The putt that sent Tiger into orbit

Twenty-five years ago at the PGA Championship, Woods began applying his 9-year stranglehold on the game.

It was an 8-foot slider. Breaking left to right. On a green exhausted by the humidity, scarred by four days of major championship traffic.

If Tiger Woods doesn’t make that putt on the 17th hole at Medinah Country Club in the Chicago outskirts, he’s probably facing a playoff with the fearless, flippant, 19-year-old Sergio Garcia for the 1999 PGA Championship. After listening to the big galleries throw their beer-built support behind the kid from Spain, Tiger wanted no part of that.

A slider never is the most natural stroke for a righthanded player. Tiger had just allowed a five-stroke lead to shrink to one. So he lined it up, stood over it, faced it and made it. Over the next decade he would make hundreds of putts like that, in moments like that, often for pars when he was on the verge of wobbling, and everybody, including his traumatized competitors, learned to expect it.

This one saved par, saved his lead, and allowed him to par the 18th and win his second major championship. No one saw a launching pad on the premises, but the ‘99 PGA, 25 years ago, ignited the best decade that a pro golfer ever has played. If Tiger misses that slider, what happens then? The greatest show in golf probably gets postponed for a while, not canceled. But that was the first emergency putt that he ever made to win a major championship — he won his first, the 1997 Masters, by a dozen strokes. There would be others. Counting the ‘99 PGA, Woods would win 13 of the next 35 majors, culminating in the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, on a shattered leg.

But on this mid-August week, there were sound arguments about the identity of the world’s best player. David Duval was No. 1 in the Official World Golf Rankings just two weeks before. There was talk of a Big Four in golf: Woods, Duval, Vijay Singh and Ernie Els. Woods had not won any of the 10 previous majors. Payne Stewart edged Woods and Phil Mickelson at the ‘99 U.S. Open at Pinehurst. Tiger finished seventh at the ‘99 British at Carnoustie, best remembered for the rain that dissolved Jean Van De Velde on the 72nd hole and created a playoff that Paul Lawrie won.

But something was building. Woods came into Medinah with three victories on the tour, including the Memorial and the Western.

The week began with an uncomfortable PR bump. Woods, Duval, Mickeson and Mark O’Meara were pushing to get paid for Ryder Cup competition. Specifically they wanted $500,000 each to participate in this “exhibition,” as Woods called it, the one golf event that forces the players to come together and represent something bigger than the logo on their caps. They insisted the extra money would go to charities of their choice, not just the coffers of the PGA of America.

Ryder Cup captain Ben Crenshaw was offended, and Brad Faxon said such talk “just rips me apart. Charity? They should stop saying that. It’s a crock. It’s one of those sound-good terms that doesn’t mean anything. An ‘exhibition’ is something Tiger and Duval should play at Sherwood. Exhibitions don’t last 70 years.”

The Feedbag Four, as they became known, got their way in the end, and by September all of this talk was buried by the Americans’ uprising at The Country Club outside Boston, as Justin Leonard drained the putt that brought back the Cup.

Back at Medinah, Woods was prospering at exactly the type of course he favored in those days, a long par-72 with sizeable fairways, and eagle opportunities on par 5s. He was tied for the third-round lead with Mike Weir, the lefty from Canada who would win the 2003 Masters. That meant Weir would play alongside Woods on Sunday, and he became one of the first victims of The Vortex, the perfect storm of Woods’ dominance and the gallery’s chaos. Every other pairing on the course was Muzak. This was AC/DC. Weir carded an 80. Better players would lose their molecules under the same conditions.

But then here came Garcia, 19, in his first season as a pro. He was playing directly in front of Woods. He birdied the 13th hole and playfully aimed his putter back toward the tee, at Tiger, who claimed he didn’t see it. 

At 16, Garcia’s drive wound up hugging a tree trunk, to the point he might have pitched out safely, and avoided all the roots surrounding the ball. Instead he inflamed the crowd with a high slice that wound up on the green, as he literally sprinted up the fairway to see the outcome. Then he smiled and closed his eyes as he re-created the swing.

“What he did there was insane,” said Jerry Higginbotham, Garcia’s caddie for the week.

“I thought about pitching it out but I thought, what’s the worst that could happen?” Garcia said. “Maybe it comes off the tree and hits me, for a two-stroke penalty, and I make eight.”

Garcia was effervescent and Woods, just 23, was trudging his way through the week as if the moons of Jupiter were on his shoulders. He also was getting razzed by fans imploring him to hit it sideways. “This sport,” he said, “has gotten a lot more booable. I didn’t think it was fair.”

“I feel like I won,” Garcia said. But the record said Woods did, for the 11th time on tour, which was three better than Jack Nicklaus had won at the same age.

Desperate to invent a head-to-head confrontation, several writers (myself included) predicted Tiger vs. Sergio would be the theme of the sport for the next 20 years. But Garcia quickly morphed into a seething, disagreeable figure. At the 2002 U.S. Open, fans at Bethpage Black mocked the way Garcia was gripping and re-gripping the club, and heckled him as he and Mickelson came up short in their bid to stop Tiger. Garcia was a demon in Ryder Cup play and finally won a major, the Masters, in 2017. He has 36 wins worldwide and is likely to be a Hall of Famer. But Tiger’s only true rivals were already in the pantheon.

Woods wasted no time establishing that truth. He finished 37th in his next event and then won the next six. Singh won the Masters in 2000 but Woods laid waste to the two Opens, winning at Pebble Beach by 15 and at St. Andrews by eight. That gave Woods the career grand slam before his 24th birthday, which is Dec. 30, a date he shares with Sandy Koufax and LeBron James.

The 2000 PGA was at Valhalla near Louisville, the site of this week’s PGA. Woods found himself challenged by Bob May, an obscure pro who had been an outstanding junior player in Orange County, ahead of Woods, and was somehow immune to The Vortex. Woods needed a playoff to beat May. Then he closed the year with three more wins, giving him eight. At the 2001 Masters he closed out a 3-tournament win streak with a 2-stroke victory, and thus held all four trophies simultaneously.

The enormity of those years is why we should keep Scottie Scheffler, and his current exploits, in its own compartment. Yes, Scheffler is the master and commander of golf today and would surprise nobody if he took a run at the single-year slam. No, he is not yet Tiger Woods. But until Tiger made a breathless putt on an uncomfortable path over risky terrain a quarter-century ago, he wasn’t either.