Six Things You Never Knew About Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan’s Friendship

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Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan are arguably the greatest to ever do it in their individual sports. I was going to say that it’s inarguable, but some of you seem to love being wrong about things. With HBO recently announcing an upcoming documentary diving into the life of Tiger, much the same way that ESPN’s The Last Dance did for Michael, we should be learning a lot about the superstar’s life behind the scenes. One of the relationships the show will surely delve into is the friendship between Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan.

Six Things You Never Knew About the Tiger-Jordan Friendship

“The Jordan of Golf”

In addition to his shocking talent, Tiger Woods had a force of will on the golf course that would just push him further than the competition. The same was true of Jordan on the basketball court. This determination and ability to will things into being was apparent in Tiger early, telling TransWorld Sport magazine in 1990 “I might be sort of like a Michael Jordan in basketball, something like that.” If you weren’t alive in 1990, Michael Jordan was barely Michael Jordan yet, Tiger was 14 years old, “Trans” doesn’t mean what you think it means there and magazines were like the internet but on glossy paper and only once a month. This was one of the big attention-getting moments of Tiger’s early career, and Jordan took note.

And we all know how good a golfer Jordan was at the time …

“There Isn’t Anything Else Michael is Good At Doing,” Tiger was Warned About Being Friends With Jordan

As Tiger’s star grew and the world took note it became quickly clear that the kid was on a trajectory toward greatness. This got the attention of global sneaker icon Nike, the company that is essentially synonymous with Michael Jordan. Once Tiger signed an endorsement deal with Nike, a meeting of the two superstars was inevitable. However, not everyone was on board.

In 1996, lawyer and family friend John Merchant told Tiger: “Michael can play basketball as well as anyone who’s ever played the game. There isn’t anything else that Michael is good at doing. Nothing. And he’s had too many years of being out there in public, so he’s going to try to use you.” Ouch. Learning how batshit crazy competitive Jordan is, it’s amazing he didn’t have Merchant slowly lowered into a tank full of piranha.

Tiger was undaunted, however, and he reached out to Jordan directly, as he told Oprah in 1997:

The Pair Played a Round of Golf, Then Jordan Beat the Knicks … Maybe?

There’s a story going around that started from a Golf Digest interview that has Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan hanging out together and playing a round of golf in the afternoon before Jordan would go on to beat the Knicks in a playoff game that night. The stories all attach this to the 1997 Eastern Conference Finals, which is a great story, but the Knicks weren’t in the Eastern Conference Finals that year. If I had to guess, I would peg this for the last great year of the Knicks-Bulls rivalry, the 1995-1996 Eastern Conference Semifinals. Either way, it shows what a competitive nut job Jordan can be, playing a serious round of golf with the best in the world while most players would be resting up or dealing with their nervous energy.

Tiger is a Weirdo

Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan are very different publicly. Jordan has always had a bit of charisma, where Woods always seems to begrudgingly tolerate reporters and fans. This might just be Woods’ strange personality coming through. As Wright Thompson details in his fantastic 2016 profile for ESPN, Tiger likes to use military lingo, telling staff to “secure” the tennis ball that his dog had left behind, and frequently using the terms “downrange” and “roger that.” Woods cherished his privacy as well, Wright further details differences in Woods’ approach to public life by contrasting the private planes owned by Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan. Jordan’s plane is “painted a North Carolina blue” with a tail number N236MJ, with the six signifying his number of titles. Why he didn’t just make it GOAT23 is a mystery. Tiger’s private plane is plain. No custom paint. No vanity tail number. In fact, Tiger wants to be off the radar so badly that he used the same ending code as popular jet-rental company NetJets to make it more difficult for fans to track his movements.

Competitive Respect and Jordan’s Pick for One Clutch Putt

Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan spent more than a decade as close friends. There was a mutual respect for the level of competitor each regarded the other to be. It was clear that there were very few people on the planet that Jordan considered worthy of a seat at his dinner table of competitive lunacy, and Tiger was one of those.

As Jordan told PGA.com in 2009, “The game is very, very mental and that’s where Tiger is so much stronger than anybody else. It’s not his game. Obviously he’s good and he can swing, but I think what makes Tiger better than most is his mental game.” Later in the interview, Jordan would invoke this same competitive ability in picking Tiger for a clutch putt, “Once again, when you talk about golf, whoever has the confidence and believes in himself can step to the forefront and make a putt. It’s easy. I’ve got to go with the obvious with Tiger.”

Similarly, Tiger said of Jordan, “I would say 1-A, 1-B, myself and Michael,” Tiger said. “He’s more, I think, outwardly competitive than I am. But I have my tendencies to be a little competitive at times.”

The Night It All Went Wrong

It seems as though everything about the downfall of Tiger Woods can be traced to one week, and more specifically one bad day. In 2009, Woods suddenly found himself mired in scandal. The normally reclusive golfer wasn’t properly equipped to handle the sudden scrutiny on his personal life and things spiraled out of control, culminating in a bizarre incidents in which Woods wrecked his car, or possibly his angry wife smashed it with a golf club. The stories vary.

What we do know is that the superstar was tragically never the same. Neither was the friendship between Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan. As Charles Barkley told The Undefeated in 2017, “To this day, I don’t have any idea what happened, after that … thing, he just stopped talking to us. That’s all I know.” Jordan and Woods would speak infrequently after the ’09 incident, but after the publication of the ESPN article, the relationship went silent.

Most attribute Tiger’s silence to the abnormal candor Jordan displayed in his conversation with Wright Thompson. In the article, Jordan is quoted as saying of the Woods incident: “That bothers him more than anything. It looms. It’s in his mind. It’s a ship he can’t right and he’s never going to. What can you do? The thing is about T-Dub, he cannot erase. That’s what he really wants. He wants to erase the things that happened. The thing is, I love him so much that I can’t tell him, ‘You’re not gonna be great again.’ ”

It seems Woods deliberately pulled back from all of his public friendships, withdrawing further into his cocoon of competitiveness and his effort to comeback. We’ll see if he can forgive and forget, and whether Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan will become friends again. For now, the comeback is going as well as we can hope though:

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