Scorecard

Year	Runaway Winner	Distant Second	Percentage Difference
1902	Pirates .741 (103-36)	Dodgers .543 (75-63)	.198
1998	Yankees .750 (90-30)	Red Sox .587 (71-50)	.163
1906	Cubs .763 (116-36)	Giants .632 (96-56)	.131
1936	Yankees .667 (102-51)	Tigers .539 (83-71)	.128
1927	Yankees .714 (110-44)	A's .591 (91-63)	.123
1929	A's .693 (104-46)	Yankees .571 (88-66)	.122

Golf Business
Wood Lines in the Woods

Two years ago the common belief was that you could put a pair of coveralls and a straw hat on Tiger Woods and sell a million pitchforks. Nike's signing of Woods to a reported $40 million, five-year endorsement deal, an investment it intended to recoup with the release of the Woods shoe and apparel line, seemed another stroke of first-strike marketing acumen. As for the heady price tags on the Woods line—retailers are charging as much as $225 for the shoes and $75 for the shirts—Nike had two words: Michael Jordan.

Early returns, however, suggest that Nike made a vast miscalculation. "None of it is selling very well," says Mike Jaffey, manager of a Nevada Bob's Discount Golf Shop in Las Vegas. Jerry Offerdahl, who owns four Nevada Bob's in Oregon, described sales of the Woods shoe more bluntly to the Newhouse News Service: "It just plain flat was a total disaster. We're already closing them out."

Nike will not release sales figures. A spokesman suggested that while off-course sales have been disappointing, the Woods items are doing better in pro shops. That doesn't appear to be the case. Several pro shops with a high-end clientele—Pine Valley in New Jersey and Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, N.Y., to name two—don't even carry the Woods line. At one that does, the golf shop at Pumpkin Ridge-Ghost Creek, which is only 12 miles from Nike's Beaverton, Ore., headquarters, the merchandise isn't selling. "Young kids like it," says Matt Brown, who works in the golf shop, "but young kids don't have the money to buy it."

That comment speaks to what seems to be the main problem with the line: It appeals to the consumer who can't afford it. There are other reasons why Nike may have shanked its assessment of Woods's marketing lure. Though golfers are by nature buying fools, they don't necessarily let marquee endorsers dictate their purchases. The signature clubs of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, for example, have never been big sellers.

Golfers, many of them saddle-shoe-wearing conservatives, may have been turned off by the radical bowling-shoe design of the Woods spikes, the "too fashion-forward" look of the shirts, as one pro shop retailer put it, and the in-your-face nature of his ad campaign. "Nike tries to use the different-is-cool theme that works well in sports," says Bill Grigsby, vice president in charge of apparel and merchandising for Edwin Watts Golf Shops. "But in golf that formula doesn't work."

Woods's less-than-dominant performance over the past year may have dimmed his star, too. That's not fair—he's still arguably the best player in the world—but it's reality. Jordan, it seems, wins a championship or an MVP award every time he picks up a ball; Woods's only major was the 1997 Masters. Americans are notoriously impatient with their icons, particularly if they think they're getting ripped off by them.

The Tyson Files
Days of Future Passed

The tumult surrounding Mike Tyson's application to regain his boxing license is a tempest in a teapot—or, considering that this is boxing, a tempest in an entirely different kind of pot. Sure, Tyson bit a chunk or two out of Evander Holyfield's ears in June '97, an egregious transgression of the Queensberry Rules, but the Nevada boxing commission's revocation of Tyson's license and its $3 million fine was a substantial hit, even for a guy with Tyson's cash flow. Now, after more than a year in limbo, Tyson wants to go back to work (as Jay Leno put it, "A guy's gotta eat"), and does anyone seriously believe that the sweet science needs further protection from this ruffian?

Boxing is a sport, after all, that embraced Sonny Liston and put welterweight champ Fritzie Zivic—who, during his career in the 1930s and '40s, was known to nibble on opponents like ears of corn—in the Hall of Fame, along with Liston. Andrew Golota has twice been disqualified for low blows and once bit an opponent himself, and he's still a heavyweight contender. To argue that Tyson is too unstable to be a professional boxer would be an act of monumental hypocrisy.