Tiger Woods’ magical, mythical 2000 season even more impressive today

Billy Andrade had an embarrassing but relatable moment at the 2000 Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard.

In the first round, with the group having begun on the back, Tiger Woods hit a shot that was so good, so mesmerizing, that Andrade was incapacitated.

“He's 3-under after three,” Andrade told PGATOUR.COM. “And we get up on the 13th tee, and he steps up and he hits a stinger. I was just like, ‘Oh, my God.’ It would be like somebody getting on their knees and getting a shotgun and aiming right down the middle of the fairway and shooting the gun, the trajectory was this high off the ground.

“It never wavered,” Andrade continued, “and it went just dead straight, 260 yards right down the middle, and I'm just like this –” (Andrade bugs his eyes and drops his jaw.) “– and I get a tap on my shoulder, I turn around and it was my caddie, Ziggy. He goes, ‘You’re up.’”

Tiger Woods’ 2000 season still boggles the mind a quarter century later as players gather this week for The Genesis Invitational at its temporary home of Torrey Pines, where Woods won eight times as a professional. The more closely you look at 2000, the more it strains credulity. In a year when he switched from a wound to a two-piece ball, Woods broke golf in two.

There was Tiger, and then there was everybody else.

“He was really every tournament,” said Maverick McNealy, who was 5 at the time. “Is anyone going to be able to beat Tiger this week? And it was almost like a team sport, one against 155.”

Woods won nine times, had a scoring average of 68.17 to break Byron Nelson’s 55-year-old record (68.33), and compelled Jesper Parnevik, among others, to wonder if he had Jedi powers. Woods broke or tied 27 PGA TOUR records and nearly contravened the old maxim (and Bob Rotella book title): Golf is not a game of perfect.

In a recent sit-down with PGATOUR.COM, the 82-time PGATOUR winner said it was “an evolutionary thing that happened,” going back to the swing change he adopted and eventually perfected with coach Butch Harmon after his epochal victory at the 1997 Masters.

“That took the better part of a year, year and a half to implement,” Woods said. “And then ’99, I got rolling and it just bled into 2000, but it was all the hard work that I've done through the middle part of ’97, the struggles of ’98, struggles early part ’99, just getting efficiently better.”

Somewhere around THE CJ CUP Byron Nelson in May of 1999, Woods’ swing changes clicked into place. He won seven of his next 10 starts that season, including his last four straight.

“It just rolled into 2000,” he said.

And it did so immediately.

Woods beat Ernie Els at The Sentry at Kapalua, where both players eagled the 72nd hole and birdied the first playoff hole. (Woods ended it with a long-range birdie on the second.)

“That one still stings a little,” Els told PGATOUR.COM. “Man, I played good golf.”

Woods made up a seven-shot deficit with seven to play to edge Matt Gogel and Vijay Singh at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, his sixth straight win. (He tied for second at the Farmers Insurance Open a week later, leaving intact Byron Nelson’s record of 11 straight in 1945.)

He won the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, and in mid-May made a groundbreaking equipment change. He put a new two-piece Nike ball, made by Bridgestone, into play at the DP World Tour’s Deutsche Bank-SAP Open TPC of Europe in Hamburg, Germany. Although he didn’t win, he tied for third and especially loved the way the ball performed in the wind.

At the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday, he won by five with the new ball, then declared that every aspect of his game could get better.

And that’s when things got crazy.

Woods’ 15-shot U.S. Open win was the largest margin of victory in a major, even as he was unwittingly down to his last golf ball in Round 2. (He’d forgotten to refill his bag after a putting session in his hotel room the night before.) Woods won The Open Championship by eight, becoming the youngest (24) to complete the career Grand Slam, and he also won the PGA Championship in a three-hole aggregate playoff over Bob May, joining Ben Hogan (1953) as the only players to win three men’s professional majors in a season.

He won the WGC-NEC Invitational in the dark (by 11 shots over Justin Leonard and Phillip Price).

