The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (15 page)

Tiger left the Players with his game in no shape to win a major championship. But over the next six days at Isleworth, he went into emergency-preparation mode. It was extremely fulfilling for me, because Tiger was always into it before majors, at his most receptive as a student. With me, the only majors where he didn’t reach that mind-set were the 2006 U.S. Open right after Earl died and the 2010 Masters. This time, I think he sensed things were coming together, and he stayed on plan.

So much so that I began to mentally label our daylight hours at Isleworth as “Tiger Days.” He would begin a typical one by waking at six a.m. and working out until eight. After he showered and ate breakfast, we would meet on the practice tee at nine for 90 minutes of hitting balls. From 10:30 to 11 he would practice putt, then play as many as nine holes on the course until noon. After a one-hour lunch break, we’d meet at one p.m. for an hour of short-game work, followed by another 90 minutes of hitting balls. From 3:30 to 4:45 he’d play nine holes, and then return to the putting green until six p.m. This would be followed by an hour of shoulder exercises before retiring for dinner at seven. If he had a week off from tournament play, he’d start all over the next day.

Tiger respected practice. It was sort of his church, the place he made the sacrifices that would lead to success. He believed in the old-school ways, putting in time, taking a step backward to take two forward, putting his faith in the old Hogan line about “digging it out of the dirt.” Even when his mind wandered to places that led to swing experiments, in our first few years together, I never once saw him hit a careless shot in practice.

Watching him in action, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Tiger disagreed strongly with the idea that champions are born, not made. “You’re a product of your environment,” he said, giving credit to his father and mother for providing the conditions that let him fall in love with the game and devote himself to it.

I’m not sure if such focus was an effort. Off the course, Tiger freely admitted that he was easily distracted and restless and needed to constantly be in motion. When I was at the house, he might suddenly go off for a workout at the gym, go for a run, or get on a video game, sometimes excusing himself by saying, “My ADD is kicking in.” But he was almost always calm and poised on the course or the practice area. There, he was in his element—and observing his comfort there, I could see that he truly loved hitting a golf ball.

He enjoyed the details. He never hit a shot without knowing exactly how far his target was, so he always had a yardage in mind with every shot he hit. He’d pull out the range finder before hitting at a flag on a practice range. When he switched targets, he’d pull out the gun and figure out the new yardage. He never failed to do this.

Another idiosyncratic trait was the way he’d take small breaks. He’d seldom hit more than 25 balls in a row before stepping away. He might sit down in the cart and just stare out silently for a few minutes. I didn’t say anything the first few times, but I finally asked, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m just thinking about what we just did.” Because what we were working on would usually be something that was uncomfortable, he was making sure he understood where he was in the process and where he was going. To me, it was an example of a great performer doing what Geoff Colvin in his book
Talent Is Overrated
calls “deliberate practice.” It’s the most difficult and highest level of practice because it requires painstaking focus on weaknesses. A lot of players hit a lot of balls but focus only on their strengths. The great improvers are willing to get uncomfortable and make the mental and physical effort to correct a flaw, which often involves difficult “opposite-oriented” remedial learning. But that was Tiger in major-championship preparation mode.

At these times, the dynamic between us was peaceful and attentive. Our voices were soft, and even the occasional laughter was kind of muffled. This learning atmosphere was the way both of us liked it. With Tiger and me, there was not a lot of talking. I didn’t want to be a big explainer. I wanted to make a few points, then let him digest them and see if he could find the solution for himself. We might stop if he got a little confused or had a question, but usually things would be pretty wordless until he felt he got it, which was when he might ask, “How’s that?” Almost always, my answer would be, “That’s it.”

One way I helped Tiger impose some structure was by instilling the idea of Nine Shots. It was simply a distillation of the nine ways a ball could be moved based on three curves (straight, starting left/moving right, starting right/moving left) and three trajectories (low, medium, and high), yielding nine combinations. In practice, Tiger wanted to be able to deliberately hit the nine shots with every club, and he’d do so in a structured way. He’d usually start with a sand wedge and work his way through the bag, although, tellingly, the exercise didn’t extend to the basically draw-proof driver.

The Nine Shots did a lot for him. First, it gave him a mental leg up. He knew other players didn’t practice that way, and he believed that such an elaborate and demanding practice template gave him an edge. His thought was, “I’m better, so what I do has to be different and better.” It matched his self-image and satisfied his ego.

In practical terms, it helped him believe he could hit the proper shot under the gun. And the right shot wasn’t just the one that gave him the best chance to get close to the pin. More important, it was the shot that let him most easily play away from trouble either on or around the green. If water guarded the left side of a green and the pin was cut on that side, Tiger could come in with a draw that started well to the right. If there was heavy wind, he could come in low. If the greens were particularly firm, as they were at majors, he could come in high with a lot of spin. He just wanted the fullest toolbox possible.

With the tools at his disposal, he became a more thoughtful shot maker and thus a better course manager. He steadily began eliminating mistakes because he almost always had the right percentage shot for the situation. As a younger player, Tiger might have forced shots at the pin, but as he gained more ways to work the ball, he could start it at the middle of the green and move it toward the pin. It’s the shot that allows the most room for error because it reduces the chance of missing the green on the “short side” of the pin, from where a recovery is almost always more difficult. By being able to vary trajectory, he gained better distance control, especially in the wind. Tiger found himself “pin high” more than ever, which is the hallmark of good iron play.

