One day around this time, Tiger Woods and Butch Harmon were alone on the driving range at La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California, wrapping up a lengthy practice session. The sun was setting, and every element of Tiger’s form—the takeaway of his arms, the plane of his swing, the angle of his clubface, his downswing, his follow-through, his sequencing—was textbook perfect. There wasn’t anything Harmon could nitpick. But he sensed Woods was getting a little lax, so he resorted to a familiar trick.
“I got something you can’t do,” Harmon said.
Those six words always got Tiger’s attention. He hated to lose. To anyone. At anything.
A small gate at the back right corner of the range, approximately 250 yards away, had been left open. The opening was just wide enough for a range cart to pass through.
“I have a hundred that says you can’t hit it through that gate,” Harmon said. “I’ll give you three balls.”
Without saying a word, Tiger reached for a club. On his first attempt, he smoked the ball the length of two and a half football fields, sending it right through the center of the six-foot gap in the towering fence. Then he turned to Harmon with a smile, put out his hand, and said, “Is that the gate you’re talking about, Butchie?”
Harmon handed him $100.
No one in the history of golf—not even the great Ben Hogan or Jack Nicklaus—possessed Tiger’s ability to focus and execute difficult shots. Few people understood that fact about him better than Harmon. They’d worked together since Woods was seventeen. Since then, they had over-hauled Tiger’s swing twice. In the first instance, he dialed back the power of his swing off the tee and added an array of new shots to his game. With those changes, he went on to win three straight US Amateurs and turn in a record-setting performance at the ’97 Masters. The second rebuild was even more radical, essentially starting over to construct a new swing that better suited his body.
Woods was the rare athlete who liked to practice as much as he liked to play, whose obsession with perfection and ability to perform without fear gave him an intimidating psychological advantage. Harmon had the sense that in the year 2000, the golf world was going to witness something unprecedented.
The Mercedes-Benz Championship in Maui was the first tournament on the 2000 PGA Tour. Tiger won it by sinking a forty-foot birdie putt on the second sudden-death hole to defeat Ernie Els. The win pushed his streak to five straight Tour wins, giving him the longest winning streak of any golfer in forty-two years. Next up was the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where he trailed by seven strokes with nine holes to play before mounting an inconceivable comeback to defeat Matt Gogel and Vijay Singh by two strokes. In tournament after tournament, Tiger was doing the unthinkable.
With six straight victories, Tiger’s streak was second only to Byron Nelson’s eleven consecutive wins in 1945. It was silly, in many respects, to compare Woods’s run with Nelson’s. In 1945, America was at war, and golf was still in its infancy as a professional sport. The purses were nominal—Nelson earned a total of $30,250 for his eleven victories—and the audiences were tiny. Conversely, Tiger was competing against a slew of extremely talented pros, and the stakes were much, much higher. Nonetheless, Tiger was furious with himself when he finally lost, finishing second to Phil Mickelson at the Buick Invitational in mid-February. He knew he was better than Mickelson, and it galled him that he, of all people, had ended the streak and denied him the opportunity to beat the ghost of Byron Nelson. But none of that disappointed Tiger as much as his performance at the 2000 Masters. Determined to win four straight majors, he shot a surprisingly poor 75 in the first round at Augusta and ended up in fifth place, six shots behind eventual winner Vijay Singh. “For some reason, the golfing gods weren’t looking down on me this week,” he said afterward.
For virtually every other pro, such deep disappointment would have undermined an entire season. But not for Woods. He fed off the adrenaline rush that came from failure, backed by an unquenchable thirst to do things that had never been done in his sport. To him, a golf course was a canvas, and his equipment—mainly his clubs and golf ball—were his artistic instruments. Far more than any other golfer, Tiger obsessed over ways to enhance the tools of his trade.
One of those moments of obsession occurred on Sunday, May 14, 2000, at the Four Seasons Resort in Irving, Texas. Tiger had just shot a sizzling 63 in the final round of the Byron Nelson Classic, finishing ten under par and one stroke behind the winner. Despite a magnificent performance, Woods was alone in his room, stewing because he felt he should have won, when he received a text message just before seven p.m.: “Hey, nice playing today.” It was from Kel Devlin, Nike’s global director of sports marketing.
