After the Masters, Tiger Woods said he put his clubs in the closet for about 10 days. Now? He’s back in tournament action with a brand new set of TaylorMade irons. He explained how he and TaylorMade arrived at that point during a pre-tournament press conference Wednesday at the Wells Fargo Championship.
“Well, they basically look the same,” he said of the new irons. “The back is a little bit different. But I really don’t care what you put on the back of the club as long as it looks good in the playing position and it flies through the windows that I want and goes the distances that I want. Other than that you can put whatever you want on the back.”
Woods added that many of the specs are unchanged, including the bounce and configuration. The sticking points in the process serve as a reminder of just how meticulous Woods is when it comes to choosing his clubs.
“The difficulty through this process was trying to go with the right metal,” he said. “For me, I prefer a different metal than what TaylorMade was using and also a different groove configuration than what TaylorMade was using.”
An added difficulty, Woods said, was going through the process without overextending himself coming off back surgery. “We had to be very cautious of how much we hit,” he said.
Woods also emphasized the importance of a well-fit set of clubs when discussing Masters champion Patrick Reed.
“You’ve gotta hand it to him because you look at his set of clubs and he piecemealed it together. And you don’t understand how much effort that takes, the amount of practice that takes to piece a set like that together,” Woods said.
The hardest part of this week’s event? Woods thinks it may come off the tee. “You’ve gotta get the ball in the fairway here because you need to have spin coming into these greens,” he said. “These greens are tough from the fairway, let alone from the rough, so it’s imperative to get the ball in play.”
Woods tees it up alongside Brooks Koepka and Reed at 12:50 p.m. ET on Thursday.
