Tiger Woods' incredible summer of 2000 remains golf's greatest mix of bravado, talent and timing

At this precise moment 25 years ago—early May 2000—the greatest golf of all time was being primed for liftoff.

A then-24-year-old Tiger Woods, who had always played a wound golf ball with a balata cover, was preparing to put a new multilayer, solid-core ball in play. He believed it gave him an edge—less spin and longer off the driver, more spin and softer around the green, easier to control in the wind.

MORE: Golf Digest exclusive—How Tiger hits every shot

Given that Woods in the previous 12 months had already established himself as the game’s best player by winning or nearly winning almost every tournament he played in (10 victories and three seconds in his last 18 PGA Tour events), gaining an additional edge in the game where even he lost more than he won could prove exponential.

And it did. In the next four months, Woods would put on a display of athletic genius that transcended how a golfer could be imagined, projecting a performer more akin in pyrotechnics and proficiency to primetime Michael Jordan. Over eight tournaments bookended by a five-stroke victory at the Memorial and a final climatic winning shot in Canada, Woods posted six victories. But more than just win, he crushed the competition in a way that redefined golf dominance.

The span will always be distinguished by the almost surreal standard of power and precision Woods executed while striding two of the game’s most majestic stages in pursuit of its two most venerated championships—the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach and the British Open at St. Andrews. His 15-stroke victory along cliffs overlooking the Pacific is widely regarded as the greatest 72 holes ever played. A month later, his eight-stroke victory over the hallowed ground of the Old Course completed Woods’ career Grand Slam and lives in his memory as the finest ball-striking of his career.

Those wins were epic enough to stand alone as a credible argument for the greatest golf ever. But Woods, ever the closer, removed all doubt in August at Valhalla when he won a third straight major at the PGA Championship, with that victory’s 25th anniversary set to hover over the proceedings next week for the major at Quail Hollow.

The game has been in a permanent state of awe ever since. The numerology alone, filled with momentous zeros, has added to the grandeur. Tiger won the 100th U.S. Open and what the R&A dubbed the Millenium Open. In each of those victories, he either set or tied the 72-hole scoring record for that championship. While Scottie Scheffler’s level of play the last few years approached what is Woodsian, even as he was winning nine times in 2024, no one seriously compared him to “2000 Tiger.” That term remains the unreachable star.

Still, defining the greatest golf ever played will always be a subjective call. There are adherents for Bobby Jones in 1930 with the original calendar Grand Slam, and for Ben Hogan’s Triple Crown in 1953. The easiest case to make is for Byron Nelson’s 11 straight PGA Tour victories and 18 total in 1945 (four of them by double digits), a compilation that will always remain mind blowing. But because those feats were achieved in a wartime vacuum, against fields short on depth at a time when the PGA Championship (which Nelson won) was the only major being played, Nelson’s best, while undoubtedly the most dominant full year of golf and arguably the most consistently accurate shot-making ever, lacked the gravitas, dynamism and sheer theater that Woods achieved.

It is slightly discomfiting to say Woods, who reigned so well and for so long, reached his peak at age 24. After all, from age 25 on he won 10 more majors (comprising two more career Grand Slams) and 58 more PGA Tour events. It just seems wrong that his body of work—constructed on the principle of constant improvement—should be overshadowed by such an early stage.

But what a stage. Woods, as is often the case with the greatest players, was extraordinarily precocious. Basically, he was so good, so young, in essentially every area of the game, his greatness couldn’t be held back.

Precocity alone has rarely produced career peaks. In retrospect, Seve Ballesteros peaked at 27. There’s a good chance Jordan Spieth reached his career peak at 23. But although Rory McIlroy won four majors by age 25, two of them by eight strokes, the ensuing years would reveal holes in his game that persisted until his recent Masters victory revealed a more complete player.

Jack Nicklaus emerged on tour with physical and mental tools that were clearly advanced. He was 25 when he won his fourth major, the 1965 Masters, probably his most dominant. But Nicklaus maintains that he didn’t reach his peak until his early 30s, when he became a better strategist and mental manager.

Woods, on the other hand, merged his optimal physical and mental skills sooner than anyone, with the possible exception of Young Tom Morris. From the age of 9, Woods had been refining the art of winning, learning to call on analytical and emotional control to a degree far beyond that of his peers, leading him to win three straight U.S Junior Amateurs followed immediately by three straight U.S. Amateurs. After only eight months as a professional, he used that foundation to fully access and maximize his physical superiority and won the Masters by 12 shots.

It was an unprecedented package:

• The speed and grace that wordlessly but emphatically announced athletic superiority.

• The technical excellence of a meticulous student of the swing and the short game.

• The articulated vision of “no limits,” with the end the heretofore mythical golfer “who has everything.”

• The work ethic born of seeing himself as an overachiever who never settles or is satisfied.

• The focus and concentration that his late mother Kultida said was evident in him as a toddler, and who as a junior golfer would learn the principles of self-hypnosis from the sports psychologist Jay Brunza, beginning a journey that as a professional had him exploring the challenge of “willing myself” into what has generally been considered the accidental state of “the zone.” It was his most fascinating gift, the ability to dig deep at the moment of truth and produce the winning shots. As he told author David Owen in 2000, “I guess the best way to describe it is that it’s the only thing that is going to happen. The ball has absolutely no options.”

• And a final X factor, perhaps the biggest difference maker, the unreal intensity of his competitive desire. The source of which, as he revealed in his 2023 World Golf Hall of Fame speech, was racial discrimination as a junior golfer. “At some of these golf courses, I was not allowed in the clubhouses where all the other juniors were,” Woods said. “The color of my skin dictated that. As I got older, that drove me even more.”

