The Vault: Tiger Woods Claims a Piece of Tom Lehman’s Soul

One of my favorite corners of YouTube is the “Chasing 82” archive, where the PGA Tour has posted videos of nearly all of Tiger Woods’s non-major wins. The collection begins with a 20-year-old Tiger edging a persimmon-wielding Davis Love III at the Las Vegas Invitational and concludes 22 years later, with Woods’s comeback victory at the Tour Championship. The videos are well edited, each approximately 52 minutes long, and contain generous portions of live-golf telecasts.

Last week, after Woods announced that he had undergone another foot surgery, I went back to this treasure trove. Whenever news emerges about the fragile state of Tiger’s body, I like to remind myself how he moved at his peak—with a lithe, cogent speed that matched his first name.

Specifically, I returned to an underrated moment from Woods’s early career.

To set the scene: the first PGA Tour event of the season was the Mercedes Championship, held at La Costa Resort and Spa. After 54 holes, Tiger was tied with Tom Lehman at 14-under. On Sunday, heavy rains forced the Tour to cancel the final round and arrange a goofy playoff: Woods versus Lehman on the par-3 seventh hole, sudden death.

Today, this looks like a mismatch, but at the 1997 Mercedes Championship, Lehman was the reigning Open champion and PGA Tour Player of the Year. In a few months, he would ascend to No. 1 in the world. Woods, on the other hand, had won two second-tier tour events the previous fall and received an unprecedented amount of hype in the offseason, but his 12-stroke Masters victory was still in the future. Tiger Woods had not yet become Tiger Woods.

As Butch Harmon put it during an interview on the range at La Costa, “Tom is a great player, and Tiger is going to be a great player someday.”

I love revisiting historical moments in which knowledge we now possess had not yet formed. We know now that Tiger Woods is an all-time great, a transcendent figure. We have known that, more or less, since April 1997. But on January 13, 1997, as he and Tom Lehman hunched under umbrellas on the seventh tee at La Costa, preparing to determine the Mercedes champion with one strike of a mid-iron, that future was not yet clear.

It became a bit clearer, however, in the next two minutes. Watch the video below from about 41:30 to 44:00.

Announcer Mike Tirico captured the feeling that history was coming into focus when he said to his booth-mate Curtis Strange, “Every time, Curtis, that you think, ‘Well, he’s pretty special, but let’s see the next time, let’s the next time,’ he adds one more piece of memory to let you sit back and say, ‘He really is special special.’”