Tiger Woods isn’t in the field this week at the Zozo Championship, still rehabbing from his sixth surgery on his lower back in the last 10 years. But five years ago, he was coming off a nine-week break after surgery to repair minor cartilage damage in his left knee and despite an inauspicious start, he rattled off a tournament-best 27 birdies and won the inaugural PGA Tour tournament in Japan to tie Sam Snead with 82 career Tour titles.
After the victory the PGA Tour posted a photo of Tiger receiving an autograph from Slammin Sam. They first met when Tiger was six years old and they played a two-hole exhibition at Calabasas Country Club in Southern California.
“I remember hitting the ball into a little creek and playing it out of the water and making bogey. I bogeyed the last and he went par-par,” Woods recalled of the initial encounter. “The only time I ever got a chance to play with Sam Snead, I was 2 down through two.”
But Woods showed enough promise to make a lasting impression on the Hall of Famer, who won his 82nd title at the 1965 Greater Greensboro Open, becoming the oldest player in Tour history to win at age 52.
“If the kid doesn’t burn out, he’ll be the greatest golfer the world has ever seen,” Snead predicted.
In October 2019, some 37 years later, Woods went wire-to-wire at the Zozo Championship in Chiba – his 359th official start – and tied Snead in the record book.
To this day, many of the players who competed that week still talk about the galleries, estimated to be 20 deep, to see the man, the myth, the legend, the one and only Tiger Woods.
“The first day we stepped out here, the fans that lined the range and the first hole, I’ve never seen anything like it,” defending champion Collin Morikawa said on Wednesday during his pre-tournament press conference.
“I sat on the first tee with J.T. and Rory and I couldn’t believe how many people were just on the property,” Xander Schauffele recalled. “It felt like a major almost just for the amount of people…it was insane.”
Max Homa couldn’t help but laugh when he watched an Instagram video of the highlights and recap and marveled at how many people were there.
“What it does for a country like Japan who loves golf,” Homa said, “you wait probably all these years to get to see this person come and play in front of you and not only does he play in front of you, but he goes out and wins.”
It didn’t look that way early. Woods hit his opening tee shot of the tournament into the water and made three straight bogeys. Then he carded birdies on nine of his remaining 15 holes to shoot 64 and claim the lead. He followed with another 64 on Friday before a typhoon dumped nearly 10 inches of water onto Narashino Country Club postponing play. Tiger spent his day off watching the movie Joker and with limited dining options joined a group of players, including Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth, at a Domino’s Pizza.
Woods had to play 29 holes on Sunday, which wasn’t ideal for his body. After the storm, Tour officials closed the course to the public but that didn’t prevent a crowd from gathering outside the gates.
“One of my favorite stories to tell people is the day that the course was closed to the fans, we drove in and fans were waiting on the streets with signs, hundreds of people,” remembered Homa. “It was really cool to see.”
Woods stretched his lead to as many as five before Japan’s own Hideki Matsuyama cut it to three before play was suspended due to darkness and forcing a Monday finish. But who was really going to catch Tiger, the all-time greatest frontrunner? He had won 44 of 46 times he had held the outright 54-hole lead, including all 25 times his advantage had been at least three strokes. Longtime golf writer Steve DiMeglio was on the scene for Golfweek and USA Today and he’d seen this movie before. “With a lead in Woods’ hand, opponents face an 0-2 count or it’s 3rd-and-35 if you compare it to other sports,” he wrote.
Matsuyama made a birdie at 16 to make it interesting but Woods, dressed in his traditional red shirt on Monday and black Nike vest, hat and pants, finished in style, carding birdies at 14 and 18 and signing for 3-under 67 and a three-stroke win over Matsuyama. He hoisted his 82nd trophy 23 years to the day of his first Tour title at the 1996 Las Vegas Invitational.
“It’s a big number. It’s about consistency and doing it for a long period of time,” Woods said. “I’ve been very fortunate to have had the career I’ve had so far. To have won this tournament in Japan, it’s just so ironic because I’ve always been a global player, I’ve always played all around the world and to tie the record outside the United States is pretty cool.”
“The ball-striking exhibition I’ve seen the last two days is a joke,” Gary Woodland, who played alongside him for the final 36 holes, said.
Woodland is quoted more extensively in Bob Harig’s book “Drive,” saying, “His distance control was something I’ve never seen. His misses are all in the right spots. He didn’t hit the ball left for two days. When you have a one-way miss you can be aggressive…He looked like the best player in the world. It was impressive to watch, pretty special.”
Woods the player also impressed Woods the U.S. Presidents Cup captain that week in Japan, and he ended up earning a much-deserved captain’s pick to the team headed for Australia, where he went 3-0 as the U.S. rallied for a hard-fought victory.
“I’d say that was the best I’ve seen him play of all the times that we played together,” Thomas said of partnering with Woods in two matches. “Just watching him kind of pick his way around Royal Melbourne and shaping shots and just hitting the ball miles in the air and kind of hitting it low, running it around different places. He was in such a focused state and just in such a zone, I was very, very fortunate to get to watch that live and be his partner not only because it was cool to watch, but he was playing so well it was going to be hard for him to lose a match. So I was on the right end of that as a partner.”
It seemed only a matter of time until Woods would notch win No. 83 and break the tie with Snead but that was before his body breaking down forced more operations, he survived a near-fatal car crash in 2021, and as Woods approaches his 49th birthday, Snead’s share of the record seems more likely than ever to remain intact.
But five years ago, golf fans enjoyed an unexpected vintage Tiger performance. Karen Crouse, then of The New York Times, said it best when she wrote, “Even if Woods’s play in Chiba turns out to be nothing more than a resplendent rainbow after a big storm, it was magnificent to behold.”
