End of the Bench: Observations on the World of Sports
 
               Tiger Woods could give three dollars to every person in the U.S. and still have enough money left to use twenty-dollar bills as toilet paper. Two-ply.
                Put it this way. If Tiger Wood decided to stack all the money he has ever made in one-dollar bills, it would reach 358,000 feet tall, or more than twelve times as tall as Mount Everest. That’s a lot of money.
                If you haven’t heard, Tiger Woods recently became the first athlete to make one billion dollars in career earnings.  What makes this even more amazing is that according to Forbes magazine, the person in second place, Michael Jordan, has already retired and is approximately 200 million dollars behind Woods.
                Basically, Tiger Woods could do a lot of things with a billion dollars. Here are some of the more interesting ideas and other random facts:
  • Buy a PS3 for every person in Iowa (Other than corn, there’s not much in Iowa, so this might bring some excitement to their lives)
  • Buy 4 Lamborghini Gallardos for every student at Westmont (more parking please)
  • Buy the Milwaukee Bucks, Charlotte Bobcats, and New Orleans Hornets and still have 150 million dollars left over (if he merged all three teams together they might make the playoffs
  • If he took his one billion dollars in ones and stacked them end to end, it would travel almost 4 times around worldPay for all Westmont student fees (tuition, room and board, etc.) for the next 16 years ( see an answer to the financial situation anyone?)
  •  Buy Twitter
  • Buy about 5 million iPhones ( a much better investment than Twitter
  • Buy every song on iTunes for himself and approximately 129 friends
  • If Tiger were a country, his billion dollars would be a higher GDP than that of 20 countries
  • Buy 100,000 tigers and create a huge, pay-per-view Battle Royale ( Who wouldn’t pay to see 100,000 tigers fight to the death? He would probably make his money back)
  •  Buy 6 or 7 F-22 fighter planes and hire pilots
                While there are probably more practical applications for a billion dollars, it is obvious that Tiger has accomplished an amazing feat. Considering he is only 33 years and golfers routinely play into their 60s and 70s, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Tiger making another billion or two. With two-billion dollars, he could probably upgrade his toilet paper to 3-ply…