Golf

What Tiger Woods noticed re-watching the Masters (including Michael Phelps!)



As Tiger Woods walked to the 16th tee on Sunday at the 2019 Masters, he didn’t see anything. Not his reeling opponents. Not the crowd around him. Not even the most decorated champion in the history of the Olympic Games.

That’s right — Michael Phelps was standing directly behind the tee box. But Woods didn’t notice.

“I was locked into what I was doing,” Woods told reporters on Tuesday. “I had just taken the lead on 15 and was just trying to figure out, am I going to — I already had an idea if it was going to be 7 or 8 [iron], and that’s what I kept thinking and reminding myself that, hey, I’ve got to be committed to either shot.”

“But no, I did not know who was there, and to see the reaction, to see Verne [Lundquist] call it and to see Michael, basically, bending over in the same position that I was in leaning forward, that was pretty cool.”

Woods’ comments here are revealing in two ways. First, that he was in the zone enough not to recognize Phelps, one of the more recognizable figures in the sports world. Second, that he really noticed later, to the extent that he remembered how Phelps looked in a screenshot from the broadcast, the one from the top of this article. It was a reminder that he often knows more than we think.

It wasn’t until at least a month after the Masters, though, that Woods finally watched the broadcast. “Joey [LaCava] came down and we watched it together,” he said. “We were talking back and forth, and reliving every bit of it. Because we have a certain viewpoint of how we look at it, the shots, the numbers, the situations, and people are making birdies and all the different scenarios were playing out in our heads.”

In the past, Woods has likened the difference to watching a football game from the sidelines versus calling plays from the booth. You get different context. The twists, the turns, the lead changes — it’s impossible to catalog in real time from within one of those final groups. Woods enjoyed the exercise.



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