Tiger Woods 'received DEATH THREATS' after inking first $40m Nike deal, former executive reveals, with 'a race component to a lot of' the backlash

Tiger Woods received death threats after signing his first contract with Nike in 1996, a former company executive has revealed. 

Woods inked a $40million, five-year deal when he was just 20 years old in 1996 - the first of an iconic 27-year partnership. 

The sportwear giant signaled the prodigy's arrival on the professional golfing stage with the now-infamous 'Hello World' advertisement, created by Jim Riswold, the creative director of Nike's ad agency, Wieden & Kennedy. 

The 'Hello World' script, which included a line that read, 'There are still courses in the US I am not allowed to play. Because of the color of my skin,' aired on CBS and ESPN and ended with the question, 'Are you ready for me?' 

However, it appears not all of the golfing world was in fact ready to witness one of the greatest to play the game. 

Tiger Woods reportedly received death threats after signing his first contract with Nike in 1996

Woods, 48, confirmed in January his partnership with the sportswear giant had come to an end

Rod Tallman, Nike's marketing chief at the time, has claimed that both Woods and the company received severe backlash to the deal. 

'The golf world that had just started to bring us into the fold turned on us,' Tallman told The Times. 

'We got death threats in our offices. Jim Riswold got them. Tiger certainly did, I know that for a fact, but of course he was used to that.' 

Tallman suggested there were two factors behind the reaction, one being racial discrimination. 

It took until 1975 before a black player was invited to play The Masters and Tallman claimed that fans didn't like that Nike was reflecting the discrimination within the sport. 

The second motive was the fact that Woods, while a brilliant amateur, was being awarded multi-millions as a professional rookie. 

'All we did was put a mirror up to the golf industry and that made people crazy,' Tallman said. 

'The combination of that ad and signing him to the biggest contract in golf was too much for the super conservative old-school golfers. There was a race component to a lot of it.' 

Former marketing chief Rod Tallman claimed Woods and Nike received severe backlash

'I'm sorry I didn't keep the death-threat letters,' he added. 'But it was an ugly period and there was real hatred. They thought this kind of money was ruining golf.' 

Woods' agent at the time, Hughes Norton, told Mail Sport ahead of the release of his memoir, 'Rainmaker', last week that the deal was 'unique'. 

Pitching Woods to Nike's then-director of sports marketing Steve Miller as a generational talent, Norton hedged his bets and declared that an offer in the region of $50million over five years would be enough to get Woods walking the course with the Swoosh across his cap. 

Recalling the negotiations in 'Rainmaker', which hit shelves in the United States on March 26, Norton explains that Miller first balked at the figure. 

But it clearly wasn't too much of a deterrent as the Nike chief came back with a compromise any agent would have dreamed of settling for: $40million - $8million a year - over five years. 

Woods' agent at the time, Hughes Norton, told Mail Sport that the deal was 'unique'

And the cherry on top? It was all guaranteed before Woods had even stepped on the tee as a professional. So was the $20million deal he struck with Titleist.

'It was so unique that somebody who had never hit a golf ball as a professional, before he stepped on the first tee, would be guaranteed $60 million,' he told Mail Sport. 

'By that, I mean even if he had he missed every cut for the rest of his career, for at least the first five years that money was in the bank guaranteed. 

'There was no recourse, there was no reclaiming of any of those revenues by Nike or Titleist. He was set up. That's so unusual'.