Bob May's duel with Tiger Woods at 2000 PGA lives in golf history

LAS VEGAS — In a concession stand line at a Vegas Golden Knights game during this NHL regular season, a 30ish-year-old man began gawking at a 55-year-old man in that benign way people stare at people who just possibly might be sort of famous.

Eventually, the younger man spoke.

“You’re Bob May, aren’t you?” he said.

“You must be really into golf,” Bob May replied, “because nobody recognizes me anymore.”

Bob May does live on in a good life and in a sparkling memory of a soaring Sunday in August 2000. He sustains his Bob May Golf Academy, even if he has downsized it from about 80 students at one point to around 20 these days. He teaches the method of his mentor, Eddie Merrins — “Swing the handle, not the clubhead” — who helped him become a Southern California prodigy and an Oklahoma State third-team all-American. He’s a Las Vegas mainstay since 1993 who spends annual chunks of time in Hawaii. He’s newly engaged. He lives and works up around the sprawled area north of Las Vegas with its warmth on the pavements and snow on the peaks. He’s still striving to play on the PGA Tour Champions circuit even after various struggles across 23 years with a spine that kept rebelling at such thoughts. He’s an emblem of the everlasting mysteries of the peculiar Scottish invention of golf.

Advertisement

He has lived for more than 2,901 weeks but remains renowned for one.

“Everybody knows who Bob is, but Bob’s by nature kind of a shy, retiring guy,” said Jack Sheehan, a fellow member of the Las Vegas Golf Hall of Fame and a longtime writer who collaborated with Peter Jacobsen on the 1993 golf book “Buried Lies.” “He’d never come up to somebody and say, ‘Hi, I’m Bob May.’ But he’s very pleasant. He’s got a good sense of humor.”

“I’m not a gambler,” May says by phone of his beloved Las Vegas. “I don’t gamble on the golf course. It’s easy for me to live here. I’m not a drinker; I’m a social drinker, if people want to have a beer or you want to have an iced tea. … I guess some ‘Sin City’ stuff, that people call it ‘Sin City’ for, it’s really not part of my life.”

So that’s Bob May, except that Bob May occupies another place, too: a corner of the consciousness of people who respect either golf or near-impeccable sports performance in situations of ruthless tension. His distinction carries two curious prongs. He’s among those sports figures known for one moment, and asked repeatedly through years about that one moment, and presented with the puzzle of how to handle being known for one moment. And he’s somebody who co-starred in an event with a caliber rarefied enough to reach damned near intoxicating.

Advertisement

In the 2000 PGA Championship at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, where the event returns this week, May and Tiger Woods provided that very occasional spectacle: a contest so rich in quality that it morphs into a joint expression of near-impeccable prowess. Someone would lose, but no one would lose. May lost (in a three-hole playoff) but with an unusual meaning of “lost.”

“He would make a putt; I would make a putt,” Woods said Tuesday in Louisville. “I would make a putt; he would make a putt.”

The Woods-May pairing itself had echoes, as the geeks around the course knew how Woods as a kid had aimed to surpass May’s junior records in their shared Southern California. May’s parents hadn’t pushed him into golf, but an aunt had given him some clubs; his father apparently ran a gas station where one Tommy Lasorda used to fill up. Those less geeky knew the larger pursuit: Woods, having won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach by 15 shots and the British Open at St. Andrews by eight, could become the first player since Ben Hogan in 1953 to hoard three major titles in one calendar year.

Advertisement

May had won the 1999 British Masters and had finished a fine 11th at St. Andrews.

Nobody really knew that.

They reached the back nine tied, then chiseled the back-nine scores primed to live forever: 31 and 31. They played the last 12 holes (counting the playoff) with zero bogeys between them. Mistakes grew nonexistent or slight even as other contenders faded with scores such as 75 and 76. Steadily, a crowd prepared to fete Woods began to dig May. Of all the many sounds, May pinpoints this from near the tee at No. 14: “I just remember this one guy screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘What about Bob?’” he says. “And the whole crowd started chanting that.”

