If Woods Plays Well, Retailers Will Smile

Tiger Woods’s break from golf since late November could not have been timed better for golf retailers. His absence coincided with the months when clothing and equipment sales are slow and discounts move goods during the holidays.Enlarge This ImageChester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Tiger Woods clothing at Golfsmith in Midtown Manhattan. At worst, stores say, sales of Woods apparel have dipped a bit.P.G.A.But news that he will return at the Masters comes at the start of the peak season.
“Selfishly, this is perfect,” said Martin E. Hanaka, chairman and chief executive of Golfsmith, a 74-store golf and tennis retail chain. “The season’s kicking off. The Masters is the No. 1 event. Spring is blooming. People are itching to get out there.”Woods is the star of Nike Golf, which produces apparel including his high-end TW shirts, pants, sweaters, jackets and vests. Victory Red, which evokes the shirt color that Woods wears on Sundays, is a golf club brand within the broader Nike line.His presence has put a halo over the Nike line, golf retailing and golf as an industry. Nike has stood by Woods since his one-car accident on Thanksgiving weekend eventually led to a sex scandal. Accenture and AT&T dropped him, and Gillette temporarily halted its use of him. Nike Golf’s Web site, which currently features Justin Leonard on its home page, seems to be using Woods sparingly.“Going forward, as he returns to golf, how Nike Golf positions him is going to be a very sensitive topic,” said Terry McAndrew, editor of the Web Street Golf Report.
Retailers simply hope that he will play well once he returns and increase sales.
“The day after he wins, our stores are packed,” Hanaka said.
Golfsmith and the New York Golf Center say that, at worst, sales of Woods clothing have dipped a bit. “When it happened, we didn’t have deep inventories,” Hanaka said. “Then we went to 20 percent off, and his stuff moved pretty well.”Gary Lynch, a salesman at the New York Golf Center on West 35th Street near Broadway, said Woods’s clothing line was hurt because women were less eager to buy his $100 shirts or $130 pants for their golf-playing husbands. In addition, with Woods not playing, the store’s front display table could not lay out his popular Thursday-to-Sunday schedule of shirts.“We were still getting Nike inventory, but it wasn’t related to anything,” he said.The two retailers said Woods’s troubles had no discernible effect on Nike equipment sales, in particular the Victory Red club line, which includes an $899.99 iron.
On Friday, Tom Gessner of East Rockaway, N.Y., was test-swinging irons at the golf center. He has long favored Mizunos and was swinging models of that brand, as well as Callaways and Nikes. He said he was considering Victory Red despite Woods’s transgressions.“That wouldn’t affect what the club does for me,” he said. “It only matters how it performs.”Nike would not offer any details about its golf apparel and equipment sales — or whether the Woods scandal affected them — during the three months ended Feb. 28. The third-quarter report, released last week, provided no results for Nike Golf.Analysts said that they did not think the scandal had hurt Nike’s golf sales.Tom Stine, a founder of Golf Datatech, said, “We know that he’s a positive in making consumers aware of the Nike brand, but we don’t have any evidence that people are going to be turned off to the brand because of him.”At the New York Golf Center, Frank Cole, a club salesman, said he had seen no diminution of interest in golfers looking at the broad Nike line or the Victory Reds.“Victory Red’s the best stuff Nike’s come out with,” he said and added that 12- to 18-year-olds were particularly devoted to Woods. “They want his shoes, they want his clubs.”
The Golfsmith store, on the East Side of Manhattan, offers a glimpse of the retail life with Woods in hiatus. About 10 feet from a table of full-price and discounted Woods apparel is a large display that draws attention away from the his shirts and pants. It shows Phil Mickelson, the smiling face of Callaway, in a promotion offering full refunds to buyers of three new drivers, from March 12 to April 7, if he wins the Masters.
“It’ll generate a lot of buzz if that happens,” said Chris Ferrara, the store’s senior general manager. “Without Tiger, he’s the most marketable player out there.”