Tiger Woods returning with new equipment and every shot ‘on call’

The golf world has changed a lot since Tiger Woods last played competitively and one big way is that the equipment company he essentially ignited just up and stopped making clubs.

Nike, of course, has long been a powerhouse in other sports, but Nike Golf was largely a Tiger creation. But in the intervening months, the company decided to get out of the “hard goods” business, meaning they would no longer make clubs and balls but still put out their golf shoes and clothes.

This has opened up a world of possibilities for Tiger, who played everything Nike for much of his career. It’s been one of the biggest topics in golf. We’re not just interested in when he will return and how he will play, but what the biggest moneymaker in the history of the game will be playing. There have been rumors and reports of Woods testing just about everything and his friend Notah Begay has said his house looks like a golf equipment superstore with boxes of stuff sent by all the manufacturers hoping he’d adopt this or that.

With Woods back out in public view this week practicing for his return at the Hero World Challenge, we now have some clarity about what he will put in the bag for this first event. The major details:

That’s a mishmash that is quite a deviation from what has so often been uniformly swoosh.

The only thing that remains from the last time we saw him are those Nike irons and wedges. The Cameron putter, however, is an old friend that he’s used plenty in the past. This is the iconic flatstick that has delivered 13 of his 14 majors. He’s mixed in a Nike putter in recent years, but there’s a lot of history with this Cameron. The deep golf subcultures of the internet are excited to have THE Scotty back in Tiger’s hands up on the greens.

The driver and ball are the big changes. Putting a Bridgestone in the bag was a bit of a stunner, and something Chris Solomon of No Laying Up had reported back in October as Woods was about to return at the Safeway Open. Many assumed he’d probably just put a Titleist in the bag and perhaps even stick with a Nike ball in his first few events back on Tour. Bridgestone has a stable of good pros, but Tiger testing and using their ball is obviously an enormous boost, and they insist they’re not paying him to play it.

As for the TaylorMade driver, we’ve seen a few of Nike’s big guns make the move to that same M2 big stick in recent months. When Nike announced they were bowing out of the equipment market, Brooks Koepka put an M2 in the bag at the Ryder Cup, where we learned that he’d added 18 yards of carry with the new driver.

Rory McIlroy, Nike’s top player, also started testing the TaylorMade M2 during these “offseason” months and was carrying it 330 yards during initial tests. McIlroy used the driver in two starts in China and Dubai. Now we have Tiger adding that same driver to the bag, following in the footsteps of two of Nike’s big guns.

This equipment lineup is tentative, of course. Tiger is not bound by anything and can switch brands and clubs in an instant. He insists this is just the start of figuring out what he’ll attack next season with and not to read too much into it. He’s not signed some deal for the post-Nike stage of his bag.

Tiger was synonymous with Nike golf, and it will be a little jarring to see him play other equipment. There are many gearheads who are worked up about all the possibilities and how this new stuff will work this week and what he might subtract or add going forward. We just want to see how he swings — any club, any brand — and hope he stays healthy. After 16 months and a false start in October when he described his game as “vulnerable,” Tiger insists he’s got it all working, telling USA Today’s Steve DiMeglio, “You just saw a session where I hit everything. And I had control of everything. I can hit all the shots now, on call.”

“On call” is such an amusing Tigerism and it’s hard to be optimistic after all that’s gone down with both his game and health over the last two years. But we’re just happy he’s back.