How Tiger Woods found his driver for the 2000 season

People actually believed that Tiger Woods wouldn’t win the US Open because he was so wild off the tee.

Then 2000 happened.

Woods put together one of the greatest statistical seasons of all timewinning nine times, including the last three majors of the year. Part of his statistical prowess was ranking first on Tour in Total Driving.

Not only did Woods put together one of the all-time great seasons, but he also probably had the biggest bag of the 14 clubs ever assembled, mainly through the work of Then-title tour representative Larry Bobka.

Bobka joined host Johnny Wunder on the latest episode of GOLF’s Fully Equipped 2025 to recap the journey that led to Woods’ club pairing for the 2000 season.

This includes detailing how Woods switched to his first Titleist driver from the Cobra driver he used when he won the 1997 Masters.

The final build was a Title 975D Head 7.5 degrees with a 43.5-inch Dynamic Gold X100 steel shaft, but the way Bobka and Woods landed on the specific head and shaft took some time.

“So when the drivers would come in, you know, we get 25 of them in a box,” Bobka said. “I mean, I would literally sit there and put a shaft on every driver in that box that was 7.5 degrees and I’d pull out, you know, three to six of them that I thought would be perfect for his eye. That would be just a little bit up on the toe, it looked like it wouldn’t go left. So most of those drivers, if you measured them at seven degrees.

“Most of them were about D3 to D4, right in that range,” he continued. “I mean, he wasn’t too picky about it, you know, if it was D3.5 versus D3 or D4, if he hit it well, he liked it. And again, that’s when the magic happened with the guy swinging the golf club.”

While revolutionary for its time, the 975D driver isn’t a head much larger than a modern day 3-wood, and the shaft is also the same length. Not to mention the shaft was the same 130g weight as his irons, unlike the 70g graphite shaft he plays in his 3-wood today.

Launch monitor technology was in its early days in the 1990s, but Bobka estimated that even with that setup, Woods was hitting 180 mph in ball speed.

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“I can only remember three people who ever made the sound he made hitting a golf ball,” Bobka said. “Working with Tiger, you start hearing it and it’s like, ‘Man, that’s the voice.’ I mean, it sounds like two cars crashing every time he hits the golf ball.”