At the RBC Canadian Open, where Woods became the only player besides Lee Trevino to win the U.S. Open, The Open Championship and RBC Canadian Open in one summer, he hit a decisive fairway bunker shot on 18 – 218 yards from wet sand over the water, in the gloaming – that became an instant classic and held off Grant Waite.

“I just kept reminding myself that these are the experiences that enrich your life,” Waite said. “I've got a chance to play with the greatest player in the universe, in the final round. ... Right now, he’s an athlete in full flight, and it’s beautiful to watch.”

Woods was the beginning and the end of every golf story, owned the sports space (four Sports Illustrated covers, including as the Sportsman of the Year) and crossed over into popular culture (Time Magazine). Sensing Tiger 2000 was a rare, almost celestial event, fans flocked to him.

“The crowds were so loud walking from green to tee, you almost needed earplugs,” said Scott Dunlap, who played with Woods in Round 3 of the PGA Championship at Valhalla.

Added Tom Lehman: “If there were 40,000 people on the course on any given day, 80 percent were following his group. And there’d be 200 guys in the media, photographers and writers.”

The effect of all that attention was to further elevate Woods above the competition, for he was used to the frenzy while others were not. Tom Weiskopf once said of Jack Nicklaus: “Jack knew he was going to beat you. You knew Jack was going to beat you. And Jack knew that you knew that he was going to beat you.”

Substitute Tiger for Jack, and that was 2000.

Woods went a combined 263-under par, never finished out of the top 25 in 20 starts, and had a win percentage (.450) that far surpassed the best batting averages in baseball.

“You’ve just got to stick to your guns,” Els said. “He just has bigger guns than I do.”

Els would finish second to Woods four times that year, running the gamut from nailbiter (The Sentry) to laugher (the U.S. Open romp at Pebble Beach). At The Open Championship at St. Andrews, where Woods avoided all 112 bunkers at the Old Course all four days, Els, co-runner-up with Thomas Bjorn, said Woods would beat Old Tom Morris “by 80 shots right now. The guy is unbelievable, man."

“I’m running out of words,” he added. “Give me a break.”

Did the exasperated Els ever say anything to Woods?

“Yeah, it took a long time,” Woods told PGATOUR.COM. “It wasn't until – he and a buddy of ours, they were in Macao, and he called me on his birthday. Macao's on a different time zone, obviously, so it’s a weird time to get a call from Ernie, and he just kind of – yeah, he laid into me a little bit, which was awesome. I loved it, and we had a good time about it.”

Flirting with the supernatural

They were beaten men.

Woods’ would-be peers were left to try and make sense of what amounted to a weekly coronation, and, like Els, they mostly didn’t have answers.

“We are failing,” Colin Montgomerie said at one point, “but we are trying.”

Sure, Els had come close at The Sentry at Kapalua, but he’d lost, just like the rest.

At the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where Woods was seven back with seven holes to play in a Monday finish, his closing kick was so explosive – 5-under, including a hole-out eagle on 15 – that 54-hole leader Gogel, then a rookie, had no idea where he came from.

“Walking off 10 green, I knew I had a three-shot lead over Vijay and maybe Notah Begay,” Gogel told PGATOUR.COM. “I didn’t even know where Tiger was. When I left 16 green, having just missed birdie, I saw he was one up. I had to birdie one of the last two.”

He didn’t and then missed a short putt on 18 as Woods won by two.

Adam Scott shared a coach (Butch Harmon) with Woods, so the young Australian, who was just beginning his professional career, played some practice rounds with Woods.

“It was just like this perfect golfer in front of you,” Scott said. “It was remarkable. And it’s hard to explain. Sometimes I try to explain what it was like to some of the younger pros, but he, he was doing things that actually no one else could do.”

The shots coming off Woods’ clubs seemed so unattainable as to be somewhat dispiriting; Scott wondered if maybe professional golf had been a bad idea, after all.

“The week after I first played with Tiger that year, he won the U.S. Open by 15,” said Scott, who has gone on to a gilded career with 14 PGA TOUR titles. “And if he didn't win by 15, I would have felt like I wasn't ready to turn pro. But I was glad he was the only guy playing that level, because what I saw playing with him the week before the U.S. Open was remarkable.”

