Tiger Woods has made eight trips to Australia during his career. Our PGA Tour editor Evin Priest looks back on all of them with some inside stories.
IT was one of those rare moments when a scene unfolding in front of you is so surreal you assume a TV ad is being filmed. Tiger Woods gliding across the practice fairway on a hot, windy December day at Royal Melbourne Golf Club. I use the word gliding, not walking, because Woods takes on a certain posture when he’s focused on a golf course that forces his upper body to remain still while his legs continue to walk.
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While Woods looked like he was on a travellator at the airport, golfers at Royal Melbourne, one by one, started to top, shank, flub and blade their practice shots as they noticed the familiar figure of Woods on their very own range. Each golfer’s eyes lit up as Woods strode past. The way the horrible swings followed Woods looked identical to some of the cheesy Nike ads he starred in alongside hack weekend golfers in the 1990s and 2000s.
This was no TV ad, though. It was December 5, 2018. I’ll never forget the day, nor the trip. Woods had been Down Under on six occasions to play tournaments since he was a rookie pro in 1996. But, for whatever reason, I learned more about him on this rare non-competitive visit to Australia.
Air Force One
December 2018 aside, Woods has made few, if any, non-playing trips to Australia alongside seven competitive visits to our shores. (His late father, Earl, once referenced phoning Tiger, thinking he was at home in Florida, only to discover he was in Australia scuba diving but the golfer himself has never confirmed such a trip.)
Your correspondent was lucky enough to break the story two months prior, in October 2018, when I got wind that the rival Presidents Cup captains – Woods (USA) and Ernie Els (Internationals) – were going to make separate trips to Melbourne at the end of 2018 to promote the 2019 Cup a year before it was due to tee off. In fact, I found out in August, but had to wait for confirmation from Woods’ team and the PGA Tour. It was difficult to sit on a golf story that big.
Because the PGA Tour runs the Presidents Cup and captaining a team is more of a ‘love job’, which requires a lot of promotional work, I thought Woods would be irritable when he came down to Australia in 2018. After all, he’d had a long year. He’d contended in Majors, won the Tour Championship for his first PGA Tour title in five years, played at the Ryder Cup in Paris and now a 72-hour promotional mission to Australia. I had been allocated 15 minutes to interview Woods one-on-one at the par-3 fifth green at Royal Melbourne’s West course during a day when he was also obligated to film a couple of TV spots for the Presidents Cup.
But I’m a PGA Tour reporter and I know these things are fluid. They can be shortened or cancelled at the last minute. This is one of the greatest athletes who has ever lived and no interview is certain.
My stomach sank when I realised I was to interview Woods after a couple of young YouTube video creators, who perform sports stunts, were set to film content with Woods. They were throwing a golf ball from the tee at the fifth to the green and trying to get the ball closer to the hole than Woods, who was hitting one with an actual golf club. It was repetitive and plenty of takes were needed. I sat there in the stifling heat thinking, This does not bode well for my interview. However, Woods called me down to the green and from there I was able to ask him questions for 15 minutes, on everything from his 2018 campaign to his chances of winning a Major in 2019 (spoiler alert: he won the 2019 Masters at Augusta).
Woods hadn’t been to Australia since 2011, but he said the Alister MacKenzie-designed West course at Royal Melbourne looked as good as it always did. “It really hasn’t [changed]; it looks about the same,” Woods said that day. “This course is one of the most unique courses you can play; it’s so short, so fast and so tricky. But it’s always been one of my favourites to come down here because we don’t often get chances to play venues like this.”
Two junior golfers were then driven out in a golf cart to Woods, and he greeted them warmly and took them back to the practice fairway where he conducted a short clinic.
The next morning, after a charity dinner, Woods spent about four hours on the Southbank promenade of Melbourne. He appeared on both the Sunrise and Today TV programs, then held a press conference with reporters and finished by hitting putts on an artificial putting mat for the cameras. He even talked to AFL rookies who were in attendance.
