Back in 2016, Tiger Woods had won everything there was to win in the game, while Jason Day was a fresh-faced 28-year-old who’d just triumphed at his first major championship.
Woods was a hero of Day‘s when the Australian was a young man, as he was thousands of other teenagers with aspirations of making it at the very highest level of the game.
Day recently said Woods gave him plenty of advice throughout their years playing together on the PGA Tour.
Woods is the best golfer to ever live according to Day, so it’s no surprise that the Australian was like a sponge when it came to taking on board advice from the 15-time major champion.
The same can be said for the 49-year-old, who was well known for taking on as much advice as he could from the younger generation of players coming through.
However, when they were actually competing against one another, were they good friends?
What Tiger Woods’ relationship with Jason Day was like during their prime years
Over the past few years, both players have spoken highly of one another.
Do you think Tiger Woods can win another PGA Tour event?
When they were trying to beat each other on a regular basis, though, it’s fair to assume that their rivalry may have been a tad more fierce than it is today.
In 2016, Woods lifted the lid on what his relationship with Day was really like, when speaking to Newsweek.
“JD and I talk quite a bit, it could be a text or a telephone call,” he said. “Some of it’s advice, most of it’s giving each other crap. We love to needle at each other a lot.
“All I say is, ‘I’m not going to tell you how your game can get better. Ask it the other way round of how I get it, and I’ll answer it that way because I don’t want to say ‘you should do this or you should do that’. I don’t think that’s the correct way of going about it.
“Jason asks great questions, very in-depth questions, and he wants to get better,” Woods said. “He has a great family with his two kids and works extremely hard. And he’s trying to figure out how he can get better as a player, especially with having a family and traveling.
“I think it’s fantastic how he’s playing, how he’s handling himself, how focused he is and how committed he is to improving. You see a lot of guys come out here for playing sake. He practices with purpose and you can see it when he plays.
“When I came up through the game I had a chance to learn from so many different players, like a Seve [Ballesteros], like a Ramon [Sota],“ he said.
“Different guys from different generations, like [Mark] O’Meara, John Cook, guys who took me under their wing but never really told me to do it their way.“
Jason Day on the one difference between Tiger Woods and Scottie Scheffler
As mentioned earlier, Day idolizes Woods.
Taking that into account, his comments on Scottie Scheffler prove just how much he rates the current number one as a golfer.
Back in June during an appearance on The Loop Podcast, the 2015 PGA Championship winner was asked to compare Woods and Scheffler.
Day said: “There’s a lot of pressure that comes with it, there’s a lot of stress. A lot of outside distractions that come with being number one in the world. To watch Scottie, the way he’s doing it, and he’s been dominant now for a few years. You just have to look how much money he’s earned on the golf course, which is like $86 million and that’s before FedEx. It’s unbelievable. With that being said, what’s impressive, obviously he’s winning every single year.
“The media, at the start of the year were like, ‘what’s going on, why isn’t he winning’. I said, ‘everyone needs to calm down, at some point he’s going to win’. And then this three-week stretch he had. He won the Byron, then he took a week off. Then he won the PGA Championship, then he finished well at Colonial, then he won at Memorial. What is happening with Scottie is that there is no slow down. The weeks he’s not winning, he’s still top-10, top-5 and that is very, very difficult to do because the amount of mental and physical stress that you put yourself under week in and week out, that will have a toll on you. And I don’t care who it is, sooner or later, you kind of start to break mentally, because you need time away from people to focus. He seems like he’s balanced. He seems like he knows exactly what he needs to do, week in and week out to prepare the best he can. He knows he needs to keep the media and fans at an arm’s distance just so he can actually focus on what he needs to do. So he’s handling it unbelievably well right now.
“Are we starting to see the second coming of one of the best players of all-time? I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but all I know now is that we’re looking at someone who’s putting up some of the craziest numbers since Tiger. I’ve been in both worlds – playing against Tiger and playing against Scottie. The difference between Tiger and Scottie is that Scottie is less theatrical on the golf course. Tiger was unbelievable to watch play golf. Tee to green, he was a little bit more erratic off the tee at times in his career, but that was the exciting part about Tiger, with the fist pumps and all that stuff. Whereas Scottie does very similar stuff, but he’s probably a little bit more consistent from tee to green, but he’s a toned-down version. He doesn’t really fist pump as much. I’m not knocking that at all. We’re seeing this type of trait in Scottie but it’s just a toned-down version. The way he looks when he wins, he’s just like, ‘yeh another win’.“
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