NEWS FROM THE TOUR VANS
BROUGHT TO YOU BY GOLF PRIDE, THE #1 GRIP ON TOUR
Early December isn’t always a busy time for gear news, but Tiger Woods made sure there was plenty for the Range Rat to digest this past week.
With the return of Woods to competition came multiple notes of consequence. Woods used the new TaylorMade Qi10 LS driver, which just recently landed on the USGA conforming list, and had a Graphite Design Tour AD-VF shaft for the club. It is the same shaft that Justin Thomas went to in his Titleist TSR3 driver.
On any other week, one might assume that Woods gaming a new driver would be the top gear story by far. Or maybe everyone would be interested to learn why Woods put lead tape on the back of his putter once again, something he occasionally has done in the past.
However, there was an even more talked-about item at the Hero World Challenge: the mystery of his shoes.
You may remember that Woods – who has worn Nike golf shoes throughout most of his career and even has his own line of TW Nike shoes – caused a hullabaloo by showing up to the 2022 Masters wearing a pair of FootJoys. He said at the time that the stability of the FootJoy shoes made it less painful to traverse the rolling hills of Augusta National. Woods implied that Nike was working on a new pair of shoes for him in the future.
But Woods has continued to wear FootJoys in his limited tournament appearances since then. Coincidentally, there was a player in the Bahamas wearing TW Nikes, but it was Scottie Scheffler, not Woods.
It is not as if Nike has stopped making golf shoes. In fact, the brand just released a Masters edition of the Nike Tiger Woods 2013 golf shoe, which was met with excitement. It has been something of a puzzle as to why Nike, of all companies, apparently has been unable to create an acceptable shoe for its ultimate golf spokesman.
All of this intrigue was resparked last week. On Tuesday, Woods showed up in unmarked black shoes that appeared to be some prototype. Many speculated that, based on the design and construction, these were likely Nike prototypes.
But a day later, he ditched those in favor of white FootJoys, the Premiere Series Wilcox which he previously had been wearing. He wore both black and white versions of that shoe in the actual competition, but the black prototype from Tuesday’s practice round didn’t resurface.
It’s hard to know what all of this means. Since the 2022 Masters, Woods has completed only one official 72-hole golf tournament, at last February’s Genesis Invitational. His inability to walk without pain in late 2022 – he pulled out of last year’s Hero World Challenge because of it – was a sign of what would come when he underwent subtalar fusion surgery on his right ankle after hobbling around at the 2023 Masters.
Next year could be different. Woods, who will turn 48 on December 30, suggests he could play one tournament per month, which would be a dramatic change from the past two years. It’s been a long time since he even entertained such a schedule. And watching him walk around the Bahamas, observers said there was nothing in his gait that suggested he was in too much pain.
“I'm very excited at how I have felt physically,” he said after Saturday’s round. “[I have] showed myself that I can recover each and every day. That was kind of an unknown as far as I've walked this far.”
The shoes could play an outsized role in all of this. Will he stick with the FootJoys? Or does Nike have something in the works that could help Woods even more? Did the prototypes fail some pre-tournament test, or was the one-day experiment a part of a larger testing process?
The Rat’s brain is already twisted into a pretzel.
Sean Fairholm