The Most Dominant Season in Golf History
In 2000, Tiger Woods didn't just win — he broke golf.
At Pebble Beach he won the U.S. Open by 15 strokes, the largest margin in the history of major championship golf, breaking a record Old Tom Morris had held since 1862. He never three-putted a green all week and played the final 26 holes without a bogey. And that was just one of nine wins in a season so statistically absurd that a quarter-century later, people still can't fully explain it: three majors, the lowest scoring average in PGA Tour history, a top-two finish 65% of the time he teed it up, and nearly double the earnings of the second-best player alive, Phil Mickelson.
He did it with a golf ball almost nobody knew existed. Nike, building a golf division around him, had secretly developed a solid-core ball with a Japanese engineer named Rock Ishii. Tiger put it in play in Germany in May — his launch angle jumped from 8 degrees to 12, with more distance and no loss of greenside spin — and by June the season was over.
The full story is here: Hal Sutton out-dueling him at the Players ("be the right club today"), Vijay Singh taking the one major Tiger didn't win, the career Grand Slam completed at St. Andrews at age 24 — the youngest ever — without hitting a single bunker all week, and the Bob May duel at Valhalla that made Tiger the first man since Ben Hogan in 1953 to win three majors in a calendar year.
Chapters:
Next: our 2001 recap — when Tiger held all four majors at once.
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Chapters
- A 15-stroke U.S. Open
- Hal Sutton — the last man to beat him
- Vijay Singh wins the Masters
- The secret ball nobody knew about
- Pebble Beach: breaking a 138-year-old record
- St. Andrews and the career Grand Slam
- Bob May and three straight majors
- The most dominant season ever, by the numbers