The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (14 page)

Tiger never tried to discourage people from believing he and Phil didn’t get along. It was that much easier for him to be cold when Phil would try to break down the barrier between them with a friendly word or gesture. Rather than respond in kind, Tiger, it seemed to me, would go out of his way to be even more distant—a kind of competitive bully move that he didn’t hesitate to use if he thought it might increase his edge. I can remember a few times when another player would make a conciliatory gesture toward Tiger, like sitting down at the lunch table or stopping to say something nice on the practice tee, and Tiger would respond with the cold shoulder. Sergio Garcia got the treatment after some early success against Tiger, and I think it bothered Sergio to the extent that he never played well in their matchups again. By contrast, Vijay Singh never tried to ingratiate himself with Tiger, and it was part of why Tiger seemed to give him more respect than his other rivals.

Tiger didn’t mind that it was awkward with Phil, which made it tricky when Hal Sutton paired them in the 2004 Ryder Cup. Tiger didn’t want the pairing because he knew it was going to put him under more of a microscope, and he knew how much criticism a loss would bring. When they did lose, it didn’t bother Tiger to see Phil get blamed, with the focus on Phil’s sprayed drive on the final hole. But I’m sure he would have rather won the match.

When Tiger and Phil were thrown together in the team atmosphere, I never saw or heard about any real animosity. By all accounts Tiger truly enjoyed the Ping-Pong matches he and Phil had at the Ryder Cup and the Presidents Cup. It was competition, which was Tiger’s safe zone as far as personal interaction. I’m sure Phil tired of Tiger’s never giving it up, but he always seemed to take the high road when he talked about Tiger, calling him the best player and thanking him for making everyone richer. And in his own way, Tiger softened a bit. He got a laugh when the Mickelsons sent the Woodses a miniature Ping-Pong table after Charlie was born. And when Phil’s wife, Amy, and his mom were diagnosed with cancer in 2009, Tiger and Elin offered support.

Early in Tiger’s career on the tour, I don’t think Phil worried him much as a player. Tiger had always admired Phil’s short game, and I’d see him imitating that dead-arm pitch Phil executes so well. But he thought Phil’s full swing was pretty flawed, too handsy and, especially at the more penal major-championship setups, very susceptible to the big miss under pressure. But Phil definitely got better when, with the help of instructor Rick Smith, he tightened up his body action and began favoring a more controlled fade off the tee. Tiger’s respect for Phil took a jump when Phil won the 2004 Masters, and it’s grown as Phil has won three more majors. Even when Phil blew it with a double bogey on the final hole of the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, Tiger saw that more as a mechanical breakdown and not some kind of choke job.

Although Phil’s head-to-head record against Tiger wasn’t very good, he’d gained a lot of confidence from his first Masters victory. Tiger’s loss of the number-one ranking and swing transition no doubt gave Phil a sense of opportunity. When they hooked up at Doral on Sunday, Phil’s body language signaled he was eager for battle.

Phil started the day with a two-stroke lead, but Tiger caught up, and with an eagle on the par-5 twelfth, took a two-stroke lead. Phil came back to tie with birdies at thirteen and fourteen. At the par-4 sixteenth, both drove poorly, with Phil losing a great opportunity to take the lead by missing a five-footer for par. Then on the seventeenth, Tiger drained a 30-foot dagger for birdie to go ahead. After Phil almost chipped in for birdie on eighteen, Tiger stepped up to his five-footer—far from a gimme even under normal circumstances—and stroked it in with the kind of calm assurance that set him apart. It was indeed a statement win, Tiger’s way of telling Phil, “I’m still better than you.”

The victory also gave Tiger back the number-one ranking he’d lost to Vijay in 2004. Tiger never mentioned that, but he was pumped about beating Phil. The next time I saw Tiger, I said, “That one meant a little more, huh?” Tiger gave me a stare and said, “Oh, yeah, anytime I can beat that guy.” Tiger knew Phil had improved, and he was taking him more seriously than ever.

Tiger also knew that despite the victories, he still had a lot of work to do. We’d pretty much eliminated his bad shots at Isleworth—his sprayed drives to the right had been the most problematic—but they still cropped up in on-site practice rounds and continued to plague him in competition. That’s the pattern of swing-change improvement—the fastest gains come where the pressure is lowest.

