Golf’s most famous partnership began with a prank call. At least, Steve Williams thought it was a prank call.
“The phone rings, and it’s pretty late, half-past nine,” Williams remembers. It was Feb. 1999 and he’d just arrived in Miami for the tournament at Doral, where he’d be caddying for Raymond Floyd. But while he’d been in the air from New Zealand, Tiger Woods had split with looper Mike “Fluff” Cowan. A caddie search was afoot.
“The gentleman on the other end of the phone says, ‘It’s Tiger Woods here,'” Williams says. “And I had a mate who could take Tiger’s voice off to a tee, and I thought it was him, so I put the phone down.”
Williams’ phone rang again.
“I said, ‘Look, Bob, I’m tired, give me a ring tomorrow, I’ve just flown in from New Zealand,’ and I put the phone down again.
“It rang back again and I thought, ‘Maybe it’s not Bob,’ and actually it was Tiger. We got off to a pretty good start there, he thought that was pretty good.”
That’s how it began, the partnership that would produce 13 major championships, 63 PGA Tour wins and dozens more victories around the world. That story also serves as the introduction to Williams’ latest venture, a podcast series called Chasing Majors, in which he and Aussie golf journalist Evin Priest comb through each of the major championships won by the team of Woods and Williams.
The series marks an extended and unprecedented peek behind the curtain for Woods fans; each episode runs roughly an hour and dives into the nitty-gritty of Woods’ greatest triumphs. There are little insights — like how they’d agree meet to hit balls at “dawn-thirty,” which meant a half-hour after the sun rose — and there are more dramatic stories, too, like Williams challenging Woods’ read on a high-pressure putt or an incident Priest teased involving a helicopter in Thailand in 2000.
“I don’t want to pretend that no golf writer hasn’t ever sat Steve down before and got him in a candid setting, and I’m very respectful of the great golf writers and presenters who have interviewed Steve over many years,” Priest said. “But for whatever reason, he just seemed to let his guard down with me and I was able to ask the right questions and extract some really good stories.”
Priest called the podcast “a lockdown passion project” produced from his home in Sydney; the biggest challenge was getting the famously reticent Kiwi on board. But Priest had spent time around Williams during his tenure caddying for Adam Scott and the two appreciated each other’s style.
“I knew when to have some chit-chat and ask [Williams] a question and I knew when to shut up and let him and Adam practice and I think he appreciated that,” Priest said.
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