Tiger and Devlin, the son of Australian great Bruce Devlin and a scratch player in his own right, had been working closely together over the previous nine months. During that period, Tiger had been quietly testing a synthetic golf ball called the Tour Accuracy that Nike Golf was developing with Bridgestone, a golf-equipment manufacturer based in Japan. In 2000, virtually every golfer on tour, including Tiger, was using a ball whose cover was made of balata, a natural substance culled from rubber trees in Central and South America. The balata ball had a liquid core with rubber bands wrapped around it. Nike’s potentially game-changing ball featured a solid, molded core injected with synthetic compounds, including polyurethane. The ball’s design allowed it to maintain its velocity at its apex, minimizing the adverse effect of rain and wind.
Tiger had been using a Titleist ball since turning pro in August 1996, but, test by test, he was moving closer to switching to Nike. The last test session had been held in March, after which Tiger said he would feel more comfortable if he had one final opportunity to test the ball. But that would have to wait until after the PGA Championship at the end of the summer. In the meantime, Devlin knew a testing blackout period was in place.
But after losing by one stroke at the Byron Nelson, Tiger decided to speed things up. The start of his next tournament, the Deutsche Bank–SAP Open in Germany, was just four days away. Why not conduct the final ball test there?
Twenty minutes after reading Devlin’s text, Tiger called him. It was just after five p.m. out west, and Devlin had just sat down for dinner with his family at his home outside Portland. He put down his glass of wine to take Tiger’s call.
“Can you meet me in Germany Tuesday morning?” Tiger asked.
“I guess I can. Why?”
“I want to put the ball in play.”
Devlin figured Tiger was messing with him. “Quit yanking my chain,” Devlin said.
“No, I’m serious,” Tiger said. “If I’d had my ball, I’d have won by six this weekend.”
The words my ball were music to Devlin’s ears. “You’re dead fucking serious, aren’t you?”
Before hanging up, Tiger asked him to bring five dozen balls to Germany.
Moments later, Devlin’s phone rang again. This time it was Mark Steinberg, who cut to the chase: “Is this even possible?”
Devlin was wondering the same thing. Tiger’s request created a logistical nightmare. Devlin was in Oregon. To make it to Germany on time, he would have to immediately pack and head to the airport in hopes of catching a red-eye and a series of connecting flights. The balls presented an even bigger challenge: they were at a Bridgestone manufacturing facility in Japan, where it was already early Monday morning. They would have to be retrieved, but even then there wasn’t sufficient time to get them into Devlin’s hands. Someone was going to have to hand-deliver them to Hamburg in less than twenty-four hours. But Devlin didn’t bother trying to explain any of this to Steinberg. Tiger expected results, not excuses.
Devlin placed an urgent call to Bob Wood, president of Nike Golf, and told him that Tiger wanted to resume testing Nike’s Tour Accuracy right away. Wood, a renowned inspirational leader who played a mean Fender guitar and often preached that fuck was the most underappreciated word in the English language, was ecstatic.
“Fuck!” he said. “No fucking way!”
“I’m serious. Tiger wants us in Hamburg. Now!”
Wood wanted Devlin in Hamburg too. But he knew of only one way to get the balls there in time.
“Call Rock,” Wood said.
Rock Ishii was a scientist and engineer for Bridgestone. Affectionately known as the Maharishi Rock Ishii, he was the genius behind the design of the Tour Accuracy. He was dead asleep at his home in Japan when Devlin woke him up.
“Can you get to Hamburg with Tour Accuracy?” Devlin said.
“What are you talking about?” Ishii said.
“Tiger wants to put the ball in play. He wants you to bring five dozen balls.”
Fifteen minutes later, Ishii was in his car, speeding to the plant to retrieve the balls. He called Devlin from the road. “There’s a flight that leaves Narita later this morning. I’ll be on it.”
Back in Dallas, Tiger was on the runway, about to take off for Orlando, when his phone buzzed. It was Devlin.
“I’ll have the balls,” he said. “Where do you want me to meet you?”
“Meet me on the first tee,” Tiger said. “Nine o’clock Tuesday morning. Steiny will arrange everything.”
