Woods' huge 2000 U.S. Open win came down to smallest of strokes

Tiger Woods' 15-stroke victory in 2000 still resonates as arguably the most dominant performance in the history of golf. The genesis of that greatness, Woods' caddie Steve Williams explains, could be found on the practice green.

By Brian Wacker, PGATOUR.COM Site Producer
 
In baseball parlance, it was a perfect game. That’s what Tiger Woods played at the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach.

As the U.S. Open returns to the Monterey Peninsula a decade later, Woods’ record-setting 15-stroke victory still resonates as arguably the greatest, or certainly most dominant, performance in the history of golf, which is saying something given that the game has been around a couple of hundred years.

And it almost never happened.

During the continuation of the second round Saturday morning at Pebble Beach, Woods hit his tee shot on the 18th hole into Carmel Bay and was down to the last golf ball in his bag.

“If he loses that one, it’s tournament over,” recalls Steve Williams, who had taken over Woods’ bag just the year before. “It was the most nerve-wracking hole of my entire caddying career.”

Woods and Williams laugh about it today, but at the time the top-ranked player in the world was wondering why in the world Williams was trying to convince him to hit a 2-iron off the tee on Pebble Beach ’s 543-yard, par-5 finishing hole. Woods hit driver again, this time finding the fairway.

“Hell no [I didn’t tell him it was his last golf ball],” Williams said.

When Woods didn’t finish his second round on Friday due to fog, Williams didn’t think there was any reason to check the bag because they were simply continuing play. What Williams didn’t know, of course, was that Woods had taken three of those balls out of the bag early Saturday morning to putt on the carpet in his hotel room. After scuffing one of his remaining balls on the 13th hole, Woods gave it to a kid and now was down to just two in his golf bag.

“I’m thinking to myself that I have to go get that ball somehow,” Williams said. “I could see how happy the boy was, though, so I couldn’t bring myself to go get it.”

Woods went on to make bogey on the last hole, but later asked Williams, “What was all that business on 18 about?”

That was near the only blunder Woods made at Pebble Beach. He opened the 100th U.S. Open with the lowest round of the day, a 65, and closed it with another, a 67. At 12 under for the week, Woods became the first player in tournament history to finish at double-digits under par. His aggregate 272 total tied the lowest score ever in a U.S. Open (set, of course, by Jack Nicklaus) and his 15-stroke margin of victory remains the largest in major championship history.

“I knew I had no chance,” Ernie Els, who finished second, said at the time. “It's got to be a dream. He just played a perfect U.S. Open. He did nothing wrong. When you're a little kid, four or five years old, and dream about winning championships and running away from the field, that's kind of how you have to play. And that's kind of perfect at the moment.

“If you put Old Tom Morris with Tiger Woods, he'd probably beat him by 80 shots right now. The guy is unbelievable, man. I'm running out of words.”

Woods, meanwhile, ran away from the field, and it all started with a practice putting session that spilled into Wednesday night. With only the dim lights of the nearby clubhouse and surrounding shops as darkness enveloped Pebble Beach, Woods poured in one putt after another as his caddie watched in awe.

“In the practice rounds, he was playing as well as I’ve ever seen him play,” says Williams, who has been on Woods’ bag for all but one of his 14 major championship victories. “The one thing that stands out the most, though, was the emphasis he put on his putting that week.

“The greens weren’t the greatest -- they were hard, fast, bumpy. It was hard to get the ball close to the hole and he knew he’d have to make a lot of putts in that 10-foot circle. He played exceptionally well, but putting was paramount.”

Woods never once three-putted and was so exceptional that he entered the final round ahead by 10 strokes. When it was finished, Woods had closed with 26 straight holes without a bogey and captured the first leg of what would later be known as the "Tiger Slam" as he went on to become the first player in the modern era to hold all four major championship trophies at the same time.

Perhaps the most memorable shot of the week for Woods, however, wasn’t a putt. It was his second shot on the uphill par-5 sixth hole during the second round. Woods slashed his 7-iron through the thick rough, sending his ball over Stillwater Cove and onto the green, which was more than 200 yards away, to set up a birdie.

The shot prompted NBC’s Roger Maltbie to say, "It just isn't a fair fight."

That week, it sure wasn’t.