AS THE 2003 GOLF season began, there was one name that stood out above all others for serious golf fans, and only one name that mattered at all to casual golf fans: Tiger Woods.
Woods had burst onto the golf scene in August 1996 when he had turned pro shortly after winning his third straight U.S. Amateur title. He signed a number of lucrative endorsement contracts before he had ever hit a shot as a pro, and his debut in Milwaukee was so hyped that it seemed almost impossible that the kid who wouldn’t turn twenty-one until late December could live up to what people were expecting of him.
Woods not only lived up to the hype, he surpassed it. He finished tied for 60th at Milwaukee, but that was the last time in eight appearances that year that he didn’t finish in at least the top 25. He won two tournaments, finished third in two others, and won more than $790,000—good enough for 24th on the money list.
His play that fall was best described by tour veteran Paul Goydos, who for three days played in the group directly behind Woods at the Walt Disney Classic, one of the tournaments Woods won. Walking off the golf course one day, Goydos shook his head and said, “You guys [the media] are always asking who the best player in the world who hasn’t won a major yet is. I can tell you who it is: Tiger Woods. You want to know why? Because he’s the best player in the world—period.”
That might have sounded hyperbolic, just as Woods’s father, Earl, sounded a little bit over the top when he compared his son to Gandhi. There was also Sports Illustrated, which named Woods Sportsman of the Year, causing New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica to say, “It’s the first time they’ve ever given that award on spec.”
Woods turned all the hype and speculation into fact early in 1997 when he won the Masters—his first major as a pro—by twelve shots. “He’s a boy among men, and he’s teaching the men a lesson,” eight-time major champion Tom Watson commented. A year later when the four-year-old son of a friend asked Watson if he was as good a golfer as Tiger Woods, Watson shook his head and said, “I’m not even close.”
Woods’s play and his stardom redefined the PGA Tour. As luck would have it, the tour’s TV contracts were being renegotiated during his first full year as a pro. The tour’s TV money went way up, and purses soared. So did corporate interest, especially for those tournaments in which Woods was guaranteed to play. As time went on and Woods settled into a predictable schedule each year, there were—unofficially—two tours: the Tiger tour and the non-Tiger tour.
If Woods was playing, everything doubled: ticket sales, corporate sales, TV ratings (especially if he contended, which he did more often than not), and media interest. This became a problem for the non-Tiger events, and, as the economy began to go south during the second Bush administration, Commissioner Tim Finchem began to have trouble keeping corporate sponsors involved at the non-Tiger events.
So when a non-Tiger event went under in Colorado in 2007, Finchem reinvented it in Washington with Tiger Woods as host. Getting a title sponsor and corporate interest for the new tournament was not a problem.
After Woods’s runaway Masters victory, he became the story at every golf tournament, and every major, that he entered. But he didn’t win any of his next ten majors, in part because he had decided that the golf swing that had won the ’97 Masters needed retooling. He wanted more consistency, especially off the tee.
Once the retooling was complete, Woods became as dominant as any player in the history of the game has ever been. He won the 1999 PGA Championship and then finished fifth at the 2000 Masters. His next four starts in majors produced a fifteen-shot victory in the U.S. Open, an eight-shot win at the British Open, a playoff victory at the PGA (clearly he had an off week), and a two-shot win at the 2001 Masters.
It was, with all due respect to Bobby Jones, the most remarkable accomplishment in golf history. Jones had won the so-called Grand Slam in 1930, but that was when two of the four majors were strictly for amateurs, and long before golf became the ultracompetitive sport that it is today. To win four majors in a row was an unheard-of feat. The only comparable achievement was Ben Hogan’s performance in 1953 when he won the Masters, the U.S. Open, and the British Open. He didn’t compete in the PGA that year because it overlapped with the British Open.
That alone tells you how different golf was in those days. At the time, no one had even uttered the phrase “Grand Slam” in the modern game. In fact, it wasn’t until 1960 when Arnold Palmer won the Masters and the U.S. Open to begin the year and then entered the British Open for the first time (he finished second) that Grand Slam was used to describe those three events and the PGA Championship.
It was Jack Nicklaus who really focused attention on the modern slam and on the importance of winning major championships. From the moment he won the U.S. Open as a twenty-two-year-old in 1962—beating Arnold Palmer in a playoff at Oakmont Country Club—Nicklaus made it clear that his priority each year was to prepare for the four major championships. He built his schedule so his game would peak during those four weeks, and he was the first player to travel regularly to tournament sites in advance to survey and play the golf courses.
