The greatest gig: Steve Williams shares how he started caddieing for Tiger.
Considering all the time Tiger Woods and Steve Williams spent together during a dominant dozen years, it’s stunning how little they’ve communicated in the 14 years since their highly publicised break-up. That’s one of the lasting impressions one gets when reading Williams’ new book, Together We Roared, which is written in the third person with co-author, Australian Golf Digest’s Evin Priest. At long last, Williams opens up about one of the most successful partnerships in sports history. The New Zealander caddied for Woods from 1999 to 2011, playing an important role in 13 of Tiger’s 15 career major championship titles. Williams was Woods’ literal shoulder to cry on at one of those majors, the 2006 Open Championship, when Woods won for the first time since his father, Earl, died. They shared a strong bond that extended well beyond the golf course with Woods serving as the best man in Williams’ wedding. However, they didn’t end on good terms with Woods firing Williams, primarily for going against his wishes by continuing to caddie for Adam Scott while Woods was injured. Williams made the situation worse with a racist remark a few months later at an awards dinner. Williams apologised, but that was pretty much the end of their relationship. Now with so much time having passed, Williams fondly looks back at what was overall a magical journey alongside one of the game’s greatest. Here are five select passages from the book’s first chapter that detail the duo’s early days together. – Alex Myers
The phone call
The hotel room phone rang about 8pm on Tuesday, March 2, 1999, in Miami Beach, Florida. Its tinny, high-pitched buzz was particularly annoying for veteran golf caddie Steve Williams, an early riser who didn’t appreciate late-night calls at the best of times, certainly not the day after he’d landed from a 20-hour, 8,000-mile journey from Auckland, New Zealand. Williams was slumped over the bed, half asleep but trying to stay awake until 9 in an attempt to thwart jet lag. Normally, he’d stay at the house of his boss, golf star Raymond Floyd, in nearby Indian Creek Island, but it was full of guests. They were in town to watch Floyd play his home event, the PGA Tour’s prestigious Doral-Ryder Open.
Reluctantly, Williams picked up the phone. After all, it could be important.
“Steve… Hey, it’s Tiger Woods!” an excited, young voice said.
“Bob, f–k off, mate. I’m going to bed,” Williams responded. Annoyed, but chuckling at the accuracy of the imitation, Williams hung up. He thought it was a prank call by his friend in Oregon, Bob Garza. Williams had a house in the SunRiver Golf Club community in central Oregon, where Garza was one of the club’s golf professionals. He did an outstanding Woods impression.
The phone rang again. “Steve, it really is Tiger. You got a minute?”
Crunch. Williams slammed the phone down again, more forcefully.
It rang a third time.
“Steve, it’s Tiger! Please don’t hang up!” the exasperated voice said. “I’ve split with my caddie. I’d love to talk to you about possibly working for me.”
Williams’ stomach sank; maybe it wasn’t Garza. Maybe it was Woods. Feeling silly about hanging up twice on the world’s No.1 golfer, Williams apologised instantly and arranged to meet Woods as soon as the Doral tournament was finished. (Years later, Woods would remember the awkward phone calls when he met Garza face-to-face during a practice round at the 2002 New Zealand Open. Williams had arranged for Garza to play a practice round with Woods, who said to a starstruck Garza, “So you’re the guy who can take off my voice?”)
The first meeting
On Monday, March 8, Williams drove three-and-a-half hours north up I-95 to Woods’ house in Orlando. At the entrance to Isleworth Country Club, a gated community within Windermere, 14 miles south-west of Orlando, Williams was asked to show his driver’s licence to security. He weaved through streets of multi-million-dollar homes en route to Woods’ house: a gorgeous, oak-lined property on a cove on Lake Bessie. Woods’ neighbours included baseball legend Ken Griffey Jnr, Los Angeles Lakers centre Shaquille O’Neal and Hollywood star Wesley Snipes.
Williams felt the drive into Isleworth had a sense of both grandeur and seriousness, but he had to suppress a laugh moments later when Woods, 23, answered the door in Nike gym apparel and
invited Williams inside but said he was finishing a war mission on a video game.
Williams sat quietly for five minutes on the golfer’s couch, thinking how strange the situation was. He was about to be interviewed for a job with an athlete many were predicting would single-handedly change the game of golf and become a cultural force unto himself. That much seemed likely when he’d won the 1997 Masters by 12 shots and broken down everything from scoring records to racial barriers in a globally celebrated moment. But here that superstar was, leaning half off the couch and tapping away furiously on a controller during a first-person shooter game. Williams, 35, had been an amateur caddie since childhood and a globe-trotting professional bagman since 1978. But he hadn’t seen anything like this. Williams was fascinated that Woods, young, famous and as talented as a golfer could be, was playing video games. One link Williams could make between the video games and golf was the intensity Woods was showing the TV; his small talk could not break Woods’ focus. Woods eventually turned the TV off and explained to Williams that he was looking for a new, full-time caddie. “Tiger said, in no uncertain terms, that he was going to break Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 major wins, and he needed a caddie who was willing to work as hard as he would to help him achieve that goal,” Williams recalls.