Tiger’s initial willingness to start testing a Nike ball had evolved out of the two Nike commercials that aired the previous summer—the one with the hackers suddenly being able to drive the ball three hundred yards like Tiger, and the impromptu one of Tiger bouncing a ball on his club. The ads roiled Titleist, and in June 1999, its corporate parent, the Acushnet Company, sued Nike in the US District Court in Boston, accusing the shoe and apparel company of deceptive advertising. Acushnet claimed that Nike had improperly induced Tiger to appear in a television commercial that endorsed Nike golf balls and Nike golf equipment, both of which violated Acushnet’s exclusive contract with Tiger to use Titleist golf balls and equipment. In both Nike commercials, Tiger had used a Titleist club and ball, but both commercials concluded with the Nike Golf logo, prompting Titleist to demand that the ads be taken down, because “many tens of millions” of people might think that Tiger had switched to Nike equipment.
The suit was eventually settled, and Steinberg renegotiated Tiger’s contract with Titleist, enabling him to use a Nike ball. But the lawsuit effectively marked the beginning of the end of Tiger’s relationship with Titleist. Before taking off for Germany, he called Titleist CEO Wally Uihlein and told him he was going to use the Nike Tour Accuracy ball for the first time at the Deutsche Bank–SAP Open.
It was raining and windy when Steve Williams arrived on the first tee at the Gut Kaden Golf Club in Alveslohe, outside Hamburg, a little before nine in the morning. Figuring the ball test was off due to the weather, he nonetheless knew that Woods would still practice. Nothing got in the way of that. Williams was shielding Tiger’s golf bag from the elements when he spotted Devlin and Ishii approaching. Devlin was holding an umbrella. Ishii was cradling boxes containing dozens of balls.
Williams was surprised to see them.
“We’re here for the ball test,” Devlin told him.
“It’s not the best day to do it,” said Williams, who was still not convinced that Nike’s ball was better than Titleist’s.
Thirty seconds later, Tiger approached, wearing a TW cap and a smile. The bad weather was just what he wanted—ideal conditions to scrutinize the speed, flight, and spin rate of the balls.
As rain beat down, Woods set his Titleist ball on the tee and aimed a drive down the left edge of the fairway. The wind pushed it into the right rough. Then he hit Nike’s Tour Accuracy ball on the same exact line. It was as if the wind and rain had stopped. The ball moved just three yards and finished left of center of the fairway. Williams was impressed. This pattern was repeated through the first nine holes.
By the time Steinberg showed up late on the front nine, Tiger was convinced he had made the right decision to use the Nike ball the next day in the pro-am. The ball’s performance in the wind had even convinced his skeptical caddie.
“I guess we’re changing balls,” Williams said.
When Tiger returned from Germany a week later, he used the Nike ball at Muirfield Village, Nicklaus’s signature course in Dublin, Ohio, and won the Memorial Tournament by six shots. It was his nineteenth PGA victory, and he did it in such convincing fashion—finishing nineteen under par—that Nicklaus quipped: “He’s making mincemeat out of golf courses.”
Afterward, Tiger huddled with Steinberg. The US Open was two weeks away, and Woods had decided to switch permanently to the Tour Accuracy ball. But he wanted to personally break the news to the president and the sales force of Nike Golf. Nike was gearing up to go all-in with Tiger and its new golf products, and he wanted to give them a boost of momentum. Steinberg said he would make the arrangements.
On June 1, 2000, Nike Golf held its semiannual footwear and equipment sales meetings at the Sunriver Resort in Oregon. That night, about two hundred employees from the US, Canada, and Europe gathered in the conference center. Nike Golf president Bob Wood was on the stage, outlining the company’s strategy and sales goals for the upcoming 180 days. Images of various products flashed on giant screens behind him. Neither Wood nor anyone in the audience knew that Tiger was backstage, in a private room with Steinberg, Devlin, and Nike CEO Phil Knight.
Suddenly, Tiger emerged from behind a curtain at the side of the stage. Carrying a large framed picture of himself holding the Memorial trophy, as well as a signed glove and the Nike ball he had used to win the tournament, Tiger walked toward Wood. The audience spotted him and started pointing and whispering. Wood, known for his captivating speeches and unaware of Tiger’s presence, couldn’t figure out why everyone was distracted. Then Tiger appeared next to him.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Wood said.
The audience roared.
Grinning, Tiger presented Wood with the framed picture. “Before we get started,” he said, “I just want to tell you and everyone here that I’ve decided to switch permanently to the Nike Tour Accuracy ball.”
