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Ten years ago, Nike didn't even make golf balls. How it broke into the insular world of golf gear

In 1996 a group of Nike marketing executives gathered in a fourth-floor conference room on the company's Beaverton, Ore., campus and looked into the future. On the whiteboard were the names of five possibilities for the company's next big sponsorship push. Two of them, the NFL and the NBA, were in sports where Nike was well established, but the other three represented worlds where Nike was all but unknown: the Brazilian soccer team, the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team and a teenage golfing phenom named Tiger Woods. Wall Street was waiting to see what Nike would do to follow up...

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