TULSA, Okla. — There’s nothing I enjoy more than going to the driving range of a professional golf tournament. It’s a fun, fascinating, bizarre place.
The driving range was the first place I went when I arrived at Southern Hills on Wednesday at the PGA Championship, and by happy accident, I found myself catching the very end of Tiger Woods’ range session before heading out for his final practice round of the tournament.
Tiger was hitting two irons at a time — a new addition to the bag this week — alternating between low stingers and normal-trajectory shots, both off the tee. As I wrote about on Tuesday, Tiger rarely hits the same two shots in a row on the driving range, and it was no different here.
After a handful of 3-woods, Tiger reached for his driver. It was the final moments before he hit the course, and here’s what happened:
- He started alternating between draws and fades with each shot.
- Then, he stopped working the ball from side-to-side, and started altering his swing speed. His accuracy-focused drives went from carrying in the 270 range to the 290 range, when he sacrificed some accuracy for added speed.
- And then, moments before his tee time, he put the driver back in his bag, reached for a short iron, and made two slow and smooth swings for tempo. He wanted solid contact with smooth tempo — ideal feelings to take to the course.
Watch the video below to see me talking about Tiger’s Wednesday range session:
Luke Kerr-Dineen
Golf.com Contributor
Luke Kerr-Dineen is the Game Improvement Editor at GOLF Magazine and GOLF.com. In his role he oversees the brand’s game improvement content spanning instruction, equipment, health and fitness, across all of GOLF’s multimedia platforms.
An alumni of the International Junior Golf Academy and the University of South Carolina–Beaufort golf team, where he helped them to No. 1 in the national NAIA rankings, Luke moved to New York in 2012 to pursue his Masters degree in Journalism from Columbia University. His work has also appeared in USA Today, Golf Digest, Newsweek and The Daily Beast.
