50 best athletes of all time

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Tiger Woods His arrival did nothing less than split a sport into Before and After. Before Tiger, golfers were athletes but not athletes.

Before Tiger, golfers had nicknames like Fuzzy and Duffy and Walrus and Bear, and even the healthiest were known to smoke cigarettes during the heat of competition.

After Tiger—after the introduction of the biceps and the tunneled gaze and the fist pump and the red shirts on Sunday—golf became many things it had never been before, not least of which was a spectacle of legit athleticism.

This may be Tiger's most enduring contribution to the sport—the way he changed the literal shape of the professional golfer. He was miles beyond anyone else when he arrived on tour in 1996, a 20-year-old comet, not just more dominant physically but somehow psychologically, too. (His father was a Green Beret who trained his only son with mind games meant for war.) For a decade, he thrashed a generation of golfers who had had the misfortune of coming up Before Tiger.

But the young guns today? They don't remember Before Tiger. They hardly remember Tiger at all. All they've known their whole playing lives is what came A.T.: golf as a sport of skillful shotmaking, sure, but also of powerful arms and legs, of weights and wind sprints, of psychological fitness. A sport of athletes. Everything about golf as we know it today—the power, the popularity, the money—is because of one man. At least that's the inarguable truth from where we sit in this, the year 21 A.T. — Daniel Riley

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