Remember earlier this year when perennial PGA Tour runner-up Phil Mickelson took a light-hearted shot at the Nike driver that Tiger Woods uses?
"He (Woods) hates that I can fly it past him now. He has a faster swing speed than I do, but he has inferior equipment. Tiger is the only player good enough to overcome the equipment he's stuck with."
Sensing that the bottom might begin to drop out of the market for Nike golf equipment, Woods and the folks from Nike swung the PR machine into high gear and put Mickelson on the defensive. Eventually, Mickelson apologized in what must have been one of the more ridiculous public statements in recent memory.
Imagine, someone being forced to apologize, not for insulting an individual, but for giving an honest assesment about a piece of equipment. Amazing. And in its own way, deplorable. But back to that later.
Today, Woods and Nike are finishing the job, and essentially turning the whole issue inside out by holding a news conference accusing other players on the tour of cheating and using drivers that give them an unfair advantage:
"First hole, here's my driver," Woods said last week at the Buick Classic. "Make sure it's legal. Green light, red light. That kind of thing."As his driving distance slips farther down the rankings -- at 292.2 yards, a career-low 29th on tour -- Woods has become increasingly suspicious that some players are using drivers with a little too much pop.
Asked if there were illegal clubs on tour, Woods replied, "You could say that."
Either that, or Mickelson was telling the truth, and Woods really is using an inferior driver.
One the one hand, you have to credit Woods and Nike for their marketing savvy. Mickelson's comments have created some serious word of mouth that the Nike driver isn't any good, and they need to combat that perception in the marketplace to protect their business. By calling for testing of equipment, Woods is setting up himself, and Nike, as the guardians of tradition in the sport, while by extension other club makers like Titlest, Calloway, etc. are underwriting fraud on the PGA Tour:
"Look at all of the young kids now: every one of them, they are cut, they are ripped, hit the ball a long ways, and the game has changed that way," he said last week. "You don't see too many young players coming up playing the way Corey Pavin used play. You don't see that type of game any more. Now it's just bombs away and we'll figure it out from there."
Funny, but if Mickleson was forced to apologize for saying the Nike driver was inferior, then isn't Woods setting himself up to have to apologize to all the other golfers and the makers of their clubs for insinuating that they're cheating?
I'm not holding my breath. And lets hope that the folks who cover the PGA Tour deal with Woods a little more roughly, and with more of a jaundiced eye, than they did when this controversy started back in February.
In the end, I don't know, and don't pretend to understand, the physics behind how and why a golf club's shape and size affect the flight of the ball. But I do know that Woods claims are easily disputable, and reporters who tackle this story ought to do so with the sort of scepticism rarely seen in the past when they've been dealing with Woods.
POSTSCRIPT: Welcome to readers who have arrived via Steve Czaban. I've got a few updates on Tiger's crusade against "illegal" drivers, which you can find in the list below:
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*A term borrowed from the PC business, where most folks are well acquainted with the "Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field."
Tigergate
Eric McErlain blows the lid off the latest carping by Tiger and Nike. Looks like Lefty was right after all.