Hello World!
(Hello News of the World!)

I’ve been rewatching Tiger Woods' 1997 US Masters victory recently, though admittedly, for me, saying that is a bit like saying: “I’m alive, and it is spring.” It’s a Masters I watch a lot, which is odd, in a sense. 1997 was not a year when I was in a particularly golfy frame of mind. I did not rush out onto the course in its aftermath, dizzy with inspiration, as I did when Fred Couples won in 1992, or when Ian Woosnam won the year before that. It was also a Masters that lacked the Sunday excitement that 1990s golf viewers had begun to take dangerously for granted: none of that Amen Corner adrenalin rush where you suddenly feel like you need a notepad next to you on the sofa to keep track of who’s made what eagle or which Rae’s Creek cock-up where and how many people are still in contention. No: Augusta 1997 was a tournament that was well and truly over by Sunday, won by a man I would find it difficult to justify including in my top-10 favourite golfers of all time, and which has none of the accompanying personal nostalgia that normally cements these things in the memory. Yet, somehow, I find myself repeatedly coming back to it.

So what is 1997’s appeal? In part, I think that it’s that it’s simultaneously the last Old Masters and the first New Masters. The drivers being used could now be mistaken for 3-woods, so small are their heads, and 463 yards is still considered a “long par-four”, but second shots of unheard of loft are being hit into par-fives.

There’s still a genuine feeling, perhaps for the last time, that the likes of Jack Nicklaus and Tom Kite might be able to win a major (I’m not including Tom Watson in this, because he’s since proved himself a superhuman anomaly). At the same time, they’re being lapped by an entirely new golfing animal: a player who hits the ball 50 yards past them off the tee, without driving even being blatantly the strongest point of his game.

In a class of his own: With Mike 'Fluff' Cowan on his bag, Tiger was rampant in '97, winning the Masters with a record-breaking performance that has never been matched. If he were to watch the tape of that triumph again, might it help enable him to put more spark into his life? (Photography Augusta National Archive/Getty Images)

Is this the Tiger Woods we’ve come to know since then? I think, on the whole, it is not. The swing’s not all that dissimilar – although actually probably even less dissimilar to Adam Scott’s – and the signature air-punches are there, but there’s a freedom in the way he moves, over the ball and around it, that’s actually quite shocking if you’ve not watched it for many years. You can put the contrast down to youth – the same difference between the flared, flowing Seve of Lytham 1979 and the reined in version of 1988 – but it’s more than that. Tiger has gone on to achieve so much since 1997 that there’s a tendency to let the dominance of his performance in his first major victory slip the mind. He’s always been long off the tee, but then, so are a lot of people, nowadays. In 1997, he was a different kind of long. Previously, you would have laughed excitedly to see someone hit a 6-iron into Augusta’s par five 15th. Here, in1997, in round one, was a 21 year-old who could get home with a drive and a wedge, and, he told us at the press conference, that was “without forcing anything”.

Since the revelations about Tiger’s sexual indiscretions first came to light last November, there’s been a lot of talk about how much more surprising they were coming from him rather than some less clean cut and reputable athlete. A premiership footballer does that kind of thing, but not Tiger Woods. I’d argue that the opposite is true. Try to live a perfect life – which Tiger obviously did, at least publicly – and, when the cracks show, they’ll be that much deeper and wider. You could blame his problems on his own feeling of invincibility, bolstered by a force field of money and power that could keep his dalliances secret from a public who believed him to be Mr Straight, but you could also blame them on overpacked suitcase syndrome: he could press down on the lid, but pretty soon, the contents were going to come spilling out.

I think the 1997 Masters could be viewed as quite instructive in all this. Tiger’s public persona has long seemed buttoned-up and tightly smiling, but his golf, for all its brilliance, has long been the same, too. That much rhapsodised “stinger” shot he plays with his 3-wood? Very nice. However, personally I’d swap it any day for the full-blooded shot he hits with the same club on the 14th on the final day in 1997, leaving himself a sand-iron to the green. He’s properly loose here. Even on the very first hole, when he sprays his drive, there’s something relaxed about his reaction: it looks like squishy, natural upset, rather than bottled-up, rigid frustration.

There is a very real sense, rewatching Tiger in 1997, that everything we’ve got from him since then, in major championship victory terms, has been an edited version of The Real Thing. This is a viewpoint that goes against the grain. It is, after all, the more familiar, dominant frontrunner Tiger – the one who seems genuinely capable of winning every tournament he enters – who doesn’t fully emerge until the 2000 US Open. But, for me, it’s during his dominant 2000 season when Tiger starts to lose just a bit of his sheen. I’d actually date the changeover from 1999, which, either significantly or not, also happens to be the year that he parted company with his original caddie, Fluff Cowan, and replaced him with Steve Williams.

Woods has always obviously had an unusually close bond with Williams, but it’s always seemed more like the bond of a star and his favourite bodyguard, whereas his moments of enjoyment with Fluff seem more like the precious ones enjoyed by an energetic kid and his groovy uncle. In 1997, it adds to the sense that he’s hugely enjoying himself in a way he never has since in quite the same way. And I’m not just saying that because I like the Grateful Dead and am currently sporting a considerable thatch of facial hair.

Dancing was once called “the vertical expression of the horizontal”. I’m not sure you can equate golf with sex in quite the same way, but it’s perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest that the repression of Tiger’s long game over the last decade might be a slight factor in the lack of repression of his clandestine bedroom short game. Not having ever won the Masters, or made the beast with two backs with a wannabe porn star, I’m perhaps not the best person to give advice, but I wonder if treatment for sex addiction – or what used to be known as “being male” – is the way to go. A few years ago the comedian Russell Brand used to talk quite a lot in self-pitying terms about his sex addiction, but what that ultimately led him to was a more wide, varied and public life as a sexual predator.

The whole world has advice for Tiger right now, and no doubt 99.9% percent of it is wrong. The outspoken sports website, Deadspin, recently put it in the plainest terms: “KEEP F***ING. YOU MAY AS WELL! Why would you stop f***ing crazy ladies now? You’re too late to save yourself…” I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I don’t think it could hurt to, at least in golfing terms, go back to letting it all hang out, à la 1997. Putting away the stinger and opening up the shoulders would be a start. Rewatch your tee shot on the 13th during the second round. Remember what you used to view as “not forcing things”. Look at the grin on your face as the ball bounces around the corner of the dogleg! Maybe get a guy with a big ‘tache back on the bag with a few hippie war stories to keep you amused. Who knows? If you asked him nicely, and apologised, for letting him go, Fluff himself might be game. After all, he’s caddying for Jim Furyk these days, and, for all the financial pluses, nobody really wants to spend all day watching Jim Furyk swing the club, do they?

March 2010

Tom Cox is the author of Nice Jumper and Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia.