Tiger Woods exclusive
In an exclusive extract from his new book, Tiger Woods talks about Augusta’s changes, swing changes and those injuries
Tiger talks technology, Augusta National, swing changes and injuries.
It’s 20 years since Tiger Woods ripped up the record books with his remarkable 1997 Masters win at Augusta National. The 21-year-old’s margin of victory – 12 shots – was the largest in the 20th century, and second only to Old Tom Morris’ 13 shots at the 1862 Open.
His score – 18-under-par 270 – broke Jack Nicklaus’ 32-yearold Masters record of 17-under. He was the youngest golfer by two years to win the Masters, and the first person of Asian or African heritage to win a Major. Never before had so many spectators come to Augusta National, and never before had so many people watched the event on television – an estimated 44 million in the USA alone.
To mark the event, Tiger has written a book – Unprecedented: The Masters and Me – in which he talks in depth about that incredible week; how he turned things around after a front-nine 40 in the first round; and what happened afterwards, both in the days after his win and the two decades since.
Here’s an exclusive taste of what you can expect...
Tiger on… Lengthening Augusta
The Augusta National I played in 1997 doesn’t play at all like the course now. Everything started to change for the 2002 Masters after club chairman Hootie Johnson decided the course should be lengthened because players were hitting the ball so far due to improvements in equipment, especially the ball. It went from 6,925 yards to 7,210 yards, but that wasn’t the only change that influenced the way the course plays. I don’t know if the changes were directly attributable to how short the course had played for me five years before; “Tiger-proofing” was the term that was often used.
As equipment advanced, Augusta National continued to play shorter for most of the players. Augusta felt it had to do something to make sure we would be hitting similar clubs into the greens that players in the Masters had always used. Augusta wanted to keep the course relevant in the era of the long ball. Hootie said that the club’s objective was “to keep this golf course current”. I could understand that, although I didn’t agree in general with the notion of “Tiger-proofing” the course. The club said that the changes weren’t being done because of me alone.
Technology was having a real effect on the game. It was moving faster than the ability of the USGA and the R&A to regulate it. Making the course longer was one thing. It wasn’t as easy to understand why Augusta felt it should change the nature of the course in other ways, such as adding rough – that “second cut”. It also added trees, which narrowed the corridors of play and eroded the strategic values that Bobby Jones and Alister Mackenzie had created as the course’s essential feature. They wanted golfers to play the game by angles, which required wide fairways.
My strategy in 1997 was based on three factors: my length, that the course had no rough, and that it had virtually no trees that would come into play even if I missed fairways. Augusta National was effectively wide open for me. The width – wider than the fairways themselves, because of the absence of rough and the relative absence of trees that impeded progress to the greens – meant that I could join longball golf to strategic golf.
Tiger on… Modern technology
Today’s ball is one of the reasons Augusta has made the greens less severe. They’ve made them easier because we’re so much farther back now. But it doesn’t matter that we’re farther back, because the ball is coming in with less spin. We were using balata balls 20 years ago. The apex of the flight of a balata ball was up, and then it dropped. Today’s ball is coming in flatter and hotter, with less spin. The balls aren’t stopping, which was why Augusta had to carefully study the ball release patterns for each pin placement.
There’s one shot in golf that will never be hit again because the equipment won’t allow it. That’s Jack’s 1-iron that he hit on the last hole at Baltusrol in the final round of the 1967 US Open. He had a three-shot lead, drove into the rough, and got it out of there and back to the fairway. Jack was going to win, but he also had a chance to beat Ben Hogan’s US Open record with a birdie. He had 237 yards to the hole, and hit this 1-iron miles into the sky that came down soft and finished 20 feet from the hole. He made the putt to set the record. I just can’t see anybody
hitting that shot today, not me, not Jason Day, not Rory Mcilroy. The ball doesn’t spin enough, first of all. Hitting a 1-iron off the ground is almost impossible now, too. And to have it stop on the front part of the green, and the green being elevated, I don’t see it. The ball has changed that much. It’s also carrying so far that guys were reaching the 18th green at Baltusrol during the 2016 PGA Championship with mid-irons.