The week of the U.S. Open wasn’t bad, either. Woods, who did not have a three-putt, one-putted 20 of his first 38 greens. Jesper Parnevik, playing with him, was beyond impressed.

“He had some Jedi powers; he could pretty much will the ball in the hole,” Parnevik said at the time. “And sometimes I could swear he did because I would think the ball was going to miss or already had missed, and it would go in sideways.

“That’s some strong-ass Obi-Wan Kenobi/Jedi stuff going on,” Parnevik added.

Others, too, hinted at something supernatural. Els told Sports Illustrated for its Sportsman of the Year issue that Woods seemed to tap into some higher plane of existence at The Sentry.

“He willed in that putt,” Els said of Woods’ winning, right-to-left-curling 40-footer for birdie. “How you actually will something in, that’s a mystery.”

Woods explained that he’d seen Els hit the same putt in regulation, but he played along.

“You just feel like if you believe in something so hard,” Woods said. “For some reason, it only happens when you're in a crunch situation, when all the pressure is there, if you truly believe that you can make the putt, you can make the stroke, the ball will go in.”

Lehman felt that there were two Tigers, only one of whom was fallible.

“As long as Tiger was reacting to his shots, you could beat him,” Lehman told PGATOUR.COM. “Like he hit a bad drive, he’d slam his driver; hit a bad iron and get upset. As long as he was doing that, I’d tell my caddie, ‘We can get him today.’

“And then at some point in the round,” Lehman continued, “you’d just have this thing come over him and suddenly, boom, all that excess emotion was gone. And it was just this long-distance stare, this focus. Like, there’s just nothing.”

Sometimes Woods’ invincibility was obvious from the start.

At The Open Championship at St. Andrews, Mark Calcavecchia sensed in Woods a virtuoso at the absolute height of his powers.

“We meet on the second fairway at the Old Course, right out of the Old Course Hotel there at 6:30 in the morning on Tuesday and Wednesday, two days in a row,” Calcavecchia said. “We played two through 17; we didn't play one or 18. He made 18 birdies in 32 holes and didn't really read any putts. I mean, it was just every shot was perfect, literally perfect.

“… I think if there was ever a tournament that was over before it started, that one was.”

Woods declared The 2000 Open Championship to be the best he had ever played.

A season that changed golf

Perhaps no player has come so close to touching the sun, in golf terms, which is one reason why Woods’ 2000 season has taken on an almost mythic quality.

“He showed us the will to win,” Els told PGATOUR.COM. “I can’t believe it’s been 25 years; time has flown by. When I talk about it, that year is very clear in my memory. The sheer dominance, the sheer confidence of an athlete playing at their highest level was great to witness.”

Just four players have won more in a single season: Byron Nelson with 18 in 1945, Ben Hogan with 13 in ’46, Sam Snead with 11 in ’50, and Hogan with 10 in ’48. Paul Runyan in ’33 and Singh in 2004 also won nine times.

But it wasn’t just that Woods won nine tournaments; it was the way he won them.

“He was on a level no one’s ever seen before,” Andrade said.

Woods told PGATOUR.COM that he doesn’t know if other players feared him, and that that wasn’t the point, anyway. The point was to separate himself mentally.

“If I can be better at controlling myself than the other players are at controlling themselves,” he said, “then I think I have a good shot at winning.”

Whatever you make of that explanation, his 2000 had the quality of great magic: The closer you look, the more impossible it appears. Even now, it seems stranger than fiction.

“Some of the records are just, like, ridiculous,” said Ludvig Åberg, who was born the year before Woods’ epic season. “Or you just shake your head and you're like, 'Is that really true?'”

It’s hard to overstate how big of an impact Woods had on today’s PGA TOUR. You can’t toss a handful of grass clippings without hitting someone for whom his heroics made golf cool – not just worth playing but also worthy of a lifelong dedication.