With one sentence, Tiger sent the sales force into a frenzy. Everyone rose to their feet and started jumping up and down, hooting and hollering. They ended up partying until dawn.
For the one-hundredth US Open at Pebble Beach, NBC deployed forty-seven cameras—nearly double the standard number—to track Tiger from the air and from the water as well as from the course. On June 14, the day before the opening round, Woods was scheduled to be on the first tee at seven a.m. for a practice round. But a memorial ceremony had been scheduled at the same time on the eighteenth green to honor the tournament’s defending champion, Payne Stewart. In a scene reminiscent of a twenty-one-gun salute, more than forty golfers lined up and hit golf balls into the sunlit Carmel Bay on the command of “Ready, aim, fire.” Stewart’s wife, Tracey, choked back tears as several thousand fans looked on. Tiger chose not to attend. In his mind, there was no need to show up, and it wasn’t a difficult decision. He had given his condolences privately to Tracey Stewart. The public ceremony, he determined, was mainly a show for golfers to hit balls into the water, and he had no interest in being part of it. Showing up would have been detrimental to his preparation for the Open.
As his fellow golfers gathered to mourn the loss of a friend, Tiger worked his way through his practice round with Mark O’Meara. Afterward, he spent an additional two and a half hours on the putting green, making subtle adjustments to his posture and his release. Then he worked on his swing. Throughout the day, celebrities—a famous athlete, a television star, a member of the national media—tried to say hello. But he had no interest in making small talk.
When Tiger was in tournament mode, he let nothing distract him—not even questions from reporters who were worked up about his absence at Stewart’s service. After all, it wasn’t as if Tiger were the only one who had chosen not to attend. Jack Nicklaus hadn’t shown up either, but no one was hounding him with questions about his decision. O’Meara, who had been as close to Stewart as anyone, had also skipped the service to play with Woods. Tiger didn’t see the need to justify his actions to anyone.
Eleven hours after his early-morning tee time, Tiger was finally ready to call it a day. Butch Harmon was used to Woods’s extreme practice habits. As he watched Tiger walk off the practice green on the eve of the tournament, he thought to himself: No one else stands a chance tomorrow.
Tiger felt the same way. That night, alone in a dimly lit room, Woods sat with his yardage book. Eyes closed, he visualized the first tee. From there, he played every shot in his mind, one by one, all the way through the eighteenth hole. Then he went to sleep. The next day, he shot 65 in the opening round. With three rounds still to play, everyone else already recognized that they were playing for second place. On Friday, while unusually strong winds wreaked havoc on the field, Tiger expanded his lead, playing as if his ball were impervious to the weather, driving his tee shots with precision and making birdie after birdie. But a late-afternoon start time and various weather delays forced tournament officials to suspend play after Tiger finished the twelfth hole.
He returned to the course early Saturday morning to finish the second round. It was around eight a.m. on the West Coast when he stepped to the eighteenth tee with a commanding eight-stroke lead. Then he hooked his tee shot into Carmel Bay.
“Goddamn you fucking prick!” Tiger barked.
NBC’s microphones picked up the outburst.
“Whoa!” said NBC commentator Johnny Miller.
“Well, no commentary necessary,” said analyst Mark Rolfing.
In golf circles, it was no secret that Tiger had a colorful mouth and a hot temper. But it was jarring to hear him let loose on national television. In parts of the country, NBC had preempted Saturday-morning cartoons to provide live coverage of the Open. Upset viewers started calling NBC and the USGA to complain.
Sports journalist Jimmy Roberts was working his very first event for NBC Sports that weekend, and had been assigned to interview Tiger after the round. Roberts had first interviewed Woods in 1996 for ESPN’s SportsCenter on the eve of the US Amateur, and he had a good rapport with him. After that first interview, Roberts had informed Tiger that he couldn’t stay for the tournament. He had to get back to New York to be with his wife, who was pregnant with their first child and undergoing some medical tests.
“Isn’t it traditional to stay for the actual tournament?” Tiger quipped with a smile.
Roberts laughed.
A week later, when Tiger made his pro debut at the Greater Milwaukee Open, Roberts covered the tournament for ESPN. Despite being mobbed by reporters and fans, Woods spotted Roberts and went out of his way to speak to him privately. “How’s your wife?” he asked.