I’d long been a Woods fan, but my opinion of him had more clarity after this trip. Nobody’s perfect, but I realised Woods was about as polite as someone could be after 28 years (going back even to high school) of people pulling him in every direction. He was gracious and warm to Australian fans, media and officials, even though he was jetlagged and required to run a three-day promotional marathon. In an ideal world, being nice shouldn’t be impressive. But when you’re one of the most in-demand athletes in the world, it is more difficult to be courteous when everyone wants a piece of you and your time.
Maiden voyage
Having turned pro only three months earlier, Tiger’s first trip to Australia as a professional golfer was in November 1996 for the Australian Open at The Australian Golf Club. Impressively, Woods shot 79-72-71-70 to share fifth place behind runaway winner, Greg Norman. I was too young to remember that trip but I do remember my old golf coach, Richard Flood, telling me stories years later about how he commentated for Channel 7 during that 1996 Australian Open and how Woods’ swing was “on a perfect circle. He took the club back on a perfect plane and brought it back to impact on the same plane”.
That was Sydney, but Woods has always adored the Melbourne Sandbelt. He tells anyone who’ll listen how it’s one of his favourite golf regions in the world. His obsession with the Sandbelt began in 1997. Woods, then a young superstar but not yet a Major winner, made his first trip to Melbourne to contest the Australian Masters at Huntingdale. He tied for eighth. That was in February, two months before he’d secure a historic win at another Masters – the one at Augusta National. Tens of thousands of fans lined the fairways at Huntingdale to get a glimpse of the kid wonder they’d read about in magazines and newspapers. This was years before
social media.
Woods showed the strategic discipline he would become famous for when he hit only one driver in the first round, despite knowing he probably could bomb his way to low scores on most courses. As a local journalist wrote that day, “A graphic impression of the slightly built young man’s power was provided with almost every shot. At the par-5 14th, at 554 metres (605 yards) one of the longest in Australian tournament golf, Woods humbled the hole with a 3-wood and 2-iron.”
The hysteria surrounding Tigermania was not anywhere near what it would become, but it was already enough to annoy some fellow pro golfers. Australian Brett Ogle, himself a two-time PGA Tour winner, snapped at fans who were running in his backswing while chasing Woods: “Tiger’s not the only one playing out here!”
Woods’ next trip to Australia came in 1998 – his Presidents Cup debut – and he demanded captain Jack Nicklaus line him up against Norman in the Sunday singles at Royal Melbourne. Woods beat the Shark on the 18th hole, but it meant little as the International team secured their only Cup victory to date.
Woods’ Sandbelt career peaked in 2009 when he picked apart Kingston Heath en route to winning the Australian Masters. Although his first appearance in Australia in 11 years cost the Victorian government a reported $3 million, Woods delighted fans with the kind of flighted iron shots and short game wizardry we had seen him deploy on links courses during the Open Championship. He led from start to finish. He came back in 2010 and finished fourth at Victoria Golf Club, his best finish in an official tournament that year, which was plagued by the aftermath of his off-course scandal which had actually first surfaced during his 2009 trip to Melbourne.
‘You’ll be flat out getting a beer’
The first time I ever saw Woods play in person was a special experience and it happened at the 2011 Australian Open at The Lakes in Sydney, which Woods used as a warm-up for another Presidents Cup at Royal Melbourne the week after.
It remains one of my favourite memories. I’d grown up a golf and Woods fan, and was finishing my journalism degree at the University of New South Wales – one suburb over from The Lakes. Two mates and I caught the train to Mascot and a shuttle to The Lakes for the first round and made a beeline for Woods (one mate split off to watch John Daly rinse a series of golf balls in the water at the par-5 11th). I remember Woods was grouped with Jason Day for the opening two rounds.
Afterwards, I had organised to catch a train into Sydney’s CBD and meet up with some other mates to go to a restaurant, but the two lads who’d come to The Lakes were heading home. I asked one of them, Pete, for a suggestion about how to kill time in between the golf finishing and the second set of mates arriving in the city. He said, “Go to a pub in Darlinghurst and put $20 in the pokies. Do 30-cent hits (bets). You’ll be flat out getting a beer.”
I followed his advice and put $20 in a machine, and by sheer luck it grew to $150. Confident, I upped the bets to $1.50 per hit. An in-game feature followed, and then the machine started spitting digital coins across the screen while telling me I had won $2,600. Some questionable regulars of this pub had gathered around me
to watch me hit the jackpot from a $20 investment.
