Inside Tiger's Game
Ahead of his Masters defence now postponed, Tiger Woods spoke of his epic 2019 victory. We reveal what you can learn from his swing and take a look inside his new bag
Tiger Woods was supposed to drive his Mercedes courtesy car down Magnolia Lane as the Masters champion, preparing to compete for a sixth green jacket – victory would have put him on a par with Jack Nicklaus as the most successful player ever at Augusta National. We talked to Tour coaches and the men who helped him choose his equipment to get an insight into his game. But first, we spoke to the man himself about 2019, the state of his game now... and what he was going to serve at the Champion’s Dinner. focused. Go ahead and make sure that you commit’. And I did, and knocked it in. And God knows what I did after that.
I did. That was one of the reasons I was so focused [and] didn’t celebrate after I made birdie on 16 because I’d been in that situation before with Chris Dimarco. I had a two-shot lead and went bogey, bogey and ended up in a play-off.
It was a pretty good year for Tiger Woods in 2019. He won his first Major in more than a decade at the Masters. He won the ZOZO Championship. He only missed two cuts all year. He climbed back into the top 10 in the World Rankings for the first time since 2013. He tied Sam Snead as the player with the most PGA Tour wins (they both have 82). He picked himself for the Presidents Cup and won all three of his matches, while captaining his side to victory. But the greatest golfer of a generation – if not of all-time – doesn’t rest on his laurels. And if that means upgrading the clubs that served him so well last year, that’s exactly what he’ll do. Here are the clubs Tiger Woods is using in 2020, with some insight from the people who helped him choose them.
realised there was some stuff with the sole, with the grooves, so we continued to converge.
The thing that really impressed me was his level of detail – the way he’d spot tiny differences in top lines, sole geometry. It surprised me how tuned in he was. I’d been working with Tour players for years – Rory, Rose, Rahm – but Tiger was in a different league. Other guys kind of get used to things, they acclimatise to the product. But you adapt equipment to Tiger; he doesn’t adapt to the equipment.
Sometimes, players don’t really know what they want, and the target moves, whereas Tiger knows exactly what he wants. And we were confident we could give him that. We use these huge machines that are so accurate at creating the CAD designs – if you were to take a piece of hair and split it two or three times, that’s the level of accuracy these machines can achieve.
I get involved when a player wants a custom set. For Tiger everything from the ground up was made from scratch. To get everything dialled in for him took about a year. To put that into context, the same process with DJ took about two weeks.”
“Tiger is amazing to work with, and the way he swings it makes it very easy to fit him. He’s very dialled in to his feels, and when he’s dialled in like that it’s just my job to match his feels to the new technology.
As you work with these guys more, you learn what’s important to them. The key to my job is relationships. You can be the best fitter in the world, know everything about shafts and products, but if you don’t know DJ or Tiger, good luck trying to fit them. With Tiger’s driver, he’s looking for a certain window. Too little spin isn’t good, too much spin isn’t good. On a stock driver, I’m happy with an 11° launch 2400-2500rpm, but he changes it all the time depending on the shot. We take feedback on everything – performance, launch and spin, what is and isn’t working – and all that gets back to the product team.”
Before his Masters victory, Tiger Woods hadn’t won a Major since 2008. That year, he started just seven events, winning five of them (including the US Open) and finishing second at the Masters. His worst finish was a fifth-place. He’d been the world’s No.1 player almost uninterrupted for a decade. His swing was regarded as better than textbook. Now in his mid-40s and the wrong side of multiple back surgeries, surely it’s unfathomable to think his swing could be better now than it was a decade ago? “The new swing is just generally better, in every aspect,” says Sinjin Macnab, a tour coach certificated by Tiger’s former right-hand man Hank Haney. “He’s getting more power than before, and it’s easier on his body. He’s kept all the good stuff from Hank Haney and Butch Harmon, but most importantly, he’s just swinging the club now, not trying to brutalise everything. If more people swung it like this, they’d be able to play golf for longer. You talk about whether he can make the Nicklaus record… I’d put money on it.”
Tiger has always possessed exemplary fundamentals and they are all evident here. The first thing to notice is how relaxed he looks. There are no excessive body angles. Since he is hitting the longest club in the bag,tiger’s posture is just gently tilted from the hips so his arms hang almost vertically below his shoulders. If you could view this set-up face-on you’d also see the ball position underneath his left armpit, his left arm and shaft forming a spoke and his right shoulder set slightly below the left.
Top of the backswing positions don’t get much better than this. Tiger has coiled his left shoulder underneath his throat through a full 90 degrees while his right knee has remained beautifully flexed to harness the motion. And if you drew an extended line from the butt of the club through his sternum, you’d find it intersected perfectly with the golf ball – a sign that Tiger has swung in his ideal biometrical plane. Power and accuracy are the result.
One of the hallmarks of Tiger’s swing over the years has been his uninhibited release through impact. If you take just one thing away from this image it’s how Tiger’s right forearm is actively releasing over his left as he sends the ball powerfully on its way. Another key highlight? Check out how low Tiger’s right shoulder is as he fires his upper body through the ball. On the contrary, most amateur golfers have their left shoulder much too high at impact, which usually leads to weak left-to-right shots.