“I would have been 14,” Keegan Bradley said. “I just remember watching Tiger in those times of my life and just, like, really impacting me as a golfer. I just was – he just made me love the game, made me just so excited to play golf, watch golf.”

Justin Thomas attended the 2000 PGA Championship at Valhalla when he was 7. It was a life-changing moment, and Woods has since become a close friend in South Florida.

“He just makes fun of me,” Thomas said. “I was 7, realistically, and I think maybe the most recent time he's joked about it, I was still in diapers. It’s like that fish story: It just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I keep getting younger and younger every time that gets brought up.

“I make sure to remind him he's an old man every once in a while,” Thomas continued. “But, yeah, that was, that was definitely a week that changed my life.”

Max Homa was 9 or 10 as Woods decimated the competition that magical year.

“I knew how crazy it was,” Homa said.

Woods’ 2000 season still lives on YouTube, if you can get past the funky styles of the day.

“I’ve gone through and watched pretty much every shot from that week,” Russell Henley said of Woods’ 15-shot U.S. Open victory at Pebble Beach. “When I’m trying to work on my swing or some part of my game and just try to see what he did.”

What sticks out for Henley is the 7-iron that Woods muscled out of the rough at the uphill, par-5 sixth hole, his ball soaring over the trouble and finding the green in two. It was the kind of shot for which others lacked the requisite speed and strength.

“I don’t think people realize how steep it is,” Henley said. “If you hit it a little thin, you’re going to hit it into the cliff. It’s a very intimidating shot. Usually, it’s a little cold.”

NBC’s Roger Maltbie put it another way on air: “It’s just not a fair fight.”

Still, many of Woods’ contemporaries remain grateful for the privilege of bearing witness.

Journeyman Dunlap found himself enjoying his one round with Woods at the PGA, and even played well, perhaps owing to his commitment to soak in every moment.

“It was the best golf probably ever played,” Dunlap said. “I got to see it up close and personal.”

Rocco Mediate will never forget a shot Woods hit at Ireland’s Portmarnock Golf Club the week before The Open, the foursome consisting of Woods, Mark O’Meara, Lee Janzen and Mediate.

“He hit a shot on 15, a par 3,” Mediate said. “Wind is blowin’ 200 mph off the water, we're just trying to hit it down there, just bounce it on the green. Tiger kind of looked at us and he went, 'No, no, no. Watch me.' He hit it like out over the ocean with a cut, with some kind of iron, to like 6 feet. You can’t do that. You can’t.

“But when he did it,” Mediate added, “it’s like, 'Yeah, I wish I could do that, but it’s not going to happen.'”

That reluctance to believe what you’ve just seen is a common sentiment from 2000. Even CBS’s Jim Nantz was not immune after Woods had hit his final approach, in the dark, to within kick-in distance at the WGC-NEC Invitational.

“Oh, no, you can’t do that!” Nantz said. “That can’t happen!”

Woods’ 218-yard bunker shot at the flag at the RBC Canadian Open elicited the same response from the runner-up Waite even though the two had occasionally played at Isleworth.

“I said to my caddie, ‘You’re not supposed to do that,’” Waite said then. “‘You’re supposed to hit it in the middle of the green. I’m hitting it to the middle of the green from the middle of the fairway.’”

Lehman and others now point out that Woods raised the bar. Far from being resentful, they are grateful for it.

“I won (the Invensys Classic at Las Vegas) in the fall of 2000,” Andrade said, “and I totally believe it was because of all the rounds of golf I played with Tiger and not being able to hide.”

Woods has chalked up 2000 to “an amazing year of control,” but other than to say it was a culmination of his work with Harmon, and that he tried to make fewer unforced errors than the competition, the whole thing is hard to describe, even now, even for him.

How do you explain a supernatural event? How do you articulate transcendence? Perhaps you don’t. Maybe you just hold it up to the light, admire it, and stand in silent reverence.

“That 2000 season showed the world what golf could actually be like,” Mediate said. “And it will never be repeated, I don’t care what anybody says. It put up a target that can’t be reached.”