When Tiger Woods “was running a little warm,” Steve Williams says, you could tell. He walked quicker. He talked quicker. Things sped up. Woods’ adrenaline was doing its thing.
So Williams would do his.
But giving Woods wrong yardages wasn’t without risk, though.
Hold on. Tiger Woods, 15-time major winner, hit to numbers given incorrectly by his caddie? Really? That was the word from Williams, Woods’ looper from 1999 to 2011 and the guest on the most recent episode of GOLF’s “Subpar” podcast, which you can watch in full here.
The subject came up when “Subpar” co-host Drew Stoltz asked Williams how he handled Woods when Woods was feeling stirred.
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“Well, the one thing I always noticed with Tiger when he was running a little warm is the adrenaline that he would get going,” Williams said. “And I could tell when the adrenaline was going, he would walk quicker, he would talk quicker, everything became a little bit quicker. And the biggest thing I did was adjust the yardages all the time.
“I was constantly doing that.”
On “Subpar,” Stoltz asked Williams if Woods knew what his caddie was doing.
“Yeah, it took him a little while to do it,” Williams said on the podcast. “The first time I did it, or the first big-time moment was on the 17th hole of the 2000 PGA Championship when Tiger had that unbelievable battle with Bob May. We got to that 17th hole. The yardage said that it was a 56-degree wedge and I just knew Tiger could get a 60 there. So I moved the yardage back so that he hit a full 60. That pin was on the front there, and [his ball] barely cleared the bunker and he makes birdie and goes on to win it in a playoff. Now had I been wrong, had that have mucked up and he hit it in the bunker, he wouldn’t have known, but that was the first time I did it.
“And then I can’t pinpoint exactly when he asked me something about it and whatever, but he said you just keep doing it, you know what you’re doing.”
Once, Williams said he adjusted yardages for the entire round.
“I’d be adjusting the yardage so often because he just got the adrenaline going and the ball started going further and further,” he said on Subpar. “So I had to be extremely aware of that and I got a very good handle on that to the point where I can recall one round at Bay Hill in the final round of one of his victories there, I didn’t give him the the right yardage, the correct yardage, on any shot for the entire round.”
The move wasn’t seamless, though, Williams said on the podcast.
“Now, you got to be careful when you’re on a par-3,” he said, “and one guy is saying it’s 195, which I know would be, say, a 6-iron and I’m telling Tiger it’s only 183. So, he hits the 7 on it, but doesn’t hit it as hard as he should be hitting it.”
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