Each birdied No. 18 — May with a double-breaking 15-footer, Woods with a marble-gutted six- or seven-footer, depending on your description. Woods birdied the first playoff hole, No. 16, with the 25-footer he famously stalked to the hole while pointing and commanding the ball to plunk in. May’s bid to even matters on the closing No. 18 went up over a harrowing ridge and nearly dropped itself. The lone misgiving about the whole sterling thing remains Woods’s tee shot on No. 18 in the playoff, which strayed left, dived into some course-side foliage and emerged to roll with momentum into a better place such that some wonder whether some fan gave it some help.

Advertisement

“When I got done,” May said, CBS broadcaster “Ken Venturi said to me, ‘This is the greatest major ever.’ And I said, ‘C’mon, stop that.’”

May cited Jack Nicklaus vs. Isao Aoki at the 1980 U.S. Open at Baltusrol in New Jersey, saying, “I’ll never forget that battle.”

Venturi said, “This is better than that!”

May said, “Well, I don’t think it’s better.”

Venturi said, “You don’t understand what took place.”

“Even after it was over,” May says now, “I didn’t realize what took place until a few years later.”

Others did, and some started turning up unannounced at his house, and 200 or so others left messages on his then-listed phone, and he moved to a gated community. At the tournament the next week in Reno, Nev., a stranger bought him dinner from across the room with a note on the back of a handicap card: “Thank you for the great weekend of watching golf.” In airports and restaurants and such, people came up after spotting his familiar Ping cap. He kept playing and logged four top-15 finishes in the balance of that year, and December came before he plopped the tape of the PGA into some old gadget called a VCR.

Advertisement

By the 2001 PGA Championship at Atlanta Athletic Club, though, a fresh menace had surfaced: A swing at the Bob Hope that February left his back ringing with pain, gutting his mobility and sidelining him for two months. Only Woods appeared in the news conference room that pretournament, saying: “We’ve talked about it since then and reminisced. It was just a lot of fun competing at that level because we both knew that even if somebody made a mistake, we were going to recover. We had that kind of feeling, and we both kind of sensed it, that it was going to take something, something special, and a bunch of birdies in order to win, and I was fortunate enough to make one more than he did.”

May toiled out on the Atlanta course, where the writers who found him included Randall Mell of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, who wrote of May in the 2000 PGA, “He raised his game to a level few in the game will ever realize.” Then May shot 71-70-76-74 in what became his eighth and final major, finishing 73rd with David Toms winning and Woods tied for 29th.

From there, May had some years of not-bad-at-all prize money ($534,000 in 2001, $407,000 in 2002, $548,000 in 2006 with a runner-up finish at the B.C. Open), but then he lost his PGA Tour card as updates brimmed with his back troubles. He would tell J.R. De Groote of West Hawaii Today in 2016 about having no disk between the L4 and L5 vertebra and Brian Hurlburt of the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2019 about a back surgery in 2017 and a herniated disk that robbed the feeling from his right arm. Beginning in 2019, he has played in six senior majors, tying for 58th at the 2022 U.S. Senior Open, and has finished between 104th and 156th on the money lists of various seasons. Meanwhile, he teaches Merrins’s simplicity-rich method to players of various ages and ambition.

All along the near-24 years, he has lacked agony because he lacked flubs that day, and he has his own natural approach to those who approach him: “It’s something that some people are very interested in, and they wonder about things,” he says. “I’m just lucky that I was a part of it, and they have interest in it, and so why not share it?” He says, “I think the reason it was such a big deal is we both performed very well,” even as that reason mingles with another: A summer when no one could come close to challenging Woods ended with May challenging Woods right up close.

Advertisement

So even as the interview requests before the annual PGA Championships dwindled steadily until 2023 became the first year without any, Bob May has his day spent in the clouds. It’s there on his placard at the Las Vegas Golf Hall of Fame, where he’s a 2013 inductee: “Bob May is a longtime resident of Las Vegas and the champion of the 1999 British Masters. He also finished as the runner-up to Tiger Woods at the 2000 PGA Championship when he lost in a playoff.”

That’s a master class in understatement.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMCxu9GtqmhqYGeBcHyUaGhuZ5Kkr265wLJkqZ%2BRYrCprcypoKimo522sXnVmqOhmZyhrnA%3D