too.” That line came after every bad round. Mark O’Meara, though, saw a little more mean- ing in the hobby; washing one’s car indicated you were a stickler for perfection, and if you wanted something done properly, you did it yourself. One day in 1999, he drove by Woods’ house and saw him and Williams soaping up Woods’ vehicles. “He had this incredible, mid-engine Porsche,” O’Meara recalls. “Steve was a perfectionist, so was Tiger. To be successful at anything in life, you have to be a perfectionist. They were a great match.” DAWN-THIRTY Williams knew, over decades looping on tours, that it was critical in the early stages of caddieing with a new player to develop a rapport and banter with that person. “In the player-caddie dynamic, there are never any guarantees it’s going to work out, and you spend a lot of time together,” Wil- liams says. Woods and Williams showed early signs of a special bond. His next tournament was the Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass near Jacksonville, Florida. Over dinner on Monday, March 22, Wil- liams and Woods discussed what time to meet at TPC Sawgrass for a practice round the following morning. One of the most important disciplines for a caddie was punctuality, specifically, being at the course well before his boss arrived. “Let’s meet at ‘dawn thirty,’” Woods said. Williams had never heard of the term. “I’m guessing that means 30 minutes after dawn?”
“STEVE WAS A PERFECTIONIST, SO WAS TIGER ... THEY WERE A GREAT MATCH.”
~MARK O’MEARA
he needed a caddie who was willing to work as hard as he would to help him achieve that goal,” Williams recalls. WASHING CARS On the Monday after the Bay Hill Invitational (Their first tournament together produced an inauspicious T-56), Williams stayed at Woods’ house, and the pair took their minds off the previ- ous week by washing Woods’ cars. Woods, prior to signing a deal with Buick in December 1999, was a fan of the Cadillac Escalade, a large SUV. He had several models along with a Porsche in his Isle- worth garage. “We really bonded because I took immense pride in washing my cars; it’s therapeutic to me because you see a car dirty, then you see it clean,” Williams says. That day, the two started a joke that would last for years. Because Woods had played poorly at Bay Hill, where Williams called him overrated, he joked to his caddie, “If I don’t get my shit together, you’ll be working for me at TW’s Car Wash. I need to get my ass into gear, and you do,
PARTNERS IN PRIME Williams caddied for Woods in 13 of his 15 major victories.
100 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
JUNE 2025
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