Tiger Woods is often judged for failing to break Jack Nicklaus’s major record, but Notah Begay III says that misses the point. Begay, who has known Woods since age 11, believes Tiger exceeded every expectation except one.
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“And then, of course, there’s the Big Cat, Tiger, who just exceeded everybody’s expectations. I think that’s probably the one misunderstood fact about Tiger. Of all the facts that are stated about him, when you have prodigies in sports, and we’ve had a lot of prodigies come up, we love potential. Very rarely do they meet our expectations, and we’re often disappointed” he said on, Short Game Chef podcast.
“Well, in Tiger’s case, he exceeded, I think, everybody’s expectations, with the exception of the major championship total. A lot of people thought that he would break Jack’s record. I think that he would have if he had stayed healthy. But, you know, would have, should have, could have,” he said of what makes Woods different.”
The four-time PGA Tour winner and NBC Sports analyst has reasons for his points.
He believes prodigies rarely live up to the hype built around them. Reasonably so, as golf has seen can’t-miss talents fall short of the labels very early. However, Tiger Woods did the opposite.
He matched and beat what people expected of him on nearly every measure, sometimes a year ahead of schedule.
Notah Begay notes the one place he came up short.
That was Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 major championships, a number Woods spent his career chasing but fell short of. And yet it hardly shadows his career.
And Nicklaus himself set that target.
After playing a 1996 Masters practice round with Woods, then a 20-year-old amateur, Nicklaus predicted that he would win more green jackets than Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer combined. Woods had already embraced the chase, keeping a chart of Nicklaus’s records on his bedroom wall as a child.
Nicklaus won 18 majors from the 1962 U.S. Open to the 1986 Masters. Woods won 15 from the 1997 Masters to the 2019 Masters, but injuries derailed his pursuit. He won his 14th major at the 2008 U.S. Open despite a torn ACL and two stress fractures in his left tibia, then waited 11 years before winning his final major at the 2019 Masters.
Even Jack Nicklaus spoke about it at the Cognizant Classic earlier this year. “Tiger should have broken my record if he’d stayed healthy, but he didn’t.”
Nicklaus’s statement backed Begay’s point. Falling short of 18 majors did not erase everything else Woods achieved. He tied Sam Snead’s PGA Tour record with 82 wins, surpassed Byron Nelson’s record of 113 consecutive cuts with a streak of 142, and held all four major titles at once in 2000 and 2001 to complete the “Tiger Slam.”
That being said, Notah Begay wondered, out of all the records, which one was Tiger Woods’ favorite? He asked him, to which Woods replied, “My cut streak. I didn’t miss a cut. I’m proud of that because it just told me I could be consistent against the world’s best players over a sustained period of time.”
That one line said more about how Woods measured his own career than any leaderboard could. He may have fallen short on one of the expectations, but he rewrote most of the others.