All of it was still in place when Woods emerged from a two-year swing change to win eight times in 1999, including his validating second major championship. Woods had become Woods and there was unanimous agreement that the best was yet to come.

By the start of 2000, he had put on about 20 pounds of muscle since first turning pro, up to 180 pounds, in the interests of achieving more clubhead stability through impact. Intentionally or not, he had followed same strengthening and thickening regimen that the two athletes he admired most—Jordan and Kobe Bryant—had employed early in their professional careers. Along with having his swing where he wanted it, Woods was in the best shape of his life, free of injury, adding more power to his game.

The swing change behind him, he was excited by the discoveries of just how good he could be, especially with a technical and historical guide like Butch Harmon, who Woods would pepper with questions about Hogan and Snead and the secrets of the greats. “He was like a sponge,” Harmon said.

On top of that, in October Woods underwent successful LASIK eye surgery, finding that “the hole looks bigger and I can read putts better.”

It was a sweet spot in his life. He was single and single-minded. Focused on golf, brimming with the joy and excitement about just how good he could become, riding what had been a nearly uninterrupted upward trajectory. As Woods had said at the end of 1999, “I like where my life is right now. It’s at a wonderful place.”

But it’s easy to misremember 2000 as one extended victory lap. Yes, it started with a thrilling mano a mano with Ernie Els at Kapalua, in which the two stars had each holed eagles from long distance on the 72nd hole before Woods prevailed in sudden death. Four weeks later at Pebble Beach, Woods overcame a seven-stroke deficit on the final seven holes with a rush of birdies and an eagle to pass Matt Gogel and win at Pebble Beach. In March, he won by four at Bay Hill.

But it wasn’t quite yet total domination. Phil Mickelson outdueled Woods down the stretch at Torrey Pines to end his winning streak at six. In February, Woods lost to Darren Clarke in the finals of the Accenture Match Play. And Hal Sutton beat him head-to-head in the final group at the Players.

Most disappointingly, Woods didn’t fire at the Masters, finishing fifth after an opening 75. As he embarked on a three-week break, he had work to do.

Spurred on by his neighbor and practice partner at Isleworth, Mark O’Meara, who won the 1998 Masters and British Open using the multi-layer, solid-core Top Flite Strata ball, Woods started experimenting with the new Nike Tour Accuracy ball. He liked how it felt, and how it flew.

Woods continued to play the wound, Balata-covered Titleist Tour Professional in his first tournament back, the GTE Byron Nelson, closing with a 63 that left him one shot out of a four-way playoff. But convinced that he would have won with the Nike, he resolved to play it the next week in Germany, where he finished third after uncharacteristically losing his two stroke, 54-hole lead. Still, he remained sold on the ball, and went to Memorial, where he shot a second-round 63 that he rated as his best competitive round as a professional before blitzing the field and leaving an ominous impression. “What do you want me to say,” Els said. “It’s over.” The man Woods was most often measured against, Nicklaus, magnanimously offered, “The golf he is playing is better than the golf I played.”

Woods would make one more important tweak two weeks later in a return to Pebble for the U.S. Open. In a more than two-hour, late-afternoon session on the practice putting green, Woods, determined that his posture was too hunched over and his hands too low, causing a flawed stroke and strike. When he stood a bit taller, moved his hands up slightly higher, it freed up his arm swing and aligned his eyes in a way that made the stroke effortless and got the ball rolling on line and hole-huntingly end over end.

Woods had 24 putts in his opening-round 65, some of them crucial momentum-sustaining par saves. He would one-putt 20 of the first 38 of Pebble’s extremely sloped greens while never three-putting over the 72 holes. Jesper Parnevik, who played first two rounds with Woods, eerily observed, “It was almost as if he was making the putts with his mind instead of his putter.” For his part, Woods considers it greatest putting week of his career.

After Valhalla, where he defeated Bob May in dramatic three-hole playoff, Woods ended the year with two iconic, 72nd-hole moments. First, in the very next week at Firestone, where he won by 11 shots, he played the last hole in almost total darkness but somehow nearly flew his 8-iron approach into the hole for a tap-in birdie. Then in early September at the Canadian Open, needing a birdie on the closing par 5 to preserve a one-stroke lead, Woods, from a fairway bunker, took on an ultra-perilous 200-yard carry over water with a 6-iron and flew it all the way to a narrowly cut back pin to lock up his ninth win of the year.

It was his last magical moment of 2000. At the Tour Championship in November, Woods held a one-stroke lead after 54 holes but was outplayed by Mickelson, who closed with 66. It marked the first time in 20 tries Woods had not gone on to win after holding the third-round lead in a PGA Tour event.

Woods would triumphantly complete the Tiger Slam at the 2001 Masters. By that time, he had lost some of the advantage he had gained with his ball switch because the vast majority of the rest of the tour began playing a multi-layer, solid-core golf ball. In the next few years, Woods probably gave up ground to the pack when he stuck with the 260cc head and 43½ inch, 120-plus-gram steel shaft of his driver when most other players were switching to 400-plus cc heads and lightweight graphite shafts in the 45-inch range. Woods would finally go to a 460cc head and slightly longer, 83-gram graphite shaft in 2004, but he would never again be the driver he was in 2000, where he ranked second in driving distance and he hit 71.22 percent of his fairways to rank 54th in driving accuracy, both career bests.

Which sounds like lamenting that Woods didn’t sustain the incredible level he attained for four months in 2000, and that would be foolish. It’s better to accept why he couldn’t. Which is that by accessing every dimension of his abilities, for a wondrous, ephemeral and very possibly ultimately debilitating moment, he reached the upper limits of his potential, a rare thing for any human being. When an athlete blessed with the innate greatness of Woods does it, it’s a gift to everyone. Thank you, Tiger.