When Tiger texts: From priceless advice to sarcastic jabs, a text from Tiger always means a little more to his peers

The choreography is always the same; only the order changes. When the last putt drops, watches go back on wrists, car keys back in pockets – and then there’s the thing nearly all PGA TOUR players do after their rounds: grab their phones, eager to see what they missed during the previous five hours. The messages that accumulate are mostly the same mundane communications we all receive – inside jokes, obscure references that fuel group texts, big reactions to sports scores.

For Webb Simpson, one message stood out after the final round of the 2018 Wyndham Championship. It was just three words, but it was memorable enough to quickly recall more than four years later.

It was the sender who made this message extraordinary.

Simpson had just shot 62 to finish second at Sedgefield Country Club, and he did so in a bright red shirt and black pants. The man who made that look famous in final rounds couldn’t help but weigh in.

“See. It works,” wrote Tiger Woods.

Inside the ropes, Woods is arguably the greatest player of all time, owner of a record 82 PGA TOUR titles and 15 major championships. He also is a dedicated and omniscient observer of the game. He does not hesitate to share his opinions and observations with his friends, and his common mode of communication, like nearly everyone else, is text message.

“He always knows what’s going on,” said Justin Thomas. “He’s a golf fan. He’s a nerd. He’s a dork.”

Woods sends everything from encouragement and his beloved barbs to the granular insights he accumulated during decades spent obsessing over the game’s intricacies. Or, if you’re Max Homa, it’s messages about their beloved Dodgers signing Shohei Ohtani.

No matter the contents, there’s one commonality between all his messages: they stand out in a big way.

“If you look down and you see it says ‘Tiger Woods’, it’s kind of the first one that you open,” said Jordan Spieth.

One of the final scenes in the first season of the Netflix documentary “Full Swing” shows Rory McIlroy in the East Lake locker room moments after he won his third FedExCup. Scrolling through the congratulatory messages on his phone, McIlroy says, “He’s always the first. Always. Tiger. He’ll text you like before the last putt drops. Always the first. He’s unreal.”

The congratulations are often mixed with a reminder that his records remain untouchable. Those little jabs come from his competitive side but also encourage the recipient to reach even higher. “Congrats. Now do that nine more times,” he wrote to Thomas moments after Thomas completed his five-win 2017 season, which concluded with him claiming the FedExCup. (Woods won five or more times in a season 10 times.)

“Sometimes it could be, ‘Hey man, great f—ing job,’ or, … it could be like, ‘What the f--- did you do on that hole?’” said Jason Day. “And I’m sitting there like, ‘Dude, I’m trying to play my best. I didn’t mean to hit it in the trees.’

“After that,” Day continued, “I sit there and ask him questions because I feel like that’s an open invitation to go, ‘Hey, what would you do in that situation?’”

Woods’ text-message mentoring is a late-stage career development, as his days of being driven solely by domination have passed. Those blue and green bubbles were his connection to the TOUR during the years he was sidelined by various surgeries and a way for him to contribute remotely to Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup efforts. His middle-of-the-night messages to the U.S. captains during the 2015 Presidents Cup in South Korea set the stage for him to be a Ryder Cup vice-captain a year later and then the Presidents Cup’s playing captain in 2019.

“Sometimes you can’t get him to answer, and then sometimes you might wish that he didn’t answer because he won’t stop,” said Davis Love III, the 2016 Ryder Cup captain. “And then sometimes he responds at 3:30 in the morning rather than at 8 in the evening, when you texted him.”

Woods set pairings weeks in advance, before the team was even finalized. Love said he had different pairings for different weather conditions, laying out lineups for cold and warm temperatures.

“You just see why he’s such a great player,” Love said, “because he remembers everything that ever happened in the game, he thinks about everything that could happen in the game. … He thinks about the small little details.”

When it comes to getting a Tiger text, Chris Como, his former swing instructor, said “all hours are on the table,” and he never knew when his phone would light up with “random insight or musings about the golf swing.” Woods’ former caddie, Joe LaCava, recently told Golf.com that he’d receive messages at 3 a.m. about the anticipated wind direction for the following day and how that would impact club selection.

Tony Finau remembers Woods sharing his insights into playing Bay Hill, the venue where Woods won the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard eight times.

“You’d be surprised the lengths that he’ll go to send you a text back and say, ‘This is what I was thinking, this is what I did and this is how I feel like you should execute that,’” Finau said. Day remembers a long discourse about the strategy on another course where Woods won eight times, Firestone Country Club.

Day lost the 2016 World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone with a double-bogey at the par-5 16th. He drove it into the left rough, hit his next shot through the fairway, and hit his third into the water. As he often does, Woods was watching.

“He gave me an earful,” Day said.

But Woods also explained in great detail why right would have been a better miss off the tee.

“Blow it 400 yards right if you want to,” Day recalls Woods writing. When Day responded that there were tall trees over there, Woods had his retort ready. That’s where the spectators walk and trample down the rough, he said. And the angle and slope of the fairway make it much easier to avoid hitting your punch shot from the trees into the rough on the other side, as Day had done.

Simpson remembers his former caddie, Paul Tesori, texting Woods immediately after a similar disappointment.

With ground to make up on the final nine of the 2021 Sony Open in Hawaii, they decided to go after a hole location tucked in a narrow corner of the 11th green instead of playing toward the middle of the putting surface. Simpson pushed the shot, however, and hit his ball into a penalty area. He made bogey and lost by two.

Simpson was signing his scorecard when Tesori texted Woods to ask if they’d made a mistake on No. 11. Tesori said stats convinced him that the aggressive play would increase their odds of making birdie.

“I didn’t win all those events because of stats,” Woods wrote, using several exclamation points. He also told Tesori not to regret a decision made in the chaos of a Sunday afternoon. “So you’d have hit it to 20 feet?” Tesori asked, referring to the safe play.

“And made the putt,” Woods replied. The message ended with a smiley-face emoji.