A viral video from TaylorMade Golf dropped a while back where Tiger Woods and Scottie Scheffler were having a driving range session. During said session, Tiger dropped a bomb on Scottie about how when he’s really flushing it, he doesn’t take divots.
Scottie’s reaction was priceless:
Here was the new No. 1-ranked player in the sport being absolutely baffled by the purity of the GOAT’s contact with the golf ball. And frankly, as someone who’s been around golf for a long time, I’d never heard about “not taking a divot” as, like… something to aspire to — unless you’re like some folks who like to pick their wedges clean.
For me, not taking a divot basically always meant I’d bladed a shot super-thin and over the green or something like that. Tiger is on a whole other level from us mere mortals. You see it not only via his incredible achievements as a golfer, but also in how hyper-analytically he breaks it down.
Case in point, we’ve arrived at today:
Here’s the key excerpt to underscore the point I’m trying to get across re: Tiger’s mind:
“Earlier in my career, I was very zeroed. I was wide and wide. Wide on the backswing, wide on the through swing. It was actually hard for me to take a divot when I was hitting it really well, just because I was zeroed.”
I legitimately do not know, nor have any good guess as to what “zeroed” means. This is coming from the man who injected “activating the glutes” into the golf zeitgeist. So like, Tiger says some fun things from time to time. But I’m stumped on this one.
Tiger goes on to explain how, in his prime, his natural shot was a draw, and that lent itself to not taking divots as well. If you say so, man. Meanwhile I’m over here drop-kicking pull-hook fairway woods all over the place.
Nobody wanted to ask a follow-up Q to Tiger either. I guess they just figured it’d descend into an even more technical jargon-fueled dialogue. In that scenario, Tiger would make it even clearer that he’s forgotten more than any of us will ever know about golf several times over.
As for when we can expect to see Tiger on the course again and in competition, your guess is as good as mine. Hopefully it’s very soon, because as many have said before, Tiger doesn’t just move the needle in the game of golf. He is the needle in many ways. Or at least was…
But hey, with quotes like these, Tiger can still stir up buzz around golf unlike anyone else.
