Tiger Woods would play mind games with his rivals during practice rounds to get into their heads ahead of tournaments. Adam Scott has explained how Woods would win the battle of the minds before players had even headed towards the first hole.
The golf icon won 15 majors at the peak of his powers and dominated the circuit in the late 1990s and 2000s. Scott remembers a practice round with Woods at The Open in 2000, which was played at St Andrews. The Australian says his opponent would hit with the wrong clubs and challenge his rivals to play better even when they had hit a good shot.
“Yeah, I played a bunch with him in practice rounds and stuff. I played a practice round with him that week of The Open at St Andrews in 2000. It was nuts, I was 19,” Scott told YouTuber Grant Horvat.
“Every area of his game was better than everyone else’s. Even his short game was like Phil Mickelson-esque. And then that ran across the board: driving, irons, putting, everything. But then, everything that went on around, the ‘Tiger Mania’ it was called back then, it was just so much. It was so new to golf, or at least [to] me at that point. I just don’t think we’d seen anything like that. It was wild to be around.
“[If you were a threat to him] he would just play games with you [in practice rounds]. He’d hit the wrong club. He’d challenge you. You’d hit a good shot and he’s like, ‘But can you draw it and hold it up against the wind like that?’ And you can’t. Just to make you feel inferior. He was a gamesman, he was the ultimate competitor.”
Woods perhaps ramped up the mind games when he was playing Scott as many believe the latter was the only player who could compete with the American. Speaking to the Fore Play Podcast Plus in 2021, Butch Harmon, who worked with both players, said Woods and Scott had similar swings.
“One of the things I’ve always prided myself on, there’s probably only two players that I’ve ever taught whose swings look similar, and that would be Tiger and Adam Scott,” Harmon said.
“When Adam Scott came right here, where you are right now, when he was a freshman at UNLV when he was 18, he showed up with that swing. His dad was a golf pro when he was a kid, and he copied Tiger Woods’ swing.”