Washing cars
On the Monday after the Bay Hill Invitational (their first tournament together produced an inauspicious T-56), Williams stayed at Woods’ house, and the pair took their minds off the previous week by washing Woods’ cars. Woods, prior to signing a deal with Buick in December 1999, was a fan of the Cadillac Escalade, a large SUV. He had several models along with a Porsche in his Isleworth garage.
“We really bonded because I took immense pride in washing my cars; it’s therapeutic to me because you see a car dirty, then you see it clean,” Williams says. That day, the two started a joke that would last for years. Because Woods had played poorly at Bay Hill, where Williams called him overrated, he joked to his caddie, “If I don’t get my shit together, you’ll be working for me at TW’s Car Wash. I need to get my ass into gear, and you do, too.” That line came after every bad round.
[Mark] O’Meara, though, saw a little more meaning in the hobby; washing one’s car indicated you were a stickler for perfection, and if you wanted something done properly, you did it yourself. One day in 1999, he drove by Woods’ house and saw him and Williams soaping up Woods’ vehicles. “He had this incredible, mid-engine Porsche,” O’Meara recalls. “Steve was a perfectionist, so was Tiger. To be successful at anything in life, you have to be a perfectionist. They were a great match.”
Dawn-Thirty
Williams knew, over decades looping on tours, that it was critical in the early stages of caddieing with a new player to develop a rapport and banter with that person. “In the player-caddie dynamic, there are never any guarantees it’s going to work out, and you spend a lot of time together,” Williams says.
Woods and Williams showed early signs of a special bond. His next tournament was the elite Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass near Jacksonville, Florida. Over dinner on Monday, March 22, Williams and Woods discussed what time to meet at TPC Sawgrass for a practice round the next morning. One of the most important disciplines for a caddie was punctuality, specifically, being at the course well before his boss arrived.
“Let’s meet at ‘dawn thirty’,” Woods said.
Williams had never heard of the term. “I’m guessing that means 30 minutes after dawn?”
“Exactly,” Woods grinned.
Woods relished practice rounds at Sawgrass without thousands of fans asking for autographs and taking photos of him walking between greens and tees. He could conserve energy. Williams also got a good look at the course when nobody was around; he and Woods could see the entirety of each hole and its landscape without crowds. Williams found it soothingly peaceful; there was often mist in the air and fog coming off ponds on golf courses early in the morning.
There was a fly in the ointment, though. Often, Woods would play practice rounds before the superintendents, who already woke at the crack of dawn, had started work. “We’d have to wait on each hole as they cut the fairways or greens,” Williams says.
The Gatekeeper
One of Williams’ duties was to create a bubble around Woods, so he could get in quality practice on the range. Woods was rigorously disciplined, and the range was his office. His looper needed to keep people away politely, regardless of who wanted to chit-chat.
“Tiger had a signal; he would take a slight peek out of his peripherals to see who it was, and he would flick his head to indicate he wanted me to ask them to leave but in a friendly manner,” Williams says. He would tell that person Woods was working on something in his swing and ask them to come back later or when he was finished practising. Constantly, fans, volunteers and officials would tell Woods random stories – they’d played with him in the pro-am the previous year or they’d watched one of his victories in person – or a tournament director would want to greet the event’s drawcard.
“If Tiger talked to everyone, he wouldn’t have time to hit a single golf ball,” Williams says. “He
was the ultimate professional. He was there to get work done.”
Woods also had a deeply ingrained pet peeve: the click of a camera’s shutter going off during his swing. Williams needed to be on constant alert for photographers attempting to take swing sequence photos for newspapers and magazines.
“Sometimes guys would be hiding in the distance taking photos, and I’d have to be very quick to hear and locate where that was coming from,” Williams says. Woods also became frustrated if a path he was taking at a tournament became obstructed by swaths of fans. As well, he’d often exit a car and a crowd of people would be waiting in the carpark for pictures and signatures. “The smoother you could make the journey from A to B for him, the better it was going to be for everybody,” Williams says. “It was stressful, but it was also the job I signed up for, no question.”
Excerpted with permission from the book Together We Roared by Steve Williams and Evin Priest, to be published on April 1 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2025.
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