Chapter 31
Orlando, Florida
April 3, 1997
Tiger’s been doing his homework, spending hours with the Golf Channel’s video library to learn the contours and the slopes he’ll face at the Masters next week.
He knows that the greens at Augusta National are lightning fast. His plan of attack is to identify the course’s natural features that play to his strengths: My length, that the course has no rough, and that it has virtually no trees that will come into play even if I miss the fairways. Augusta National is effectively wide open for me.
Tiger fine-tunes his swing, working with a driver made from the pros’ material of choice—persimmon. His mental game requires no fine-tuning.
He’s in a good, confident place, having won several tournaments leading into the event. “Now all of a sudden here I am prepping for the Masters and I’m already hot,” Tiger marvels. “You couldn’t have asked for a better start. It was a dream scenario.”
On April 3, Arnold Palmer invites Tiger to his course, Bay Hill, to play a friendly game for a friendly wager. On tour, Tiger especially enjoys “Tuesday shootouts,” pre-tournament practice rounds in which players keep things interesting—a birdie is typically worth a crisp $100 bill—but because sixty-seven-year-old Palmer is known to be frugal, he sets the bet at $100 for the entire round.
On the par-three 17th, Tiger takes the round and wins the bet. But Palmer isn’t quite ready to pay up. He raises the stakes: double or nothing on the 18th hole.
“The hole borders on unfair,” Masters winner Raymond Floyd has said of the 18th at Bay Hill and its diabolical design, featuring three bunkers guarding the hole on the left and a lake border on the right.
Tiger likes his odds. He steps to the tee on the 458-yard par 4 and drives well down the fairway, directing the ball left of center toward the fast, undulating green.
Palmer’s drive comes up well short of Tiger’s. He knows he has to risk hitting driver again if he wants to reach the green in two, so he pulls out that club and goes for broke.
“Arnold never gives up, does he?” Tiger says to their playing partner, Alastair Johnston, Palmer’s business manager at IMG.
Palmer lands his ball in the back bunker, but he’s still grinding and outputts Tiger. Both players par the hole, and the wager ends in a push.
“Do you think there can be a perfect game in golf?” a reporter from Sports Illustrated asked Arnold Palmer back in 1959.
“If you mean the perfect game within the realm of probability, maybe it will be played,” Palmer said. “That would mean hitting 18 perfect tee shots and 18 perfect second shots and landing in the cup in no more than one or two putts. But no one is ever going to birdie 18 holes.”
In the absence of a truly “perfect” game, a score of 60 is typically considered as close as you can come in golf.
On April 4, Tiger and Mark O’Meara each drive a cart onto their home course, at Isleworth Golf he’s still new to the area and has never seen a shuttle launch before. “I had been interested in the space program since I was a kid, and I often read about NASA’s missions,” he notes, so it’s “pretty cool” to watch the boosters come off and see the smoke from the contrails. Here I am, playing golf while seven astronauts have just taken off in a space shuttle, he marvels. What an accomplishment.
Piloting the shuttle is rookie astronaut Susan Still. The engineering achievement appeals to Tiger, the twenty-one-year-old science enthusiast—“I felt both small by comparison to space travel, and in awe of what man could achieve”—but NASA’s impressive display doesn’t improve his score on the hole. He makes par.
It’s a momentary distraction. “I still shot 59,” Tiger says. The score is an Isleworth course record. “I designed the course,” Arnold Palmer says, “so I certainly knew how good a 13-under-par 59 was on the 7,179-yard layout.”
Before there’s time for the scorecard to be framed and hung in the clubhouse, Tiger and O’Meara are back out on the course the next day. On April 5, they repeat the previous day’s round, once again starting on the back nine. O’Meara watches as Tiger birdies the 10th.
At the 11th, Tiger “gets up to the tee, he’s hitting like an 8-iron,” O’Meara says. “I haven’t even gotten out of my cart, but he hits it and it’s going right at it. It one-hops and goes into the hole” for a hole in one.
After two holes, Tiger is already 3 under par. O’Meara’s hit his pain point. This is crazy. You shoot 59, and now you make a hole in one. I’m outta here. He takes a $100 bill and puts it on the seat of Tiger’s golf cart.
“That was a really nice shot,” O’Meara tells his friend. “I quit. I’ll see you later on the driving range when you get done.”
As Tiger says afterward, “It was a helluva two days.”