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It’s a moot point as to whether a player would want his caddie to hold his umbrella for him in these days of social distancing or, indeed, whether the caddie would agree to do as much. (In the UK, for the moment, golf club caddies are instructed not to touch anything other than the bag itself.) Yet according to Steve Williams, who worked for Tiger Woods during that great champion’s finest days, there are few situations more challenging than when rain is on the attack and player and caddie are elbow to elbow.
“Usually,” said Williams, “you’re not standing or walking too close to each other, but all that changes when the umbrella goes up. Suddenly you’re right in your man’s space. You can hear him breathe, you can hear him muttering to himself; you can sense what he’s feeling.”
Williams sees it as a time when a caddie must proceed with caution: “He needs to pick his words as carefully as he picks the clubs. If he’s going to say anything, it had better be something which he is pretty sure will be well received. Anything less is not a good idea.
“With Tiger, I tended to say much the same thing, especially in the heat of battle. I would tell him, ‘Remember, you’re the toughest man out here,’ which he was by some distance.
“If, on the other hand, I was caddying for someone else, I always felt that my most important role was to stay abreast of the latest weather reports. If, say, the storm in progress was going to last another hour, I’d tell my player how long he was going to have to deal with it – and maybe remind him to go a bit slower. Most players pick up speed in these circumstances.”
As Williams saw it, Tiger tended to up his game in bad weather. “When others might have been fretting over things like the fit of their waterproofs, he would revel in the challenge, see it as an opportunity to draw further ahead of the field.”
After Williams had reiterated that Woods was far and away the best “foul weather” golf he ever saw, I asked him how he rated professionals in general in that department. “Adequate” was the word he used, before agreeing to identify a runner-up. That was Darren Clarke, winner of the 2011 Open: “He had the knack.”
Where Clarke was “blessed” to have played amid the often angry squalls at Portrush in his formative years (though not everyone would necessarily call it that), Woods was brought up in California where rain was so rare that it made for an adventure. “Whenever we had rain,” said his man of 15 majors, “I loved to play in it. The only hard part was trying to convince my mother that I could go out and play without getting a cold.”
Williams always wanted a golf bag to be as light as possible and, on those occasions when he had neglected to pack an umbrella as he worked with Woods (he would admit to three such days), the player never chided him. He simply viewed what lay ahead as even more of a challenge.
“He would say, ‘Hey, it’s just rain,’ and get on with it,” he said. “Spectators would offer their umbrellas, but he would never accept, preferring to make a joke about the situation: ‘Just because my caddie can’t remember to bring one, that’s no reason for me to take yours … ’ ”
You ask Williams to select Woods’s best day from an “under-the-umbrella” point of view and he goes straight to the Friday of the 2002 US Open he won at Bethpage Black by way of a follow-up to his victory at Augusta.
“Tiger,” he said, “had opened with a 67 to be one ahead of Sergio García. That was a great round played in perfect conditions, but his 68 on what was a hideously wet second day – it alternated between cold drizzle and angry downpours – was truly remarkable.
“The fairways were as narrow as I’ve ever seen and the length of the rough was horrendous,” he continued. “I can remember Sergio making a remark along the lines that the officials would have pulled it if Tiger hadn’t been playing well out there.” (For the record, García followed his 68 with a 74, while Pádraig Harrington moved into second place on 138, three shots behind Woods.)
As to what Tiger did differently from the rest on the sodden ground, Williams described it as follows: “He ‘picked’ the ball up, hit it so cleanly than it was almost a semi-thin.”
From Woods’s finest wet day, Williams moved on to his worst, the one which confounded his chances of winning that year’s Grand Slam. The scene was Muirfield where conditions which were bad beyond belief once the two of them left the first green on the Saturday.
Williams said that the caddies often talk of needing a third hand in a storm and this was just such an instance. “We had an umbrella but the conditions were so dire that you ended up battling the umbrella as much as the course. You simply couldn’t have prepared for what was going on. Tiger lost a lot of strokes that day.” (There were instances of spectators being felled by the wind.)
Woods finished with an 81, but any thoughts of how he had blown his chances of that year’s Grand Slam evaporated when he noticed that Colin Montgomerie had had an 84. As the mighty Scot walked past, head well down, Woods yelled across a mischievous, “At least I whipped your arse, Monty!”
When I asked Williams for the best of his “under-the-umbrella” calls, he asked for a bit more time to think about it. He, his wife and his son, Jett, now 14 and a committed rower and a stock-car racer, own a large estate where Williams is currently in the process of felling a few trees.
After chopping up a few logs, he came back to me, with the story he had to tell attaching to Adam Scott’s second-extra-hole victory – the second extra hole was the 10th – against Ángel Cabrera in the 2013 Masters.
“With a back left hole location, you only ever played for the middle of the green,” he said. “Cabrera had already hit a good second and, at that point, there was a whole lot to take into account. The rain was falling, darkness was setting in, and I knew it was going to be the last hole of the night whatever.
“Adam’s shot called for a 7-iron, but I talked him into hitting a three-quarter 6-iron to get to that back left flag. He hit it pin high – and holed the 15-footer he had left for his birdie.
“Afterwards, he described that 6-iron as the best shot he’d hit.
“I have to say that I’ve often thought since of how tough a situation it would have been had we had to get ourselves in gear to come back in the morning. It would have been a long night, that’s for sure.”
Top: Caddie Steve Williams with Tiger Woods
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