Roberts was touched. Ever since then, a mutual fondness had existed between them.
As Tiger came off the eighteenth hole at Pebble Beach, Roberts planned to ask him about his cursing after the wayward tee shot. But he didn’t want to blindside Tiger on live television, so instead of waiting for Woods to come up to the tower to be interviewed, Roberts went down to meet him and give him a heads-up.
With an eight-stroke lead after two rounds of play, Tiger had a smile on his face and Joanna Jagoda at his side as he came off the course and said hello to Roberts.
“Look,” Roberts said, “I’ve got to ask you about what happened on eighteen.”
The smile instantly fell from Tiger’s face. He had just finished a remarkable round of golf and was on target to win the US Open by a record margin, and Roberts wanted to talk about four-letter words? Seriously? Virtually everyone on the pro tour, including some of the journalists who covered it, used similar language, but they didn’t have microphones, as Harmon said, “shoved up their ass all the time.”
Roiled, Tiger didn’t say any of this to Roberts. Instead he just gave him a death stare.
Roberts didn’t understand the pushback. From his perspective, the question would give Tiger an opportunity to apologize for a slipup and acknowledge that he was so competitive that he sometimes lost his temper.
“He’s absolutely right,” Jagoda said to Tiger. “Go upstairs and answer those questions.”
Aggravated, Woods followed Roberts.
“You didn’t finish thirty-six holes the way you would have liked to,” Roberts said on the air. “And, in fact, you appeared to get pretty angry on the tee there.”
“Yeah, I got a little angry,” Tiger said. “I kinda let the emotions get the better of myself. I hit a bad shot. I was trying to hit a nice little straight ball out there, and I hit a pull hook. And I guess got a little upset. I’m sorry I did get upset, but I think anyone in that situation would get a little perturbed at themselves. Unfortunately, I let it voice out loud. But I collected myself, stepped up there, and just ripped the next one. I wish I could have hit that first one the way I hit the second one.”
Woods was furious over the question, but he had no intention of voicing his dissatisfaction to Roberts. Unlike his outspoken father, Tiger shied away from confrontation. “I learned to let my clubs do the talking, as my mom always advised me,” he said. “She taught me to be strong, and the more I said, the worse the situation would be. If I was going to let my clubs do the talking, Mom said, I might as well beat the other guys by as many shots as I could. There was a difference between winning and beating. I wanted to win, sure, but I also wanted to win by as many shots as possible. My mom liked me to ‘stomp’ on the other players, to use her word.” He seemed to feel the same way about Roberts.
On Sunday, Tiger began the final round eight under par, ten shots ahead of his nearest competitor. It was the largest lead in the history of the tournament, but he wasn’t satisfied. Determined to shatter the course record, his goal on Sunday was to play a bogey-free round. He did just that. By the time he reached the final hole, he felt calm and completely at ease with himself. He blushed as everyone on the fairway bowed as if paying tribute to royalty. He shot a 67 and won by a record fifteen strokes.
As he made his way to the trophy presentation just off the eighteenth green, NBC cut to a commercial. Jimmy Roberts was standing by. In what would be to that point the most visible piece of television in his career, he was doing the trophy presentation. Millions would be tuning in.
Seconds before Roberts was to go on the air, Harmon grabbed him by the arm. “What are you trying to prove?” he asked. “Why in the fuck are you asking these questions?” Harmon was still furious over the previous day’s interview about Tiger’s on-air cursing. “That’s bullshit!” Harmon told him. “We thought you were a friend.”
Roberts was shaken. Holy cow, he said to himself. What was that all about?
Jimmy Roberts had apparently become one of Tiger’s enemy journalists.
But none of Tiger’s feelings toward Roberts were on display when he entered the post-victory press conference at Pebble Beach clutching his newest trophy. After praising his own ability to make some “big par putts” in what he blithely downplayed as a “pretty good week,” Woods was asked whether his record-shattering victory had solidified him as the King of Golf.
“The records are great, but you don’t really pay attention to that,” Tiger said. “But you don’t really understand exactly what you’ve done until time passes. And I’ll appreciate this win a lot more in the future than I do right now, because I’m too close to the moment. . . . The only thing I know is I got the trophy sitting right next to me.”