The driver problem was complicated by Tiger’s being ambivalent about his equipment. Late in 2004, he’d finally changed over to a driver that most other players had switched to two years before, one with a 460cc titanium head, the largest allowable under the rules, and up from 380cc. He also went to a longer shaft, up from 43½ inches to 45 inches. Theoretically, the extra size in the head created an internal weighting system that would lead to straighter shots and faster ball speed, while the longer shaft increased clubhead speed. There was no question the combination gave Tiger more distance. In 2005, he’d average a career-high 316.1 yards off the tee, ranking him second in that category. But he also finished near the bottom—191st—in driving accuracy, hitting only 55 percent of the fairways.

Tiger had driven the ball the best of his career in 1999 and 2000 with a 260cc steel head and a 43½-inch steel shaft. Although he’d eventually gone to a 360cc club, he’d resisted going to the largest head even as Mickelson and others had said he was missing the boat. He intuitively felt the new technology didn’t help him as it helped others. Every tour player gained distance with the combination of the 460cc drivers and the latest multilayer balls, to the point that more players than ever were reaching par 5s in two. Dominating the par 5s had always been one of Tiger’s main advantages, and it was lessened as other players got longer. Unfortunately, though many others retained or even increased their accuracy with the bigger heads, Tiger saw his ball flight become more crooked.

The reasons are complex. First, the big head and new ball were distance-oriented and designed to produce less spin and thus less curve. That made it much more difficult for Tiger to hit his natural draw, a right-to-left shot that carries less backspin than a fade. With the new technology, Tiger found that a draw with his new driver would carry too little spin and “fall out of the air.” Indeed, the bigger the heads got on tour, the more players went from favoring a draw off the tee to going with a left-to-right “slider,” which had enough spin to retain its carry but didn’t lose nearly as much distance as a spin-heavy fade used to with the older drivers and balls. I wanted Tiger to go with that slider to help get him out of his habit of letting the shaft drop behind him on the downswing and coming into the ball on too much of an inside path. But the slider was a shot that Tiger had never grooved, and it went against his “eye” when he looked at the target from the tee. His swing was definitely draw-biased, and with the old equipment, he was used to a ball that would spin back a bit to the left even if it started too far to the right. With the new driver imparting so little spin, a ball that would start right would basically stay right. The result was that Tiger became statistically less accurate.

After he switched to a 460cc driver, when Tiger wanted to hit a draw off the tee, he’d pull out his 3-wood, its 15 degrees of loft producing more spin. I eventually tried to persuade Tiger to increase the loft in his driver from 8.5 degrees to 9.5 degrees, but he didn’t want to give up the distance potential of the big-headed driver in certain situations. He finally tried more loft at the 2009 Memorial, and had one of the best driving tournaments of his career. He hit every fairway in the final round, and later told me that was the first time he had ever done that.

Frankly, I thought Nike should have built a driver specifically for Tiger, something with a smaller head that would allow him to curve the ball more easily, even if it cost him a bit of distance. But such a design would have gone against the extra-power theme that sells new clubs in the marketplace. Instead, the reps would bring Tiger the latest models, with some relatively minor customizations. There was no doubt that Tiger would produce impressive readings on the launch monitor when he tested the new clubs. Unfortunately, he’d get seduced by numbers that showed distance gains, especially when he’d hit shots with a higher trajectory and less spin. Tiger knew he had a hard time achieving such a flight consistently in competition, but with each new club he hoped he’d be able to groove the high bomb rather than the low cutter. Except for very short spurts, it never really happened. Bottom line: the ball flight he adopted with me as his coach wasn’t ideal in terms of the physics of “laboratory golf,” but it was the best way for Tiger to
play
golf and avoid the big miss.

Once everyone switched to a multilayer ball, Tiger still insisted on using a ball that spun more than any other on tour. Stamped with a star, it was not used by anyone else on the Nike staff and it wasn’t sold in golf shops. Tiger liked the soft feel and extra stop the ball provided for difficult shots around the green. But that ball was also the shortest on tour, the Nike guys telling me it cost Tiger at least 10 yards in lost distance. If Tiger had used a less spinny ball—and I always thought he tried to play with too much spin around the greens—he could have achieved some distance gains without going to the bigger head and longer shaft in the driver.