Nicklaus’s relentless pursuit of major titles—he ended up winning eighteen as a pro, blowing away Walter Hagen’s previous record of eleven (Jones won fourteen majors, but eight of them were U.S. and British Amateur titles)—focused attention on them like never before. That’s why a young Tiger Woods became fixated on Nicklaus’s eighteen major wins as his primary goal as a golfer.
Nicklaus had also talked openly about wanting to do what was generally considered to be impossible—win all four majors in the same year. This is a feat that has been accomplished in tennis on a number of occasions; Don Budge, Maureen Connolly, Rod Laver (twice), and Steffi Graf have all done it. In golf, Jones’s 1930 “slam” came close, but it was in a different era with different tournaments serving as the majors, and Hogan was next closest when he went three-for-three in 1953.
Early in his career, Nicklaus had several remarkable years. In 1963, after winning his first Masters, he missed the cut at the U.S. Open. He then finished third at the British Open and won the PGA. In 1966, he won the Masters for the third time in four years, finished third in the U.S. Open, then won the British before a disappointing tie for 22nd at the PGA. A year later, after missing the cut at the Masters, he bounced back to finish 1–2–T3 in the last three majors of 1967.
The closest he ever came to a slam was in 1972 when he won the Masters and the U.S. Open before finishing second to Lee Trevino in the British Open. The dream of the slam gone, he finished tied for 13th at the PGA.
Woods knew that one way to surpass Nicklaus on his way to the eighteen majors was to win all four majors in a year. He did—just not in the same year—starting what became known as the “Tiger Slam,” with his remarkable victory at Pebble Beach in June 2000, then closing out his run at the Masters in April 2001.
He had a rare letdown after that victory at Augusta, failing to finish in the top 10 at any of the remaining majors in ’01. But he came right back at the start of the next year with victories at the Masters and the U.S. Open, meaning he had won six of nine and seven of eleven. For comparison purposes, Nicklaus’s best run came at the start of his career when he won seven of twenty-one.
After his 2002 win at Bethpage, Woods was asked how he felt being halfway to a Grand Slam. “I’ve already won a Grand Slam,” he answered. “So this is no big deal.”
His Tiger Slam wasn’t a Grand Slam, which would have meant winning all four majors in the same year. But to be fair, Woods wasn’t the first to try changing what constitutes a slam. During one stretch in her career, Martina Navratilova won six consecutive major tennis titles. Unfortunately, she won three to end one year and three to begin another year, but never four in one year. Navratilova insisted that winning four in a row at any point meant you had won a slam. According to that theory, she would have won three slams during a six-tournament stretch.
Not possible—even for Navratilova, even for Woods.
IT WAS AFTER BETHPAGE that Woods made the decision to fire Butch Harmon. He has never really explained his reasoning in any detail, but several factors appear to have been involved.
Clearly, one was the influence of Mark O’Meara, Woods’s best friend on tour and a mentor to him in many ways. O’Meara had worked with Hank Haney for years, and Harmon now says he could see changes in Woods’s swing that reflected the influence of O’Meara and Haney, even before that day in Scotland when Woods told him their teacher-pupil relationship was over.
“He kept wanting to try things that I knew came from Hank and Mark,” Harmon said. “Did I think they were going to make his golf swing better? No. I thought he had a pretty good golf swing, and the record kind of spoke for itself on that subject.
“But one of Tiger’s strengths is he’s never satisfied. He could win ten majors in a row, and he’d still be searching for ways to get better. I would stand there with him on the range at times and say, ‘I like what I see.’ I mean, the swing he had in 2002 was good enough to win four straight majors and seven of eleven. I’m not going to mess with that just for the sake of sounding like I’ve got something for him I haven’t got.
“He would say to me, ‘I’m too steep.’ I knew where that was coming from; I understood it. He thought what they were telling him could improve his swing. I didn’t. Obviously, in the end, the final decision on what direction to go in was always going to be his.”
Woods’s swing transition didn’t start right away. In fact, he didn’t start working with Haney on a full-time basis until 2003. He worked by himself on the range at Muirfield. He contended for two days but shot 81 in the third round on a day when the golf course was buffeted by gale-force winds. The 65 he shot the next day—to finish tied for 28th—might have been one of the best rounds of his life, given that he had nothing to play for but still played as hard as he possibly could for all 18 holes. At the PGA a month later, he finished second to Rich Beem, still without a formal working relationship with any swing coach.
That fall he began working on the second major swing change of his career. It would take him a full two years to become comfortable with his golf swing again and to return to the dominance fans and sponsors had come to expect. But for the rest of the golf world, to paraphrase Phil Mickelson at his most directly eloquent, Woods going from dominant to almost dormant didn’t suck.