‘Never been that nervous’: Tiger Woods’ ex-caddie revisits his biggest gaffe

Ed note: Of Tiger Woods’ endless accomplishments, his fabled Tiger Slam of 2000-01 — when he simultaneously held all four major titles — ranks near, if not at, the top. After all, so many things need to go right for a player to win one major, let alone four straight, while so many things can also go wrong on a would-be road to greatness. Bad back. Cold putter. Even a caddie misstep. Ask Steve Williams, who was Woods’ caddie during that historic four-for-four run.

Williams is a looping legend. He didn’t make many on-the-job mistakes, but he did make at least one — and it was a biggie. It came in the second round of the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, which Woods completed on Saturday on account of inclement weather. We pick up the action on Friday evening, as told by Kevin Cook in his new book, “The Tiger Slam,” which captures the full scope of Woods’ streak in riveting and colorful detail. You may pick up a copy here.

The following passage was excerpted with permission from “The Tiger Slam: The Inside Story of the Greatest Golf Ever Played,” Avid Reader Press © 2024 by Kevin Cook

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The Tiger Slam

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Twenty-five years ago, Tiger Woods achieved the greatest feat in golf history: the “Tiger Slam.” Now, for the first time, the award-winning author of Tommy’s Honor delivers a riveting account of Tiger at his most brilliant—dominating the game in a way we will never see again.

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Woods spent part of Friday night practicing putting on the carpet in his room at the Lodge at Pebble Beach. Asleep by midnight, he woke early on Saturday to meet his coach, Butch Harmon, and Williams on the range at 5:00 a.m., leaving a few balls in the room. It was sweater weather. At first, the light was worse than when the second round was called on account of darkness, but it improved as the sun rose over the range.

NBC pre-empted Saturday-morning cartoons and the Saturday edition of the Today show for unscheduled “bonus coverage” of golf beginning at 6:30, Tiger Woods’s tee time. NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol said there was no coincidence behind the schedule change. “In the TV age there have been two people who have attracted viewers beyond their sport, Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan,” Ebersol said. “Tiger Woods is clearly the third.” He wasn’t concerned about losing viewers if the leader blew the field away. Tiger’s 12-shot victory at the 1997 Masters was (and still is) the highest-rated golf telecast of all time.

It was going to be more than a two-peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwich sort of day. Before teeing off for what promised to be a marathon of a third round, he had to play Pebble’s last six holes without giving strokes back to the field. He and Williams met Jim Furyk, Jesper Parnevik, and their caddies at the 13th tee. While the players loosened up with a few final practice swings, Williams reached into Tiger’s golf bag for a ball and didn’t like what he found there.

There were only three Nike Tour Accuracys in the pouch that held them. Williams checked other pouches and found nothing but tees, sandwiches, and a raincoat. Tiger had left three balls, half their supply, in his hotel room.

No worries, Williams told himself. Three balls would be plenty to play the last six holes of the second round. It would probably leave them with two extra. Williams wasn’t overly worried when Tiger pulled his first drive of the morning into the rough and slashed out, leaving a scuff mark on his brand-new Nike ball, and tossed the ball to a little boy in the gallery. Now they were down to two. Williams thought about asking the boy to give the ball back but didn’t want to make a scene on international TV. “It wouldn’t be a good look if Tiger Woods’s caddie took a ball off a happy kid,” he recalled. “There would be tears.”

He kept his thoughts to himself as his player reached the 18th tee leading the tournament at nine under par. Then Hogan’s rattlesnake struck. After two and a half days of piercing fairways, Tiger launched a hook “halfway to Hawaii,” as he put it later. He cursed himself: “Goddamn you, f–king prick!” An NBC microphone caught every syllable. Within minutes, viewers were phoning the network to complain about his language.

The same mic caught Tiger’s next word. Turning to Williams he stuck out his hand and said, “Ball.”

