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American Morning

Gallup Poll: Tiger Woods Boosts Golf Viewership

Aired April 06, 2001 - 09:39   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: There's a new Gallup Poll out showing that a whole lot of people are watching golf for one reason: Tiger Woods. And for the latest figures, let's check in with Gallup Poll editor in chief Frank Newport in Princeton, New Jersey.

Frank, good morning.

FRANK NEWPORT, GALLUP POLL EDITOR IN CHIEF: Good morning.

Indeed, we'll show you, here, Tiger Woods' favorables are way up there in the stratosphere, although we're not sure that it's really dramatically affected the overall number of golf fans in the country; we'll end up by showing you that as our bottom line.

Thought we'd give you a little comparison, here, politically speaking. Tiger Woods, when we last rated him, 88 percent favorable rating; that's as high as we ever see in politics. George W. Bush, by way of comparison, is just at 63 percent. So Tiger Woods should run for president; maybe he will at some point in the future.

Second of all, we asked -- this is a very fascinating question -- last year; no mention of golf, we just said, who's the greatest athlete in the world active today, period -- that was the question. And look at this, then Tiger Woods came in with 30 percent. Nobody else was even close; Michael Jordan, who wasn't even active, came in at 4 percent -- Mark McGuire and Cal Ripken But there was just no question: He is the athlete of all kind (sic) around the world today.

Are you more likely to watch golf? Well, we asked everybody: If Tiger's playing, are you more likely to watch a golf tournament; you can see in that little slice of the pie up here about a quarter of Americans say they're more likely to watch a golf tournament. That's a pretty big number, we think, because that's all Americans, not just golf fans.

Finally, here's that mention I was saying about, what's your favorite sport to watch? We went back to 1937 on this one, and 1 percent mentioned golf when we say what's your favorite sport to watch. It went up to 1992 to 3 percent. My point was just recently -- just last week -- only 4 percent said golf now. So it really hadn't ballooned golf in terms of this.

By the way, notice that it's baseball that's come down, and football is now the No. 1 sport. So we're not sure; despite the Tiger phenomenon -- we've got a huge number of more golf fans out there, but he really is a world-class phenomenon.

Daryn, Steve, back to you.

KAGAN: Very good; thank you so much.

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