By John Hopkins
It was overcast and blustery in Ireland that autumn day in 2004 and we sat on rickety chairs in a field. As settings go, it didn’t amount to much. It might even be said to have been incongruous. But that hardly mattered. I, then golf correspondent of The Times of London, wasn’t getting that most coveted of all prizes, a one-on-one with Tiger Woods, but as I was the only journalist present in this bucolic environment where cows grazed nearby it was the next best thing.
Two weeks earlier Europe had won the Ryder Cup at Oakland Hills, their fourth victory in the last five matches, and Woods was at Mount Juliet in County Kilkenny for the WGC-American Express Championship. I asked him what changes he would like to implement to improve his team’s chances at the 2006 Ryder Cup at the K Club near Dublin.
He wanted to be named as a playing vice captain for that team, he revealed. “What I would like is to work with the captain on the pairings and team strategy … and doing what I can do to make our team more successful,” he said. “I basically kind of do that now but if I were a vice captain it would have an official role.” (Woods was named as a vice captain of the U.S. team at Hazeltine in 2016.)
“I was very interested in why he [Phil] didn’t hit driver.”
Tiger Woods
Woods said he wanted the PGA of America to alter its two-year selection period. “I have never been happy with that [system]. If you go back to the 1991 Ryder Cup, Wayne Levi won four tournaments in 1990 and could barely make a cut in 1991 and he was on the team. I don’t think that’s the way to send your 12 best players out. To get the true team that’s playing the best we’re going to have to go to a one-year period like the Europeans do.” (The PGA of America changed to a predominantly one-year selection period for the 2025 match.)
Woods admitted he was puzzled as to the strategy of Phil Mickelson, his playing partner, on the final hole of their Friday afternoon foursomes match against Darren Clarke and Lee Westwood a couple of weeks earlier at Oakland Hills. Mickelson hit such a wild stroke that he and Woods lost the hole and with it their match. (The two men, the world Nos. 1 and 2 that week, had lost their morning four-ball match as well.)
As Mickelson’s ball flew perhaps 40 yards off line, TV showed a stony-faced Woods staring impassively for perhaps 10 seconds and slightly shaking his head. “I was very interested in why he [Phil] didn’t hit driver,” Woods said. “It was 490 yards into the wind and a normal 3-wood would go 280 that would leave us 215 to the front. I thought that was a long way to leave us.”
The next morning The Times trumpeted this interview in large typeface on its front page, labelling it exclusive and spreading it over half of a broadsheet-sized page in the sports section. For a few ephemeral moments I received a journalistic treat of the sort that used to be handed out regularly – hearty congratulations from my bosses back in London for a story that went around the world. It was a rare triumph. I, in The Times, had stolen a march on one of my newspaper’s most bitter rivals, The Daily Telegraph, and its golf correspondent. Her name is well known in these parts: Lewine Mair.
