The golf shoe already good enough for the most exacting man in the game has just gotten better.

If Tiger Woods announced plans to design a jet, the folks at Gulfstream would shake in their flight boots. He is, after all, a bit of a perfectionist — a man who can tell, by feel, when a groove on his wedge is starting to wear, and can predict with mind-boggling accuracy the spin rate of a ball he’s just hit. Let’s just say if Tiger built planes, the seams would surely be tight.

Consider this story: A few years ago, Nike gave Tiger three new drivers to test. He hit each before declaring that he liked “the lighter one.” The clubs are identical in weight, he was told. No, they’re not, Tiger replied, and when put on a scale, the one he preferred was two grams lighter than the others. That’s about the weight of two paperclips. On a golf club that weighed more than 300 paperclips.

“He can pick up the most miniscule of changes,” says Jill Prandy, who, as the company’s international business director for footwear, works with Tiger in designing his signature shoe. “He challenges us: How can my footwear make me play better?”

Case in point: In 2007 Nike introduced the Tiger-approved SP-8, which featured the Nike Power Platform, a technology of rigid and flexible plates that helps maintain ground contact throughout the fastest of golf swings.

The shoe was as stable as a super-jumbo jet; Tiger thought it could be better. Thus comes the new Nike Air Tour TW 8.5 ($230), which maintains that same successful chassis, but adds more upper-foot support and a new molded heel to further keep the back of Tiger’s foot (and, presumably yours) in contact with the ground.

The soft-leather shoe comes in three designs: white with black, all black and white with red — which despite Tiger’s fondness for crimson shirts, he rarely wears. “When he stands over his shot,” Prandy explains, “he likes his footwear to be quiet. That’s why the toe is only one color and there are no intersecting stitch lines there.”

A final selling point: Although the 8.5 is Nike’s top-of-the-line golf shoe, the company doesn’t even allow the rest of its sponsored pros — Justin Leonard, Stewart Cink and K.J. Choi among them — to wear them on the Saturday and Sunday of tournaments. “On the weekends it’s Tiger’s shoe,” Prandy says. And yours, too, if you’re into perfection.  nikegolf.com

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