Who’s the longest hitter in professional golf? For years now there has been only one answer: Tiger Woods. But it is no longer true, and not by some distance.
Woods may still be the best player in the world, but he has slipped to 27th place in the list of the United States tour’s longest drivers and would struggle to make a world top 100 if such a thing existed.
The man who used to intimidate rivals with his awesome driving length is finding his dominance from the tee undermined, and it could be that the equipment provided by his sponsor, Nike, is to blame. He has seen other players, most using the rival Titleist brand of ball and driver, surge past him while his own driving distance has stagnated or declined as he has switched to Nike.
When Woods hit his first professional drive some seven years ago he smashed his tee shot 330m down the middle of the fairway. He became the instant king of driving distance, the most macho stat in golf. At that time he was a Titleist player and had been throughout his incredible amateur career.
But when he turned professional he signed, for a sum not unrelated to $40-million, with Nike, which at that time did not make clubs or balls. There was an understanding, though, that Nike would eventually and that, provided they were better than the Titleist clubs, Woods would use them.
That moment came last September in Ireland at the American Express World Golf Championship — and Woods won. But he played the Ryder Cup the next week with less compelling results, getting only two and a half points out of five. The debate was on.
It was Phil Mickelson who enunciated it most clearly through a backhanded compliment in a golf magazine. He said that Woods was the only player in the world good enough to win using ‘inferior equipment†and added that Woods ‘hated it†when he, Mickelson, ‘bombed it past him†off the tee.
There was an instant furore, with Nike pointing out that its stuff couldn’t be so bad given that the best, and certainly the most picky, player in the world chose to use it. The opposition smiled quietly and pointed to the stats.
Woods, meanwhile, was in denial. The advantage he had in length over the whole world of golf had gone and so had his ability to find the fairway.
In the recent Nissan Open he was interviewed after 36 holes and said: ‘I drove it really good this week.â€
Perhaps he really did think that, but closer examination showed that the world No 1 had missed 15 of the 28 fairways he had aimed at.
Woods had previously told the Nike director of product creation, Tom Stites, whose responsibility it was to build a club to satisfy the world No 1: ‘Don’t expect me to change if they’re only as good as my current clubs.†That was a daunting demand to make of any man and the process of creating Woods’s clubs went on for 18 months.
The man himself was very involved. ‘When we showed him data,†said Stites, ‘he concentrated on it. Some player’s eyes glaze over when you mention things like kick points and bounce angles, but Tiger finds it fun.
‘I’d go to him with a selection of prototype clubs, he’d hit four shots with each club, offer feedback and I went back to the drawing board. We worked on everything, from what the clubs looked like to what they felt like to where the ball actually went.
‘I would be able to grind a few thousandths of an inch off the club
or change the bounce angle of the sole by half a degree and he would be able to detect the difference by being sensitive to how the club moved.â€
No effort or expense spared, then. Woods now uses Nike irons, a Nike driver (the forged titanium model) and the Nike ball, although he still has a Titleist three-wood, two Titleist wedges and a Titleist putter in the bag.
It is the ball and the driver that Mickelson means, though, when he talks about ‘inferior equipmentâ€. When he says inferior, it is of course relative, and though Mickelson is paid to boost Titleist, it is surely not a coincidence that 14 of the top 20 in the driving distance category use that company’s equipment.
There is no doubt Woods does hate Mickelson bombing it past him off the tee. The two men are not enemies, they just don’t like each other. They have nothing in common except an ability to play golf outstandingly well.
Mickelson’s idea of a great evening, for instance, is playing with his two young daughters and putting his newborn son to bed. Go to Woods’s place for dinner, as Stuart Appleby did once, and you get to eat takeaway hamburgers and play video games all night. The bottle of wine Appleby took with him stood unopened on a sideboard.
But it is Mickelson who has supplanted Woods as the biggest hitter. In fact, Woods has become part of a quiz question. Example: ‘What do Todd Barranger, Tag Ridings and Harrison Frazar have in common?â€
Answer: ‘They are all US tour professionals and they are all ahead of Woods in driving distance statistics.â€
And so are a total of 26 professionals, not counting Ernie Els who is the longest of them all but has not played a sufficient number of rounds to qualify.
Woods, amazingly, is averaging ‘only†267m, 14m behind Mickelson and 24m behind Els’s unofficial mark.
No one, of course, is saying that Woods is not long enough. His record this season of winning three of the five events he has entered is evidence to the contrary. But what a great many people are saying is that he is handicapping himself by using the equipment he is choosing to use.
That he could, in fact, win more, by more, with different clubs and ball. In fact, the new Titleist Pro V1x ball is, privately, admitted by all to be the top ball and Mickelson and Els use it and the 983 model driver to dominate the driving distance category.
There is a curious precedent for all this. During the period of his career when he was winning all his major championships Jack Nicklaus played with clubs and a ball made by MacGregor, not the most popular ball on the market at that time.
Years later Frank Thomas, the former technical director of the US Golf Association, analysed that ball with modern technology and compared it with other balls of its day. He told Nicklaus he might have won 40 majors, not 20, had he played with a better ball.
So is Tiger handicapping himself?
It may be difficult to tell. The man is so good, as Mickelson et al admit, that he might well win with a broomstick and ball made of putty. —