Steve Williams: ‘Tiger’s only acceptance of a good week was a win’

W orking alongside Tiger Woods does not afford time to look up and smell the flowers. Woods won 13 of his 15 major titles with Steve Williams as caddie, a run the New Zealander quickly came to realise was about business rather than pleasure.

“Tiger’s only acceptance of a good week came with a win,” Williams says. “Every week with Tiger, unless he won there was just more pressure on the next one. I have never met someone for whom winning was so important, the be all and end all.

“I wish I could say I enjoyed it but when Tiger won a major championship, it was straight on to the next one. The epitome of that was when he won Pebble Beach by 15 strokes [the 2000 US Open]. One of the very next things he said to me after signing his card was: ‘Steve, you need to get your ass across the water and get all the detail from St Andrews so I can win there as well.’ That was the kind of pressure you were under. I remember sitting at the airport that night in San Francisco, thinking I should be enjoying myself but thinking all the things I needed to know about St Andrews.

“He wanted to break Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors. That was his goal. He would tick one off then move to the next one.”

Williams, 59, seeks no sympathy for the attritional nature of that environment. Far from it. He and Woods laughed and joked during a chance meeting in a Los Angeles hotel earlier this year. Earlier, Williams had been portrayed as the barking, brooding caddie by Woods’s side. “Was it unfair? Probably,” he says.

“A lot of the accusations were through jealousy but it was water off a duck’s back to me. It was a circus when Tiger was in his prime. You have to do some officiating. I was bodyguard, security, whatever you want to call it but it was