It probably makes me sound like an oldtimer saying things were better back in the day, but I don’t see how anybody could say it’s a good thing that the ball is going so far, and that it doesn’t curve as much because it doesn’t spin. Driving the ball accurately used to be more important than now, and I know that because I got myself in plenty of trouble by missing fairways. I had to depend on my recovery game and putting. There’s not nearly as much of a demand on precise driving now. Drivers are much more forgiving. If you put today’s players on the Augusta National course I played in ’97, with the equipment we use today, somebody would go very low. I was hitting drivers and wedges in then, and it played short for me. Today’s players are probably 30 yards longer than I was. With so many hitting it so long, somebody would break 60.
‘There’s one shot in golf that will never be hit again because the equipment won’t allow it. That’s Jack’s 1-iron at the 1967 US Open’
Tiger on… Changing his swing
While Butchie [Harmon] and I reviewed the (1997) Masters tapes, it became apparent to both of us that, while I was swinging well for most of the tournament, I was still too handsy and ashy through the ball. While in the tournament I felt my swing was solid, and that I had my A-game. But that wasn’t true, as I began to appreciate. My win had been the result of 63 holes of having a functional, timing-based swing, and my timing was as close to perfect as it could be. My putting was also close to perfect. If you combine hitting the ball as long as I was with taking care of the par 5s while having wedges into so many of the greens on the par 4s, with no three-putts for the entire tournament, you’re going to do well.
But I needed to improve the position at the top of my swing if I wanted to win on courses that required more control and where the fairways weren’t as wide as Augusta’s. I’d been proven right about my feeling when I first saw the course in 1995 that Augusta set up perfectly for me. There were also three other Majors I wanted to win. I needed to tighten my swing if I was going to have a chance of winning them. Timing took me a long way at Augusta, but I couldn’t rely on such timing week in and week out, and in particular, at the US Open, the Open Championship, and the PGA Championship.
I was criticised widely for wanting to change a swing that had won the Masters so decisively. But I didn’t care that I had won by 12 shots, or that there was so much criticism. I knew what I needed to do, Butchie knew what I needed to do, and above all, I wanted to do it. I thrived on working on my swing. I was addicted to staying on the range for hours. A typical practice day for me was hitting six hundred balls, working on my short game and putting, playing, sometimes on my own, and working out in the gym for two or three hours. That was the life I wanted.
We went to work. I wore myself out on the range, but I loved working so hard on my swing. I’ve always enjoyed spending hours and hours on the range, or studying film of my swing. It’s been for one objective: to get the most out of myself. I wasn’t in the game for the trophies. I was in it to find the answer to one question: How good can I be? I suppose I was searching for perfection, although that’s not attainable in golf except for short stretches. I wanted total control of my swing, and, hence, the ball.
Tiger on… His injuries
I’ve had many well-documented injuries. In between 1994 and 2016, I went through four knee surgeries and three back surgeries, along with other procedures. I probably came back too early from some of the surgeries, but I was single-minded in my desire to compete and my need for competition. I pushed hard, maybe too hard sometimes. Then again, had I not pushed hard, I wouldn’t have won the Masters in 1997, nor would I have won the 2008 US Open. During that event, I went down to the ground many times during the tournament because of two stress fractures in my left tibia, and the lack of an ACL in my left knee. I’d ruptured the ACL while running. But I could play because the pain would come after I hit the ball. It didn’t lessen the pain, but I could at least swing the way I wanted to. While it’s in the nature of athletes to push through their pain, it might have been smart for me to be more cautious.
It became difficult for me to make the swings I wanted after my back surgeries. The first, in 2014, kept me out of the Masters that year. The back pain necessitating that surgery came during my backswing as I turned behind the ball. But I chose to ignore it and swing through the ball. Did my relentless desire to keep going, no matter how much I was hurting, contribute to more physical problems? I don’t know, but I again chose to push hard. I’ve paid a price. I had my second back surgery in September 2015, and a follow-up procedure in the same area of my back a few weeks later. This time I wasn’t going to return to competition too early. I ended up taking more than a year off. I missed competing, but, finally, I had taken the advice my doctors gave me. This doesn’t mean that I regret my decision to keep going hard. I can live with the choices I made. I made many swing changes to improve and to compensate for my injuries. I worked out because I enjoyed it and because I believed it would only make me stronger.