AUGUSTA, Ga. — As it turns out, even Tiger Woods needs swing advice sometimes.
On Masters Sunday, it also turns out there’s only one person worthy of giving it: His son Charlie.
Woods wandered out to the practice range at Augusta National on Sunday fresh off a career-low. He’d just carded the worst score of his major championship career on Masters Saturday, a 10-over 82 that was so out of sorts, it was hard for even Tiger to make sense of what went wrong.
“The fact that I was not hitting it very good or putting well,” he said, offering a round summary of the entirety of his game when asked about his weaknesses on Saturday. “Just hit the ball in all the places that I know I shouldn’t hit it. And I missed a lot of putts. Easy, makable putts. I missed a lot of them.”
But then he was there, wearing his familiar Sunday red (and Sun Day Red), and there was hope again that he might turn his Masters around. First, because it’s hard not to believe in Tiger when witnessing him stripe golf balls at the range. And second, because a familiar face wandered out closely behind him.
Charlie Woods, the 15-year-old chip-off-the-old-block, had arrived on the range on Sunday morning as moral support to his father … and with hopes of helping the 15-time major champ figure things out.
The two went through a lengthy warm-up together, with Charlie — clad in fresh Nike AF1s and an SDR-logo’d hat — offering tips on the state of his father’s game throughout. Billy Kratzert, who was working on the Masters featured group broadcast at the time, said that Charlie appeared to be encouraging his father to have the club “exit to the left,” keeping the arms from running off and allowing the body to keep rotating.
