Chris Como is one of the few people in the world who can say he was Tiger Woods’ teacher, which makes him uniquely suited to speak about Woods’ training and tendencies.
Como worked with Tiger for three years, but their partnership ended in 2017. Although Como’s latest high-profile student has been on quite the run himself — Bryson DeChambeau won the U.S. Open last month and has been the talk of the golf world in 2020.
And it turns out Woods and DeChambeau have a lot in common. Appearing on this week’s Subpar Podcast with Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz, Como was asked about any similarities Woods and DeChambeau might share.
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“Tiger obviously is known for his work ethic, but when I was working with him his body didn’t have the capacity to hit a ton of balls; he was very strategic with how much time he spent hitting balls just because of his back and all that,” Como said. “Bryson has the work ethic that I would imagine Tiger had in his prime, so there’s that sort of comparison. Just that overall curiosity. They are both curious people, they both love trying to understand the game and their own swings, just really going deep into the thought of what makes this all work. Both very smart and curious.”
Woods, despite all of his success, changed his body and swing (a few times) over the past two decades, and DeChambeau went through a well-documented transformation of his body over the past year. Como said they both aren’t afraid to take risks to better their games.
“They have this vision, this goal in their mind and they are willing to sort of say, ‘OK, I’m going to take the risk to kind of achieve that,’ because at the end of the day there’s a cost of doing nothing also,” he said. “How many people have not ever tried to get better and lost their Tour card? So people cherry-pick the stories of a guy making a swing change and loses his card, but there’s also people that didn’t make swing changes and were kind of like stagnant and lost their card. So you got to look at both sides of it.”
You can check out Como’s entire Subpar appearance below.