Tiger’s power wasn’t best reflected in his distance off the tee. While Tiger was long, I never considered him “monster” long in the way Hank Kuehne was as a young player or Bubba Watson and Gary Woodland are today. But what Tiger could consistently do that other players couldn’t was call on his power to hit special, extremely high-skill shots—getting an extra 25 yards out of a 3-wood from the fairway to reach a long par 5, or sending a long iron over impossibly tall trees when others would have to go under or simply chip out into the fairway. One of the best such shots I ever saw Tiger hit came in the final round of the 2009 WGC Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone. A stroke behind Padraig Harrington on the par-5 sixteenth hole, Tiger drove poorly and had to lay up his second shot 176 yards from an ultra-firm green with a front hole location cut perilously close to the pond. The whole round, players hadn’t been able to get sand wedges to stop by the pin, but Tiger powered an 8-iron sky-high that landed behind the hole and spun back to within a foot. It was that kind of shot, not his drives, that other players conceded they simply didn’t possess.

In the early years of our work together, improving his driving was just one item on Tiger’s checklist for future improvement. Our hope was high, and his work ethic and attitude for learning were exceptional. Tiger never really asked me how long it was going to take before he got comfortable, and it was a question I wanted to avoid because putting a time limit on swing changes is counterproductive. They take the time that they take, and the pressure of a deadline often makes it take longer. So to head off any impatience from Tiger, I used the feel-good moments after Doral to say, “You’re doing better all the time. In about two and a half years you’re going to have something really good.”

He looked at me hard, obviously startled at that time frame. I’m sure he would have guessed something a lot sooner. The fact is, I made up that two-and-a-half-year period. There was a chance he could have mastered everything in a month, but I wanted him to stay engaged with learning. I’d observed that he got his best work done when he knew he had a lot of work to do. It was when he was most determined, least questioning, and most focused. But the moment he perceived that he was just refining—that was when his focus and work rate went down and the experimentation went up. As Butch found out, “maintenance” was the wrong theme. Tiger thrives on the chase.

This is my answer to people who question why Tiger continually changed his swing. Beyond the actual technical improvements, the biggest value of the process is that it kept him interested. As a prodigy, Tiger ran the risk of early burnout, and he needed more stimulation and variety than the average pro, who preferred maintenance to makeovers. Also, with every change, Tiger had gotten better. The improvement might have come at a significant cost of effort and time, but to him it had been worth it.

I also believe Tiger intentionally overstated how much of a change he was undertaking. It helped his mind-set to believe he was doing something major. But the truth is, in many ways I was continuing much of what Butch had given him. Butch and I differed slightly in our conception of the correct swing plane, and I made a big adjustment to Tiger’s grip. But mainly my work with Tiger was repackaging what he had worked on with Butch. Tiger’s were far from the biggest swing changes ever made by a tour player. But thinking of it all as very dramatic helped him put in a lot of work.

A big swing change had the added benefit to him of lessening outside expectations and giving him an excuse if he happened to play badly. At close quarters, I began to understand just how intense a pressure cooker he lived in and how he devised ways to escape it or turn down the heat. He didn’t really talk about it, except for a stray comment like, “With me, nothing is ever good enough.” When I’d complain to him about getting slammed by writers and commentators for my teaching, he’d chuckle and say, “Hank, welcome to my world.”

Tiger hit a lull after his win at the 2005 Doral. He didn’t play great at Bay Hill, beginning with a popped-up 3-wood opening drive that went only 200 yards. He never broke 70 and finished tied for 23rd. He played worse at the Players Championship, tying for 53rd while making four double bogeys. Over my time with Tiger, the best he ever did in that tournament was eighth in 2009. Although he’d won the tournament in 2001 and the U.S. Amateur there in 1994, the TPC Stadium Course definitely made Tiger uncomfortable. There were at least four tee shots that gave him trouble, the par-4 fourteenth and the eighteenth holes in particular, where the water hazards cut tightly on the left always seemed to produce a big block to the right. Of all the architects, Pete Dye seemed to create the designs that were the hardest for Tiger to negotiate. Pete really knows how tour pros think, and he is very good at punishing those who play away from the big miss.