Tiger Woods remembers seven-shot comeback win at 2000 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am
3 Min Read
Twenty-five years later, Tiger Woods still remembers the nuance.
Woods won the 2000 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in scintillating fashion, rallying from a seven-shot deficit with seven holes remaining – in a Monday finish – to clip Matt Gogel and Vijay Singh by two strokes at Pebble Beach Golf Links. It marked Woods’ sixth straight PGA TOUR title, a streak that began at the 1999 World Golf Championships-NEC Invitational and ended with a runner-up at the following week’s Farmers Insurance Open. No player had won more than three straight since Ben Hogan in 1953. Woods was at the height of his powers and on the precipice of the “Tiger Slam,” winning four straight majors from the 2000 U.S. Open through the 2001 Masters.
Woods isn’t competing at this week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the season’s second Signature Event featuring a limited field and elevated FedExCup points, but the quarter-centennial is cause to remember one of the most unexpected of his 82 PGA TOUR titles.
Woods’ most memorable shot that week on the Monterey Peninsula was a hole-out eagle from 97 yards at the par-4 15th hole, which would normally call for a 56-degree wedge. Yet with the hole location near a steep back-right slope, he audibled to a pitching wedge.
Mid-flight, he thought the ball might finish above the hole. He was happy to be proven wrong; it landed 4 feet right with “just enough spin to slide into the cup,” wrote the Associated Press.

Tiger Woods' comeback win at 2000 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am
“The balls were spinning quite a bit; in that era, we had square grooves with the spinnier golf ball,” Woods said in a sit-down interview at last month’s Hero World Challenge. “That shot didn’t work with the 56(-degree wedge), so I hit it with my pitching wedge, tried to hold it against the hill and play some kind of dead-arm shot there with a very slow release and just let it die on the hill, which it did. I hit it the right number, but I thought I was going to leave it high, because I held it probably just a fraction too much on the hill.”
After the ball went in, Woods immediately knew he had a chance at a sixth straight title, despite trailing Gogel by five strokes into the final round and then losing ground through the first 11 holes.
“That’s right! Right back in it!” Woods exclaimed from the 15th fairway.
Woods nearly holed out for a second straight time at the short par-4 16th, as his wedge approach landed 3 feet short of the hole and narrowly missed the hole’s left edge on the second hop. He converted the birdie and then finished par-birdie for a final-round 64 and a 15-under total.
“Tiger did everything he could humanly do,” said CBS broadcaster Jim Nantz afterward, “which sometimes doesn’t seem very human-like.”
Gogel had a chance for a playoff but missed a 10-foot birdie try at the closing hole on the left side; he then missed a short comebacker for par.
“It’s not over until it’s over,” Woods said afterward in understated fashion. “I figured I needed to birdie the last four holes. I didn’t do that, but I still played it 4 under.”
Woods’ comeback victory at Pebble Beach foreshadowed a historic week at that summer’s U.S. Open, also played at Pebble Beach, which he won by an astounding 15 strokes over Ernie Els and Miguel Angel Jiménez. That week, Woods played the par-4 15th hole in a relatively pedestrian 1 under. He didn’t card an eagle on the week, but there was ample residual magic from his rollicking comeback four months prior.
The California native has made seven appearances at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, with his lone victory coming in 2000; he also finished runner-up in his tournament debut in 1997, closing in rounds of 63 and 64 (both at Pebble Beach) to fall one shy of his mentor Mark O’Meara.
Most everything came up Woods in 2000, a trend that continued for some time.
“I think he’s a legend in the making,” Els said after Woods’ comeback win. “He’s 24. He’s probably going to be bigger than Elvis when he gets into his 40s.”