12/20/2025
Tiger and Kobe have psychotic attention to detail. Here are two stories to prove it. Nike sends Tiger Woods a box of six drivers to test. After beating the covers of hundreds of golf balls. Tiger tells Nike he prefers the heavier one. The team at Nike are confused. All the drivers they sent were the same weight.
They feed this back to Tiger, but he insists one weighs is more than the others. Eventually, he sends the clubs back to the factory to be re-weighed. Tiger was right. One of the drivers weighed two grams more than the others because an engineer had attached the head with an extra dab of glue. The difference was that of $2 bills.
It’s 2009, and Kobe is warming up with the Lakers before a game against New Orleans. During his shooting practice, he notices he’s missing more than usual. Something feels off with the rim. He tells the officials, who brush him off immediately — this is the NBA, after all. But Kobe doesn’t let it go.
Eventually, the officials get out their measuring tapes and discover that the rim is too low by a quarter of an inch. For reference, that's the length of the sight of a penny. The rim is fixed and Kobe starts making them again. For world class athletes, the devil is in the details.