# The Tiger Effect: Why Childhood Sports Memories Forge Lifelong fandom
golf sank it’s teeth into me for the first time as a 10-year-old.
It was June 2008, and I was seated on a plush brown leather couch between my father, who believed Tiger Woods was destined to win on Sunday at the U.S.Open at Torrey Pines, and my grandfather, who did not. Suddenly, the 50-inch Samsung “flatscreen” in the corner (a bulky hybrid edition of the razor-thin screens that now fill our lives) flashed with a highlight, and my grandfather screamed.
“C’MON ROCCO!!!”
That famed battle between Woods and Mediate at Torrey Pines is scorched into my memory like the sear of a well-done steak. The drama of golf’s David and Goliath in the ring for what felt like 20 heavyweight rounds. The heart-stopping exhilaration on the 72nd hole with the national championship on the line. Woods’ eventual victory by virtue of a half-dozen of the most remarkable golf shots I’d ever seen (and ever would).
For a long time in my life, I thought myself unique for this memory, fortunate to be a golf fan born under the lucky star of a childhood in the height of Tiger Woods. But according to a new analysis from the *New York Times’* Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, the opposite might have been true: I might have been a golf fan precisely *because* my childhood overlapped with the height of Tiger Woods.
according to an analysis of Facebook fan data reviewed by Stephens-Davidowitz, an American data scientist and economist, a heavy correlation exists between athletic success witnessed in boyhood and the later advancement of rabid fandom. Actually, according to Stephens-Davidowitz’s analysis, championships witnessed by boys between ages eight and 12 were associated with the greatest increase in the development of rabid fandom, in certain specific cases two or three times more likely to result in rabid fandom than championships experienced at other ages in childhood development.
Some caveats: Stephens-Davidowitz’s analysis was confined to baseball teams, and did not look into the changes in fandom associated with championships in other team sports, or fandom in individual sports like golf. Interestingly, Stephens-Davidowitz’s analysis *also* failed to find a similar correlation between young girls and the development of rabid fandom, finding their allegiances were less affected by team success.
Still, on the whole, Stephens-Davidowitz’s analysis (which you can read in full here) presents a fascinating glimpse into the behavioral psychology of sports fandom, and provides fascinating cues for sports leagues hoping to bolster their fandom. For golf, which has subjected itself to a nauseating degree of “grow the game” discourse over the last decade, the biggest takeaway might be that many of the efforts to engage with teenage and twentysomething audiences might be overstated. Michael Mulvihill,president of FOX Sports’ insights and analytics team,summarized the toplines:
“Tremendous piece of research here that aligns with similar work we’ve done on how MLB/NFL fans are minted,” Mulvihill wrote. “As an industry sports badly overvalues marketing to young adults and undervalues k