Faster, higher, stronger: How Tiger Woods changed golf forever
It’s in the numbers, and there are plenty of them.
There’s the 15 major wins, second only to the 18 of Jack Nicklaus and four ahead of third-placed Walter Hagen. The next best player still active is Phil Mickelson, who has five majors to his name.
Can Tiger overhaul Nicklaus? At one point in his career it seemed inevitable, at another impossible. Now? After adding No 15 at the Masters last April it’s not beyond the realms of possibility, but, with his 44th birthday in just a few weeks, not likely.
Then there’s the 82 PGA Tour wins, level as the most by a player with Sam Snead. Woods reached that mark at the ZOZO Championship in Japan in October. Will he pull ahead of Snead to stand alone? Almost certainly.
Or there’s the record 281 consecutive weeks as world No 1; and the 681 weeks in total he spent as world No 1, another record.
He’s the only player to hold all four major titles at the same time, a feat dubbed the ‘Tiger Slam’. The only player to win three consecutive US Amateur titles. The list of achievements goes on, and on and on. But underpinning all the records and achievements is something more subjective.
Tiger Woods fundamentally changed the way golf at the elite level is played.
Nick Faldo saw the change first-hand at the Masters in 1997, Tiger’s first major as a professional, and his first major win.
“Such was the outbreak of Tigermania sweeping Augusta that a gallery exceeding 15,000 assembled on the first tee to witness the defending champion being outdriven by 60 yards or more,” Faldo wrote in his autobiography Life Swings.
Woods won by 12 shots. He didn’t just overpower Augusta National, he brutalised it. The coming of Tiger Woods was also the dawn of golf’s power game.
Tiger wasn’t the only big hitter out there, but he was by far the best and one of the things he did differently back then that has become the norm today was work hard in the gym.
Professional golfers realised that if they wanted to get on the Tiger train they had to make the gym part of their practice routine: build strength and flexibility, because with that comes more torque in the swing, which generates more clubhead speed which in turn leads to more length.
“I think that I’ve driven a lot more youth to the game,” Tiger said after his 2019 Masters victory. “You know, a lot of the guys that are — especially on the Tour now, are training. They are getting bigger, stronger, faster, more athletic. They are recovering better. They are hitting the ball prodigious distances, and a little bit of that’s probably attributed to what I did.”
With players becoming more athletic, combined with advances in golf equipment and course conditioning, the big-hitting benchmarks have been pushed ever higher.
In 1990 the average driving distance on the PGA Tour was 261.1 yards and Tom Purtzer was the big dog with a driving average of 279.6.
By 2000 the Tour average had grown to 273.18 yards. In 2010 it was 287.49, and in 2018 the driving distance average across the Tour was 295.29 yards.
In 1997 there was one player who averaged more than 300 yards off the tee, John Daly. In the 2018-19 season there were 50.
Then there was the small matter of how golf changed to combat the assault led by Tiger on its championship courses, adding extra yards to layout in an effort to “Tiger-proof” them.
The Augusta layout that Woods dismantled on the way to his first major measured a total of 6925 yards. Changes introduced for 2002 stretched it to 7270 yards. By 2010 it had grown to 7435 yards. Tiger’s win at Augusta this year was on a course that measured 7475 yards.
Augusta was not alone. Even the grand lady of major golf courses, the Old Course at St Andrews, has also stretched in the Tiger era. From 6933 yards when John Daly won there in 1995 to 7279 yards in 2005, and 7305 in 2010.
As players hit the ball ever further, golf courses have become ever longer in response.
How many other sports have changed their playing fields to try and halt the tide of progress?
That could be Tiger’s biggest achievement. The numbers and records may get overtaken but one fact remains. Tiger Woods changed the game.
The first port of call in evaluating the career of Tiger Woods is the most obvious.