‘1,000 contacts with a club’: Tiger Woods breaks down his typical tournament preparation to college kids in fascinating video

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[PHOTO: Ross Kinnaird]

Practice makes perfect, as they say. Nobody preaches that harder, and actually lives by it, quite like Tiger Woods, whose grind sessions were the stuff of legend at his playing peak.

With all the wear and tear on his body, though, the current version of the Big Cat can’t quite dig it out of the dirt like he used to. He does, however, still make time for “1,000 contacts with a club” when prepping for tournament play, as he explained to a group of college kids during a recent Bridgestone shoot.

“One of the things that I enforce all juniors, all kids, all pros, is that when I’m getting ready for tournaments, I make sure that each and every day I make 1,000 contacts with a club,” Woods said.

As he continued, that doesn’t mean just bashing balls at the range for hours on end. That can certainly help, and a former version of Woods probably did have thousand-ball range sessions. But “contacts” with a club come in many different forms.

“That means possibly hitting 100 balls on the range,” he says. “Three hundred chip shots, 600 putts. OK. Break it up however you want to break it up to. That develops feel and sensation that never goes away.”

That explains why, despite health issues that have caused him to miss years at a time, Woods’ feel, particularly around the greens, is always there whenever he makes a comeback. He may not ever have the power or the speed that he once had, but his feel will never go away. Well, except for that time it seemingly did in 2015 before he got it back, which is something we don’t discuss enough.

In the full clip from the Bridgestone shoot, the 15-time major champion surprises a number of students from the Bridgestone collegiate development program on the range, even offering up a few free swing tips that regular people would pay astronomical amounts of money for. He also drops in a few classic Tiger terms like “peeler” and “upshoot spin cut”: