Colin Montgomerie’s comments after playing with Tiger Woods at the 1997 Masters are worth revisiting.
Everyone knows that Woods was the best golfer on the planet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but his story was far more compelling than that.
Even though Jack Nicklaus (18) has won more majors, Tiger (15) is widely recognized as the greatest of all time because his dominance was just extraordinary.
Montgomerie’s amazement at Woods’ performance in 1997 goes some way to explaining how much better he was than everyone else.
Colin Montgomerie was amazed by Tiger Woods’ performance at the 1997 Masters
Montgomerie played in the same group as Woods in the third round at the 1997 Masters. The Scot started the day three shots behind the leader and was 12 shots back after the round had finished.
That is because Tiger shot a seven-under-par 65 at Augusta National, arguably one of the greatest rounds of golf in history.
According to Sports Illustrated, Monty looked like he “had seen a UFO” after watching Woods make seven birdies and no bogeys.
The European Ryder Cup legend made it abundantly clear that nobody would catch Woods in the final round, even though Nick Faldo had pulled off an 11-shot swing over Greg Norman to win the Green Jacket a year earlier.
“There is no chance. We’re all human beings here. There’s no chance humanly possible,” Montgomerie said. When asked about Faldo and Norman, he replied: “This is very different. Faldo’s not lying second, for a start. And Greg Norman’s not Tiger Woods.”
Of course, Woods ultimately won the 1997 Masters title by a wide margin, starting his stranglehold on men’s professional golf for the next decade.
Montgomerie has since reflected on Woods’ “frightening” performance in the third round that confirmed he was on another level to anyone else.
“It was the easiest 65 I’ve ever seen,” Montgomerie said in 2017, via Golf Digest. “The second hole was frightening. I hit the drive, I had the honor, and I hit my drive to the brow of the hill on the second.
“Now this is the forward tees, remember. They had not moved the second tee 60 yards back by then, so I was at the brow of the hill, just about reaching with my 4-wood; that shows you how old it was. And he was down… he must have been 150 yards ahead of me and hit a 9-iron to the back.
“Now from then on, from that second hole onwards, I thought, hang on a minute. This is something extraordinary. The pin was located back left in that very narrow tongue of the green there and he flew the green with a 9-iron, and I came up my usual short right, down the bottom right there, and I was amazed at that.
“That was the one shot that really springs to mind. This is a game that I had not seen before, and none of us had.”
Tiger Woods set an unbreakable record at the 1997 Masters
Tiger Woods set an incredible record at the 1997 Masters that may never be broken for as long as the event continues.
Woods won the tournament by 12 strokes, the biggest winning margin in Masters history. Jack Nicklaus previously held the record after winning by nine shots in 1965.
Final leaderboard at the 1997 Masters Tournament
The closest anyone has come to breaking Woods’ record was Dustin Johnson’s five-shot victory in 2015.
Perhaps Scottie Scheffler or Rory McIlroy could win by six shots if they were at their absolute best, but a dozen-shot lead is completely out of the question.
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