Why Tiger is Different

Watching Woods up close reveals his unusual approach; inside his mental game
September 22, 2007; Page W3

An unexpected pleasure of trailing Tiger Woods around the Tour Championship last week, inside the ropes, was hearing what the fans yelled out to him. From the practice tee to the 18th green, it was wild, especially as he passed down the cordoned-off pathways between each green and the next tee. "You're a rock star, Tiger!" "Sign my Bible, Tiger!" "I'm up for adoption, Tiger!"

Tiger Woods

How he manages to retain his focus amid this frenetic swirl is just one of the many mysteries of his greatness. As he prepares to hit each shot, the hullabaloo subsides -- often the only sound is the whirr of the TV blimp overhead firing its canisters -- and there he is, utterly alone, executing that most subtle and temperamental of athletic acts, the golf swing, with uncanny precision. In person his physique is not quite so bulked-up as it appears on the TV screen, but the intensity of his concentration and his supreme self-composure are swami-like. You can't take your eyes off of him.

I followed Mr. Woods for the better part of three rounds last week not because I was so particularly interested in the tournament -- which he won, by the way, besting his nearest competitor by eight strokes -- but because he is probably playing right now the best golf of his career and I wanted to bear witness. Dating back to the 2006 British Open, he's won 13 of his last 22 Tour events -- an unfathomable 59% winning pace. In his last five tournaments, including the Tour Championship, he won four and finished second in the other while posting a cumulative score of 75 under par.

You can see Mr. Woods settle into his preferred mental state on the practice range. He arrives there about 50 minutes before each round and begins by working his way through his bag, usually hitting only three or four balls per club. Frequently, however, he pauses for a full minute or two, sometimes longer, and just stands there looking around and chatting easily with his caddie, Steve Williams. On the putting green, as his tee time approaches, he wanders off by himself and rolls two balls back and forth, walking between the putts with extreme, exaggerated slowness.

There's a tendency, under pressure, for time and motion to speed up. Clearly, Mr. Woods wants none of that.

The galleries whooped and hollered when he arrived at the first tee at the East Lake Golf Club, and continued to do so after every shot, most riotously when he boomed his drives and at any approach shot that landed on the green. "Fans dissolve into helpless laughter," I wrote several times in my notebook.

By the third round I began to get a sense of how these amazing shots probably seem to Mr. Woods himself: entirely within the realm of the ordinary. It was clear from watching him on the range that a 300-plus yard drive or a low-flying pitch shot that checks up in a thrice are nothing at all special for him. They are his standard, off-the-rack shots. The meat of the matter for Mr. Woods is adapting them to each situation in competition and pulling them off there as precisely as he does in practice.

That's where self-mastery comes in. Last week, compared to other times I have watched him play, he seemed more comfortable over the ball. Between shots -- and it's eye-opening how much of a Tour pro's time on the course is spent waiting -- he leaned casually on a club, made small talk with Mr. Williams or the other pro in his twosome, Mark Calcavecchia, or stared calmly down the fairway. Then, when the time came to hit, he slipped on his glove (never until that moment), pulled his club, sometimes made a few practice turns, and hit the ball with almost no hesitation, no agony.

In a Groove: Tiger Woods during the final round of the Tour Championship last weekend.

By the third day of my watch I also began to be able to distinguish some of his truly superlative shots from his merely first-rate ones. On the par-three 11th hole, playing at 181 yards, he fired his tee shot directly at the pin. The gallery erupted in amazement and delight, but I could tell while the ball was still in the air that the trajectory was not quite right. It was ballooning a bit, and sure enough the ball came to rest (according to the Tour's ShotLink system) 19 feet, 11 inches short of the hole. Mr. Woods had no trouble two-putting for par from there, but the shot had been nearly seven yards off -- a big mistake by his standards.

This particular shot made me realize how many absolutely perfect shots I had already witnessed, maybe eight or nine over the 50 or so holes I observed. One was a similar shot of 201 yards over water on the par-three sixth hole, to less than three feet from the hole. That trajectory had been lower, unwavering, with a slight, flawlessly executed fade. Another perfect shot had been his tee shot on the 15th hole on Saturday: a 303-yard piece of art that curved in a high arc around a very tall pine and landed precisely in the middle of the ascending fairway.

When the tournament was over and Mr. Woods had accepted the Tour Championship trophy and the first FedEx Cup, along with $11.26 million in winnings, a reporter asked if we could expect him ever to play any better than he is now. Instantly he responded, "Yes."

The day before, all he would say about the state of his game was that it was "moving in the right direction." Presumably he won't be satisfied until every one of his shots is perfect.