Was Tiger Woods' equipment in 2000 the reason for his success?

Frank Nobilo has a potentially hot take on why Tiger Woods was so good at the turn of the century.

By Kyle Porter

Feb 18, 2015 at 7:14 am ET • 1 min read

There are different stages of "the legend is fading," and we have apparently reached the"Wait, was he ever that good or was he just using superior equipment?" portion of the discussion.

On Tuesday, Frank Nobilo noted that Tiger Woods was using a superior golf ball in 2000 compared to everybody else on tour.

"A lot of people look at 2000 as Tiger at his best but it was probably the first and only time in Tiger's career that you could argue that maybe he had better equipment than the rest," said Nobilo to Reuters. "Only a handful of guys had gone to the solid ball. The rest of us all thought a wound ball was better."

"Everybody caught up about a year or two later (with ball technology) and Tiger was still better, but not by quite as much."

It's true that he didn't win the US Open by 15 strokes again but let's look at Woods 2002-05 stretch. He won 17 times in that four-year run, including four majors.

That's pretty good.

"He obviously had skills too but that's why it wasn't a fair fight," added Nobilo.

That's a pretty interesting take from somebody who was competing against Woods at the time. He also doesn't mention that Woods changed his swing just four years after that crazy 2000 season.

Stuart Appleby, another contemporary of Woods', said the ball didn't much matter.

"He had an edge anyway," said the Australian. "I don't know if he needed more of an edge. I think there was an advantage (but) he could have hit anything (and still won)."