It was Williams’s worst moment. The broad-shouldered Kiwi was perhaps the fittest, toughest caddie on Earth as well as the most famous, a distinction that went to whoever carried Tiger’s bag. He raced dirt-track cars back home in New Zealand and kept pace with the player he called “Tigah” on their frequent morning runs. Williams had laughed off car crashes, blisters, shin splints, and even the chaos of following around the most visible golfer on the planet, but here was a more private discomfort. “I have never, ever been that nervous,” he recalled. “I am standing there with my backside trembling. My butt cheeks were absolutely clamoring. I don’t want to tell him it’s our last golf ball!”

Tiger was in no mood to stand there waiting. “Give me another f–king ball.”

Williams had found his way into a caddie’s nightmare. One part of his job was checking their supply of balls before every round. He had done it before the second round began but had forgotten to check through the bag before they resumed play on the back nine that morning. Now he was afraid he might get his player disqualified in the middle of the U.S. Open. Tiger, who knew the Rules of Golf as well as anyone, could have told him that the situation wasn’t necessarily so desperate. But it was complicated. The Rules of Golf allow a player who runs out of balls to borrow one from another golfer, provided it is the same make and model. That clause might have saved Williams’s backside a month before, when Tiger was teeing up the same Titleist so many other players used, but it was no help now. Only one player in the field had even one Bridgestone-make Nike ball. Under the rules, a player who borrows and uses a different model of ball incurs a two- stroke penalty. Another option would be for Williams to run to the clubhouse and buy more balls, but the Tour Accuracy wasn’t on sale in pro shops. Or he could sprint to Tiger’s hotel room to grab the three balls he had left behind, but he’d never make it back in time to avoid a two-stroke penalty for slow play. So they were looking at two strokes either way.

Tiger knew none of that. Williams wasn’t about to tell him that if he hooked another one to the beach, he would lie four on the tee at Pebble’s 18th hole after two lost balls and two penalty strokes. Add another penalty for using one of Furyk’s or Parnevik’s Titleists — now he’d be lying six. Not even he would be able to knock a 543-yard drive from the tee into the cup for a double bogey. In that scenario, after lying six on the tee, he would need to “birdie” the hole to make a quintuple-bogey 10. There goes most, if not all, of the biggest lead in U.S. Open history, with Williams to blame for the biggest screw-up in caddying history.

He put Tiger’s driver back into the bag, silently willing him to play safer with a 3-wood off the tee this time. But Tiger was determined to swing the big stick. He reached for the driver.

“Take your f–king hand off that,” Woods said. “Give me the f–king driver!”

Williams handed it over. He watched and worried while Tiger belted a drive to the right-hand side of the fairway. He was lying three with a tree, the lone cypress that stood in the middle of the fairway, blocking his way to the green. From there, a layup to the left was the sensible play. He could still save his 6 with a wedge and a putt that way. “But he wants to hit a big cut out over the ocean,” remembered Williams, who still didn’t admit they were down to one ball. Lips zipped, he watched his man open the clubface of his 3-wood and bang a long, looping left-to-right approach that flirted with disaster all the way to the green. As it curled back over the savior bunker between the beach and the last hundred yards of the fairway, Williams felt his backside relax. “My heart rate didn’t return to normal until he’d reached the green and made bogey.”

Even after dropping a shot on a birdie hole, Tiger led by six strokes through two rounds. No one had ever held such a commanding lead at the midway point of a U.S. Open. Later that morning, the field was trimmed to the customary top 60 players plus ties plus anyone else within 10 shots of the lead. Tiger was so far ahead that the “within 10 shots” provision didn’t help anybody. Only 17 of the 63 golfers who survived to play the last two rounds were within 10 shots of him.

In the third round, on what was a brutal day for scoring, Woods shot even-par 71 to stay at eight under and open his lead to 10. On Sunday, a closing 67 moved him to 12 under and put a cap on what was perhaps the most dominant week the game has ever seen. Woods became the first player in U.S. Open history to finish at double-digits under par, and his 15-shot win is still the largest margin of victory in major championship history.