My interactions with Woods as a reporter on the PGA Tour, years later in the US, were fantastic. But on that day in 2011, I didn’t think watching Woods could get any better. Woods went on to lead the Australian Open after 36 holes and wound up finishing third behind winner Greg Chalmers. The next week at the Presidents Cup, Woods won only two points for the USA from his five matches but it went unnoticed as they beat the Internationals 19-15 at Royal Melbourne.
Captain Woods
Because I was, at the time, the golf reporter for the Australian Associated Press based in the US on the PGA Tour, and because I had proven to Woods’ team that I was a reliable reporter, I was able to have several one-on-one interviews with Tiger in the lead-up to the 2019 Presidents Cup. After the December 2018 sit-down, I interviewed Woods in Los Angeles in February 2019 and then again in Japan in October the same year, when I was there to cover the PGA Tour’s Zozo Championship.
It was held at the Accordia Narashino Country Club, just outside Tokyo, and I had one of the coolest experiences of my career. To get some final Presidents Cup stories in the can, Woods’ team had organised for me to walk a hole or two with him during a Wednesday practice round. I remember asking Woods what was the first thing he thought of when I brought up Australia.
“First thing? Kangaroo,” he laughed. “No, for me as a person who has gone down to Oz a lot, I love the fact that you guys are so into sport. The whole country, whatever sport it is, they support their country. Knowing all the Aussie guys over the years, the fact they have to travel so far to compete, that’s not easy to do. Just a simple thing like Tri Nations [rugby], you had to travel. For the golfers who have come over to the States to compete, it’s not easy to do and I have a lot of respect over the years for the guys who have done that. Whether it was Norman before me, or Peter Thomson before him, or ‘Finchy’ (Ian Baker-Finch) – you have to make a lot of effort to go around the world and play because it’s so far from home.”
Woods has been able to charm reporters all around the world for decades by dropping little displays of knowledge about the reporter’s homeland. It’s not a bad thing; it shows he is willing to make an effort to relate, however briefly, to professionals working in his industry. But speaking about the Tri Nations was particularly impressive, though, because there are plenty of Australians who don’t know enough about rugby union to know what that is.
After I’d asked all my questions, Woods and his caddie Joe LaCava – who I’d also gotten to know a little bit on tour through my good friend, New York Post golf and NFL writer Mark Cannizzaro – did not indicate they wanted me to leave. In fact, they were enjoying a chat, so I hung around. We walked another couple of holes and Woods was visibly excited when talking about getting to play Royal Melbourne two months later. He was asking me how Royal should play in December given what I’d heard about the weather and condition of the Composite course.
He talked about how he wanted to perfect the low, slinging draw with his long irons in the lead-up to December in case he needed it for conservative tee shots. He couldn’t wait. That week in Japan, Woods went on to win the inaugural Zozo Championship to capture his 82nd PGA Tour title and complete his 2019 comeback season, six months after winning the Masters.
A cup for the ages
When the 2019 Presidents Cup arrived, there was an electricity in the air that felt more like an Olympics or a Rugby World Cup. Melbourne had the energy of a European megacity in summer. Celebrities like Shane Warne and world No.1 tennis star Ash Barty were in town to watch their second love in sport: golf. Woods’ form suggested he was going to have a huge Presidents Cup campaign, especially as a rare playing captain, and that’s exactly how it panned out. The 15-time Major winner wowed the large Melbourne crowds by hitting his signature laser iron shots and producing magic around the greens. A 3&2 win over International team member Abraham Ancer in the Sunday singles included seven birdies in 16 holes for Woods. He was by far the best player at the 13th edition of the Presidents Cup and the only player on either team who did not suffer a loss at Royal Melbourne that week.
Woods had won 15 Majors and 82 PGA Tour titles and was enjoying one of the greatest comebacks in the history of sport. But he still had hunger to perform and dominate that week in Melbourne. So I asked him, in the press conference after the USA had won, where he would rank his victorious captain’s debut among his greatest achievements. “Just to be a part of this, with all of the 11 other [American] players, is truly an experience that I will cherish forever,” he said.
For the Australian golf fans, the feeling is mutual.
