On the occasion of his 43rd birthday and Tiger Woods has lavished praise on the fans that walked triumphantly with him up the final fairway on route to his 80th PGA Tour victory at East Lake in Atlanta.
Woods ended a more than 5-year winless drought amid emotional and rarely seen before scenes last September.
The former long-time World No. 1 had gone close to success earlier in 2018 at the Valspar Championship and was leading mid-round during the final day of the 2018 Open Championship at Carnoustie
Woods also continued to defy the skeptics in pushing eventual champion, Brooks Koepka all the way over the final round of the PGA Championship at Bellerive.
Wow. 🐅 pic.twitter.com/klf7PLfVv9
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) September 23, 2018
Finally, Woods delivered the victory the golf world had waited 1,876 days but little did anyone expect those scenes on the par-5 18th fairway that Sunday afernoon on the 23rd of September.
“It was pound the ball down there on 18 and it happended to be in the fairway great, if not then so be it and game over,” said Woods in a 90-minute ESPN TV special that aired tonight (December 30th) at 9pm US eastern time.
“When we (Joe LaCava – caddy) were walking down there it started getting really loud behind us and I looked and there the people were becoming overwhelming.
“The cops were trying to organise people so that they don’t go rushing.”
LaCava says: “I didn’t realise what was going on behind me and I could see out of the side of my eyes that guys were rurshing towards us.
“The cops, and the guys who had been walking with us for the round, are now facing the crowd and they said to us: ‘What do you think we ought to do here?’
“I said ‘Oh, let them come up. It should be fun’ and what I thought was just a couple of hundred people”.
Woods then realises the size of the crowd after his plays his second shot but began fearing trouble in negotiating his way through a narrow section of the fairway due to the location of a lake guarding the later left-hand side of the final faiway.
“There is a natural bottleneck there at the lake and then when we stepped-up there all hell broke lose,”said Woods.
LaCava revealed he purposely hung back to allow Woods to soak-up the crowd support but the Connecticut caddy soon had Woods demanding: “Hey Joe? What are you doing?”
LaCava remarked: “I’m hanging back to let you have your moment.”
Woods responded: “You better get your butt up here”.
Woods looked back on that afternoon declaring it be one of the ‘coolest scenes ever’ in his career.
“The people were just yelling so much and this is where the modern game has changed and evolved as people don’t clap anymore because they can’t because they have a phone in their hands so they can’t actually clap, so they yell,” said Woods.
“The great thing was that the fans did not want to cut us off. They wanted to be part of the atomsphere. It was something I have never seen before.
“The fans were just different to anything I had ever done in my entire career.
“It would have been easy to fall off this pass year and that would have made it more difficult to climb back up there again, and do it again.
“So to have that fan support I had there in Altanta made the win that more special.”
