It’s Genesis Open week on the PGA Tour, the home of Hogan, and the place where, at 16 years-old, Tiger made his PGA Tour debut.
It was an extremely big deal at the time, as you can imagine — so big, in fact, that CBS’ Sunday Morning devoted an entire segment to the young phenom, which you can watch below.
There’s all kinds of interesting stuff packed into that almost 10 minute segment, but the part I found most enlightening was the footage of Earl trying to distract Tiger while he was playing. We’ve heard lots of stories of Earl Woods toughening-up Tiger by trying to get in his head while they were playing, but it’s fun to see Earl actually do it — and even more shocking to see it actually work!
Here, Tiger is pictured making a few practice strokes hitting a short putt. As you can see, Earl putts him off by putting his putter in the way to block his routine.
And then, a few seconds later, we see a young Tiger missing the putt.
It’s moments like these we seldom get to see, but are fascinating when we do. It helped train Tiger’s bulletproof on-course mentality that has propelled him to the very height of the game.
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