Ten years ago, the last time the U.S. Open was played at Pebble Beach, Tiger Woods stayed at the Lodge, in the Sloat wing, just beyond the 18th green. He was a 24-year-old bachelor with a new body (bulked up), a new swing (ruthlessly tight) and the same old attitude (step on their necks). Eighty-eight-year-old Byron Nelson was at Pebble, in part because he wanted to talk to Woods about playing in his tournament, the Byron Nelson Classic. All sorts of people were coming at Woods, wanting him to do this and that. Woods tried to lie low. He wasn't happy with Pebble's crowded, chat-heavy driving range. On the Monday before the first round, he did something no other player thought to do, even though the option was listed right there in the fine print of the contestant information packet.
Woods walked up to an assistant at the range at nearby Spyglass Hill.
"Hey," he said, "can I hit some balls?"
"Sure," said the assistant, Jin Park. "What do you want?"
Park had a buffet table with buckets representing all the major food groups — Titleist, Precept, Callaway, the whole gang.
"No, that's O.K.," Woods said. "I brought my own." Steve Williams was with him, carrying sacks of balls.
Golfer and caddie set up shop on the range, which was closed to regular customers. Woods started hitting balls on the gently sloping downhill practice field, where the far boundary, 270 or so yards from the tee, is marked not by a fence but by a straight line of Monterey pines, all of them well over 100 feet tall.
Park watched Woods go through his whole bag. With a two-iron, Woods was reaching the pines. With the driver, Woods's shots were going over them. Park wasn't awed by Woods's spectacular length. Park was a long hitter himself. What struck him was the precision and the repetitiveness of his ball flight.
Woods left with a simple, "Thanks, guys." A kid picking the range came in with the balls Woods had left behind. Park checked them out. "Look at this," he said to the other golfheads with him. Nike had just entered the ball business, and the souvenirs Woods had left behind were Nike prototypes.
"'I brought my own'," Park, now the head pro at Spyglass, said the other day, repeating what Woods had said to him 10 years ago. He'll never forget it. Six days later Woods won the U.S. Open with his new Nike ball — by 15 shots.
Were you there when Armando Galarraga pitched his nearly perfect game in Detroit last week? Have you ever been at an event where you saw sports history, true sports history? Here's the test. You can close your eyes and see the highlight reel. You can remember the people you were with, what you said, how the athlete looked, what you were thinking, how things smelled, what you were feeling.
If you witnessed Woods at Pebble Beach at the 2000 U.S. Open, it stayed with you. You can make the case you saw the single most dominating performance in sports history. Not the most emotional. Not the most exciting. Not the most significant. Nope. Simply the most dominating.
The significance of the 2000 Open is rooted in one thing: It shows what a man with a plan can accomplish. Woods didn't simply out-talent Ernie Els, the runner-up, by 15 shots. He did something else. And that is why Jin Park — among others — will long remember what Woods did that week on those often fog-shrouded links.
Jim Furyk, along with (irony alert) Jesper Parnevik, played the first two rounds of the '00 Open with Woods. A decade later the thing that stays with Furyk is the pureness of Woods's putting in those two rounds. "When he had an eight-footer, he knocked it in dead center as if it was a two-footer," Furyk says. Woods did that on greens that were fast but not smooth, a gruesome combination that required players to hit their putts harder than normal and to use only the front door. The side doors were closed.
Chuck Dunbar, Pebble's head pro then and now, recalls watching a monster practice session, well over two hours long, that Woods had on Pebble's practice putting green on the eve of the Open, a session during which Woods decided to raise his hands higher at address and get the toe of the putter out of the air and on the grass. What struck Dunbar was Woods's singular purpose and distinctive method. Other players were putting and chatting, putting and chatting. "Tiger was putting with a purpose," Dunbar says. Woods wasn't doing drills, but he wasn't simply getting in his reps, either. "He was making every stroke count." Dunbar still carries around that image of Woods.
On Fire: Hockey night at Toyota ParkKhan gets into U.S. Open
