Steve Williams answered quickly. He added the word “unparrelled” to his response, too.
He’d been asked:
Whom did Tiger Woods view as his rival?
Good topic, right? Perhaps you’ve wondered that, too, and you’d have options. Maybe the answer would be no one, as Woods was often in a golf course all his own. Or maybe it would be Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els or Vijay Singh, who all won multiple major championships during the years Woods won his 15.
But Williams, Woods’ caddie for 13 of those wins, believed his one-time boss would pick the winner of 13 PGA Tour events and the 2001 Open Championship.
“David Duval, unparalleled,” Williams said on this week’s episode of GOLF’s “Subpar” podcast, which you can watch by clicking here. “He thought that David had what it took to compete week in and week out and challenge him for number one supremacy.
;)
This Tiger Woods story? It features an impersonator and being told ‘to F off’
“He was the guy, but it was a very short-lived time. David had that wonderful patch where he got the number one in the world, captured the Open Championship, and then he made a drastic change with his body. And hence, he lost feel with his golf swing in there, and it took him a long time to get it going again. But he was the guy that he had the most respect for and the guy that he thought could challenge him.”
On “Subpar,” co-host Colt Knost also noted that “lesser-known guys” found success against Woods in majors, and he asked Williams why that was.
“I think if you look at it, the guys like Phil and Vijay, they were playing with Tiger week in and week out,” Williams said, “and they were frequently paired with him and to the point where nine times out of 10 when they appeared with Tiger, he got the better of them in the score that was posted on that day. So when you get a guy, sort of an unheralded guy that’s not played with Tiger a lot and he’s playing with him in the final round of a major championship, everybody’s thinking, oh, Tiger’s going to win the tournament.
“And there’s a lot of pressure, we know that. But these guys are sort of under no pressure, if you know what I mean, because they’re not expected to win. And they rise to the occasion, but because they’ve never been knocked off the tree as often as some of these other guys that played with Tiger frequently.
“Ernie Els was an absolute wonderful player, fantastic player in that. But he hardly ever got the better of Tiger. And I think sometimes when you play with somebody on a regular basis, whether it be golf, tennis, whatever it is, and someone keeps getting the better of you, you almost know that the guy is going to get the better of you. And I think that’s probably indicative of where these guys that weren’t expected to play, put Tiger to the best test.”