Tiger At 30

As he approaches a milestone birthday, is Tiger Woods' best still to come? And which of the young players (if any) will step up to challenge him?

The State of Tiger: This is Jaime Diaz's fifth annual assessment of Tiger Woods' year, and career, in golf. For previous installments, see the related links box below.

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By Jaime Diaz

Illustration by Alan Dingman

January 2006

On Dec. 30, Tiger Woods is turning 30.

With a tick of the clock, all those freeze-framed uppercuts from the mid-'90s at Sawgrass, Pumpkin Ridge and Augusta so emblematic of an ageless Boy Wonder move to the nostalgia file. Golf--and life--squeeze in that much closer to take their toll. Growing heavier is a living legend frontloaded by the epic 2000 achievements that will be the measure for all future seasons. From a certain perspective, "Tiger Woods is 30" can sound as wistful as "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?"

Of course, it's a safe bet that as exalted as his still relatively brief past is, Tiger Woods ain't living in it. To him, 30 isn't the end of anything but his 20s. He's well aware that given the normal career arcs of the game's greatest players, it's more of a beginning.

"I've still got a long way to go with the stuff I'm working on," Woods said matter-of-factly in a late-season interview, a line he has uttered since he was 13. "A lot of room to grow and improve. So I feel like my best years are still ahead of me."

As we ponder what's next in 2006, the central questions again revolve around Woods. Will he get better or worse? Will the 13 victories in major championships keep mounting? How much will his competition or fate slow him down? Will he decide to revamp his game yet again?

As Woods likes to say, nothing is given. Now married, considering having children, worried about his ailing 73-year-old father, still occasionally bothered by a tricky left knee and troublesome back, his life is more complicated than it was at 21 or 24, when he won majors by double digits. He knows it's possible he could be more supernova than Old Man River, more Bobby Jones than Jack Nicklaus, who took 28 seasons to win his 20 majors. But whatever happens, Woods has lived up to the line he intoned on a commercial: "My life is about never settling."

It was never more true than in 2005. At the beginning of the year, Woods' career momentum had stalled. He hadn't won a major since the 2002 U.S. Open, hadn't earned an official stroke-play victory in 15 months. Vijay Singh had supplanted him as No. 1 in the world, Phil Mickelson had won his first major, and the so-called Young Guns were lurking. Woods was in the midst of swing changes with new coach Hank Haney that had produced inconsistent results, particularly with the driver. Woods was facing more negativity, second-guessing and unknowns than he ever had. Then, through stubborn commitment to a vision perhaps only he and Haney could see, he turned everything around and recaptured his domination and his aura.

The moment of truth occurred on Sunday at the Masters, which might go down as the most important major of Woods' career. Leading by two strokes over Chris DiMarco after an operatic chip-in on the 16th, Woods finished with two shockingly shaky bogeys. Woods had never thrown away a major, and to do so at such a crucial juncture portended devastating effects. Yet in sudden death on Augusta's demanding 18th hole, he somehow gathered himself to produce two near-perfect shots and a walk-off putt.

"That was so big for me--in here," he says, tapping his chest. "Because I hadn't battled down the stretch in a major with the swing changes I had made with Hank. You've got to put yourself in the biggest arena and see what happens. At Augusta, I blew it on 17 and 18, and that was after hitting a terrible tee shot on 16. Then in the playoff, I got recommitted and made my two best swings of the day. Huge."

Back ahead of Nicklaus' record major pace, Woods displayed greater control of his swing in the U.S. Open at Pinehurst, only to be undone by poor putting. After a five-stroke victory in the British Open at St. Andrews, a poor start and putting lapses were enough to undermine Woods in the PGA at Baltusrol. His 2005 record in the majors: first, second, first, tied for fourth. Four strokes from the Grand Slam.

Technically oriented, Woods has always considered improved swing mechanics as the most direct route to progress. When he sensed a staleness in his game in 2003, the possibility of reaching another level of skill was enough to set him on a new course. Yet despite months in which Woods played the most erratic golf of his professional career, he remained stoic and never wavered.

"It's never easy taking swing changes into competition," he says. "You have to be prepared and understand that you're going to fail. And it's OK to fail. The hardest thing is picking yourself up when you get knocked down. But to make the changes, you've got to keep getting up and realize that you have to get worse to get better."

Gradually, Woods found ways to stay on his feet.

"The biggest thing I learned this year was how to fix my swing during a round," he says. "Last year, because the swing was still new, I didn't know how to fix it. I'd hit a certain shot, good or bad, but I didn't know how I did it. This year, from the ball flight, from the depth and shape and direction of my divots, I know how to fix it. It's more reliable than feel, because when you're changing something, what you think you're doing is not always what you're actually doing. I might hit a shot that turns out all right, but if I look at the flight, I can tell, 'OK, that's not it. I've got to go back and work on this.' And then you can get it back. So when I'm under the gun and might be struggling that day or hit a couple of bad shots, I can rectify it and get back on course. That was a major breakthrough."

During seemingly lost moments, Woods took comfort in knowing he had done it all before.

"I was not going to change back, because one of the things I've done throughout my career is to have a game plan for the future and stick to it," he said. "It's not necessarily that I'm going to make these changes to be ready for tomorrow. I'm making these changes to be ready for sometime in six months, or a year from now. So you have to have a big-picture view of it. And trust me, that wasn't always easy for me to understand. But it was something my dad really tried to instill when I was a kid. He'd say, 'Look at the big picture, son. You shot 77 today, but was there something you did better than your last round when you shot 72?' 'Well, yeah, I did this better, which was different.' 'Very good. That's a step in the right direction.' So you're always growing toward something bigger."

Regaining the Power Advantage

Adding urgency to Woods' conviction was evidence that he not only had lost his advantage over the field in the area where he had established the most dominance--power--but was actually being passed. After never ranking worse than third on the PGA Tour in driving distance the first five years of his pro career, from 2002 to 2004 Woods dropped to sixth, 11th and ninth.

Getting shorter in relation to his competition got Woods' attention the more he came to realize that the modern professional game was clearly rewarding length and power more than ever before. As technological advances in clubs and the golf ball have produced a dramatic jump in distance, the world's highest ranked players--Woods, Singh, Mickelson, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen--have all been long drivers with excellent short games, leaving behind more-accurate medium-length hitters.

The bombers have established their advantage most clearly on the par 5s, where all rank near the top in the frequency of going for the green in two, and in average score. They also tend to play tight par 4s more aggressively, generally preferring to hit driver as close as possible to the green in the belief they'll have a better chance of stopping the ball close to the flag with a wedge or short iron from the rough than with a middle iron from the fairway.

Along with Haney-directed changes that have given him a fuller backswing and more clubhead speed, Woods regained length by changing his driver to one with a 460-cubic-centimeter head and a longer and lighter shaft. He also switched to a hotter ball. Sure enough, in 2005, Woods was a statistical monster in the area of power. His career-high 316-yard driving-distance average ranked second on tour. On the par 5s, he led the tour in going for the green at a rate of 65 percent (he was successful 34 percent of the time, second on tour), and in scoring with an average of 4.5, making birdie or better a tour-best 53 percent of the time. Anecdotally, the message was slammed home when Woods reached the 372-yard 16th hole at Doral during his victorious shootout with Mickelson, the blimp-mounted camera following the ball soaring over what seemed like the length of the Everglades.