot victory in
the Masters that had left people in golf groping for words to describe
what they had seen. And what they had seen was impossible. "He's a boy
among men," Tom Watson had said at the time. "And he's teaching the men a
lesson."

The Masters had elevated Woods to a level of fame that perhaps no athlete
other than Muhammad Ali had ever achieved. People who knew absolutely
nothing about golf, cared not at all about the sport, stopped to watch
Tiger play. Children who once wanted to "be like Mike" and slam-dunk from
the free-throw line now wanted to be Tiger and hit 350-yard drives. He
signed endorsement contracts for staggering amounts of money. He blew off
the president of the United States and Rachel Robinson, the ...