Nobilo: Woods had an equipment edge in his dominant 2000 season
Tiger Woods’ 2000 was one of the greatest years in the history of golf. Woods won the U.S. Open, Open Championship and PGA Championship as part of a nine-win PGA Tour season.
Frank Nobilo, who played against Woods during his PGA Tour career and is now a CBS and Golf Channel analyst, said Woods has an equipment edge that year which undoubtedly helped the 14-time major winner.
“A lot of people look at 2000 as Tiger at his best but it was probably the first and only time in Tiger’s career that you could argue that maybe he had better equipment than the rest,” said Nobilo to Reuters on Tuesday.
When Woods turned pro in 1996, he played Titleist equipment, including their wound ball. As he transitioned to using more Nike equipment, Woods put a solid-core ball, called the Tour Accuracy TW, into play during a European Tour event in Germany in May 2000.
“I tested it and felt great about it and what it did for me, how it performed around the greens and especially in the wind,” Woods told Golfweek in 2014. “I believe it was, in Germany at the Deutsche Bank event in Hamburg, where I put it in play for the first time. Then I came back and played Memorial and won, and then I had a good showing at the U.S. Open at Pebble and then won the British and the PGA. It was a nice little run, and I basically won four straight majors with that ball.”
Woods was a pioneer in that regard, moving away from a wound-core ball and its rubber-wrapped core to the solid, multi-piece core construction with a urethane cover. That kind of ball construction is standard issue today, but, at the time, was viewed skeptically by many of Woods’ peers.
Nobilo feels Woods’ edge went away within a couple of years as the golf world followed Woods’ choice.
“Everybody now is using the same type of equipment so it’s hard for any one player to get that technological jump ahead that I believe Tiger had in 2000,” Nobilo said. “He obviously had skills too but that’s why it wasn’t a fair fight.”
Just three years after Woods’ amazing 2000 season, Phil Mickelson, who played Titleist equipment at the time including the Pro V1 which debuted in ’00, poked Woods with public comments saying Woods was playing with “inferior” Nike equpiment.
”He hates that I can fly it past him now,” Mickelson said in 2003. “He has a faster swing speed than I do, but he has inferior equipment. Tiger is the only player who is good enough to overcome the equipment he’s stuck with.”
Ryan Ballengee is a Yahoo Sports contributor. Find him on Facebook and Twitter.
