Scottie Scheffler remains the closest thing to a human cheat code in professional golf. Earlier this week, the 28-year-old secured his third PGA Tour Player of the Year award, joining Tiger Woods as the only men to be honoured three consecutive years.
The following day, Scheffler was identified as Google’s most-searched golfer for 2024, breaking a two-decade run for Woods as golf’s king of the interwebs. All of the Tiger-Scottie talk eventually led to comparisons between Woods’ incredible 2000 season and Scheffler’s banner 2024 campaign.
Tiger won nine times, including three major championships. Scheffler won nine times, including a major and an Olympic gold medal. It’s natural to compare seasons and wonder if one is better than the other.
When asked during a Jack Nicklaus Aware presentation at a PGA Tour Superstore in Plano, Texas, how his season stacked up to Tiger’s 2000, Scheffler quickly squashed the comparisons.
“I think they’re a bit silly,” he said. “I think we’re always looking to compare somebody to Tiger Woods. I saw it a lot growing up. … There’s really only one Tiger, that’s just kind of it.”
Most golf fans would agree three consecutive major wins—which would eventually become four straight at the 2001 Masters—trumps a green jacket and gold medal. But if you need another reason to view Woods’ season as the best of all-time, just remember the 15-time major winner switched golf balls midway through the season at the Deutsche Bank-SAP Open in Hamburg, Germany.
And it wasn’t just any ball change. Unhappy with his performance at the 2000 Byron Nelson Classic (where he finished T-4), Woods opted to replace his Titleist Professional, which featured a liquid-filled core and wound construction, with Nike’s Tour Accuracy—a three-piece, solid construction prototype.
On the scale of drastic equipment changes, this one ranked right near the top. Not only was Woods changing balls mere weeks before the U.S. Open, but it was into a ball that boasted a markedly different construction than the Professional.
Woods was seeing roughly 2-3 mph of additional ball speed with the Tour Accuracy, which required him to adjust his carry yardages through the bag. It would have been natural to expect an adjustment period to the new ball, but Woods didn’t blink.
One week after playing the ball in Germany, Woods returned Stateside and won the Memorial by five shots. Then came a 15-shot win at the U.S. Open, followed by four wins in the next six starts.
Woods changed balls, arguably the one piece of gear pros are most hesitant to alter, and didn’t blink. To be clear, not every ball change is so seamless. Two years ago on the Chasing Majors podcast, Woods’ former caddie, Steve Williams, recalled Greg Norman’s switch to a high-spin Spalding ball, during the 1980s, that had the polar opposite effect on the Shark.
“When Tiger went to that Nike ball, it absolutely suited him,” Williams said. “But way back in the 1980s, Greg Norman played Spalding and went to the Tour Distance ball—he was obviously paid a lot of money to play Spalding and this new golf ball—and that ball was so detrimental to his career. It was the worst thing he ever did. That ball would’ve cost him two shots a round.”
For Woods, the drastic ball change allowed him to gain one to two shots per round, according to his looper, as he put together a stretch of golf that will most likely never be replicated.
“Every time you have a golf ball reacting to the way you want to hit it, I think that just frees you up and gives you confidence,” Williams said. “You’d have to say it was worth one or two shots per round, for sure.”
Scheffler may have the same number of wins at Woods, but only one can boast winning three majors immediately following a ball change.
On this week’s Golf IQ equipment podcast, we took a closer look at the Scheffler versus Woods debate and highlighted the ball change that’s rarely discussed. There’s also a deep dive into TaylorMade’s all-new Qi35 drivers, Justin Thomas’ driver hack and much more.
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