Tiger Woods didn’t need to birdie the last hole. He’d already won the Masters. He made it anyway.
Augusta National’s 18th green, April 8, 2001. Fifteen feet, left-to-right break, the gallery three-deep around the green, history hanging in the air. Woods stood over it, stroked it, watched it fall.
It dropped. He raised his fist. Then walked to the edge of the green, buried his face in his hat, and stood there for a long moment while the gallery roared around him.
“I finally realised I had no more shots to play,” Woods said afterwards. “I’m done. I won the Masters.”
He had also won the US Open, The Open Championship and the PGA Championship. All four in a row. All four in his possession at the same time. Nobody in the history of professional golf had ever done it. Nobody has done it since.
It became known as the Tiger Slam. And 25 years on, it remains the most extraordinary run of golf any human being has ever played.
The Year That Started Everything
To understand the Tiger Slam, you have to understand what 2000 meant.
By June of that year, Tiger Woods was already a two-time major winner. He’d destroyed Augusta in 1997 as a 21-year-old — 12 strokes clear of the field, the largest winning margin in Masters history — and had added the 1999 PGA Championship. He was the best player on the planet. Everyone knew it.
What nobody quite grasped was how much better he was about to get.
In May 1999, Tiger had called his coach Butch Harmon and said simply: “Butchie, I got it.” He’d been rebuilding his swing for almost two years, convinced the version that had won him the Masters by 12 shots wasn’t good enough to last. The call was his way of saying the rebuild was complete.
Woods then won 16 of his next 28 PGA Tour starts.
By the time he arrived at Pebble Beach for the 2000 US Open, he was playing a form of golf the rest of the field couldn’t meaningfully compete with. Paul Azinger, watching from the sidelines as Woods built a 10-shot lead through three rounds, summed it up: “He’s the show pony. The sad thing is, you can’t control him.”
Woods closed with a 67 to win by 15 shots. Fifteen. The largest winning margin in major championship history. Ernie Els, who finished second, was asked to describe what he’d witnessed. “My words probably can’t describe it,” he said. “So I’m not even going to try.”
One down. Three to go.
St Andrews and the Career Grand Slam
Six weeks later, Woods arrived at the Old Course at St Andrews for The Open Championship. The prize was his first Claret Jug — and something else.
Winning at St Andrews would make him, at 24, the youngest player in history to complete the Career Grand Slam: all four professional majors, at least once, in a career. Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus — all had done it. All had taken considerably longer.
Woods was blemish-free from the start. An opening 67 built from patience, eight consecutive pars before the birdies arrived. By halfway he led by three. By Saturday night, the only question was the margin.
The moment that defined the week came in the third round, on the par-five 14th. Woods was 270 yards out. He turned to caddie Steve Williams, they debated the shot briefly, and then he flushed a fairway wood at the flag. As the ball rose into the Scottish sky, he said to Williams: “That the one you’re talking about?”
It was. He won by eight. Nineteen under par, on the most famous course in the world, without a single bogey in the final two rounds.
Two down. Two to go.
The One That Nearly Got Away
The 2000 PGA Championship at Valhalla was supposed to be another procession. Woods entered having won the previous two majors by a combined 23 shots. The bookmakers disagreed about who would finish second. First was assumed.
Then a 5ft 7in journeyman from California named Bob May showed up.
May had grown up playing the same Southern California courses as Woods and had set junior records that Tiger himself had used as benchmarks. On tour, he was quietly solid — no major wins, no fireworks. At Valhalla, he shot 72-66-66-66. On Sunday, paired with Woods in the final group, he played the back nine in 31. He hit iron after iron stiff to the flag while Woods scrambled. He birdied the 72nd hole, curling in a 15-footer that twisted and turned before falling.
To win, Woods needed to make five feet for birdie. In a moment that told you everything about who he was, his caddie Steve Williams’s comment before Woods putted was simply: “He’s not going to miss.”
He didn’t. They went to a playoff.
Three holes, aggregate score. On the first extra hole, the 16th, Woods hit a 25-foot birdie putt and sprinted behind the ball as it rolled toward the cup — one of the most famous celebrations in golf history. May matched him with a par. On the third playoff hole, the par-five 18th, both men pulled their drives left. Woods hit a pitch from an awful lie to 18 inches and made par. May needed to hole a long one. It didn’t fall.
“Tiger plays a different game than we play,” May said afterwards, in a line that has stood the test of time.
Three down. One to go.
Eight Months of Waiting
This is the part of the Tiger Slam story that gets forgotten.
Between the PGA Championship in August 2000 and the Masters in April 2001, eight months passed. Eight months of press conferences, of Nicklaus comparisons, of every journalist on the planet asking whether he was going to do the impossible. The weight of what he was chasing was obvious to everyone. Including Tiger.
He arrived at Augusta in 2001 with the three other major trophies in his possession. Win the Masters, and he would become the only player in history to hold all four at the same time. Lose, and the window was gone.
His first round — a 70 — left him five shots off the lead, tied for 15th. Not exactly ominous. But Tiger had a habit of saving his best for when it mattered most. A second-round 66 moved him into contention. A third-round 68 gave him the lead by one shot, with Phil Mickelson breathing down his neck.
The final round was not a formality.
Mickelson birdied his way into the conversation early. David Duval, desperate for his first major after years of near-misses, shot 67 — the low round of the day. He briefly tied for the lead with a birdie on the par-five 15th, and for a few holes, the Slam genuinely looked like it might slip away.
Then Duval bogeyed the 16th. Mickelson bogeyed the 16th. Woods, steady as granite, played the final three holes one under par.
Standing on the 18th green, needing only a par to complete the most remarkable achievement in professional golf history, he made a birdie instead. Because of course he did.
What It Actually Means
There’s still a debate about what to call it. The traditional Grand Slam is all four majors in a calendar year. The Tiger Slam happened across two seasons. Purists reach for the asterisk.
Ignore them.
Four consecutive major championships. Four completely different tests of golf. Blew the field away twice, won a duel at Valhalla by a single shot, held his nerve at Augusta while Duval and Mickelson both cracked at the 16th. Phil Mickelson, paired with Woods in the final round, said afterwards: “I didn’t watch him play a stroke. I just looked up and saw the ball going in, and kind of expected that.”
Nobody has come close since. Rory McIlroy spent a decade chasing the Career Grand Slam before finally winning the 2025 Masters — but four consecutive majors remains untouched. Jordan Spieth won the Masters and the US Open in 2015 before falling short at St Andrews. The calendar-year Grand Slam hasn’t been done since Bobby Jones in 1930 — and back then, two of the four majors were amateur championships.
The Tiger Slam stands alone.
After completing it, Woods went home to Orlando and spent four days in bed with the flu. The four trophies were on the shelf somewhere. History was made. The greatest run of major championship golf ever played ended with Tiger Woods watching daytime television and eating soup.
Some endings are exactly right.