Having more control got Tiger away from trying to blow fields away. When he had fewer shots in his arsenal, he played more aggressively. When he was “on,” it could lead to double-digit victories, but more often it led to mistakes that cost him wins. The Nine Shots helped Tiger understand that he was good enough to never really take a chance and still win. It would mean he’d be much less likely to win by 10, but he’d be
more
likely to simply win. It was Tiger becoming more of an expert at “getting the W.”

The Nine Shots also helped him understand better than ever the exact causes of different ball flights—such factors as club path, clubface angle, angle of attack, and clubhead speed. It gave him the knowledge to diagnose and fix himself more efficiently on the course. And he really valued having those assurances. To him, being able to make the right corrections during a round was the true measure of a real player.

In essence, the Nine Shots were Tiger’s acid test. When he had mastered all of them, he could effortlessly put his swing into “neutral”—perfectly on plane, with no built-in tendency. That wasn’t always the case, but it was always his goal, because he understood that the more he moved off neutral, the more shots he wouldn’t be able to hit. Some days, he had to accept that neutral wasn’t attainable and that the wisest course was to play with what he had. Those would be the days when he gave the pin a wider berth and focused more on avoiding mistakes than on making things happen. He had confidence that he could figure it out before the next round, and that helped him be more patient.

The Nine Shots were also fun. Tiger was a natural worker of the ball; he liked creating shapes and spins. It was something he’d done with his dad, playing “call shot”—Earl requesting a specific shot and Tiger delivering. It was kind of an old-school way of playing, when the less aerodynamically sleek golf ball could be moved around a lot. Such a style was rewarded in the week-to-week modern game because the hole placements on the PGA Tour had gotten so close to the edges of the greens. And the benefits were even more evident in the firmer conditions of the majors. Even when softer conditions didn’t really reward shot-making versatility, the style kept Tiger’s interest up. But most important, the Nine Shots allowed Tiger to access his artistic abilities in a structured way, and I believe it eventually made him the best iron player of all time.

For the 2005 Masters, the fault that we most wanted to address remained Tiger’s tendency to drop his head down and behind the ball on the downswing, especially with the driver. I realized that many great players lowered in their downswing, but I always thought Tiger lowered too much when he struggled. So we worked on staying taller on the backswing, keeping the head from moving or tilting, and staying taller through the ball. One measure of Tiger’s motivation and focus was that he wasn’t questioning the premise as much as before, though he would question it again. Tiger was trusting me, and it felt good.

At Isleworth the week before the Masters, when we’d go back to his house, we continued to talk golf. One thing I tried to do was interpret statistics in a deeper way than what he might read in a magazine or hear from a television commentator. For example, though Tiger’s driving-accuracy percentage (the number of fairways hit divided by the number of attempts) had gone down, I would point out that the increased distance all the players had gained had caused most of their percentages to go down as well, and that his drop in 2005 was negligible compared to the drop in the tour average. I’d say, “Don’t let Johnny Miller or the Golf Channel tell you how you’re doing. You’re doing better, and this proves it.” Tiger would smile and say something like, “Man, you’re really Mr. Stats,” but he’d gained some positive reinforcement.

Because Tiger would tune out lectures, I tried to get my lessons across indirectly. From my first days as Tiger’s coach, I had noticed that while he was incredibly good with difficult shots, especially around the green, he was too often ordinary or worse with easy ones, especially straightforward chips. Hoping he would make the connection, I told him about a friend of mine, billiards champion C. J. Wiley. C.J. helps me with my pool game, and one day I complained that “I make all the hard ones but miss all the easy ones.” He responded, “Hank, that’s because there are no easy shots. There are just shots.” Tiger liked that story, and shortly after, when he won in Dubai in early 2006, he called me. “I got all the easy ones up and in,” he said, pausing slightly, “because there are no easy ones.” He wanted me to know the lesson had taken, and his short game became tidier once it did.

Long conversations were rare, but golf was one topic Tiger would warm up to more than any other. In the end, he was a golfer. We’d watch tournaments and analyze swings, usually commenting on particular moves that he liked. For example, the way Vijay stayed tall and kept his body moving through the ball, or Steve Elkington’s way of keeping the club on plane, or Hunter Mahan’s turn away from the ball. Even guys with supposedly bad swings—he’d pick out the good thing they did, the thing that made them good enough to play the tour. I remember once we were watching Allen Doyle in a Champions Tour event. Doyle’s style was unorthodox, but he hit the ball straight and won a lot of tournaments. Tiger said, “That club really stays low after impact a long time.”

Ben Hogan was probably the only player whose whole swing Tiger admired. He watched videos of Hogan closely. He could relate to Hogan’s athleticism, but he especially focused on how Hogan kept the club on plane even with a really aggressive lower-body move. That was an action Tiger had a hard time with, his lower body supposedly “outracing” his upper body, while Hogan, who as a younger player had fought a hook because he got the club across the line and too flat on the downswing, had solved the problem. I also found it beyond coincidence that Hogan’s path to eliminating the big miss was similar to Tiger’s. Both men weakened their grips well into their professional careers. And just as Tiger learned to count on our “saw across” shot as a reliable way to get his driver in play, Hogan devoted a lot of his practice time to hitting intentional cuts and slices with a long iron in a remedial effort to groove the power fade that became the cornerstone of his greatest golf.

But Tiger wasn’t in awe of Hogan. In fact, when we talked about it, he noted how Hogan in a
Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf
match seemed to hit a lot of low, punchy shots into the soft greens—shots that wouldn’t stop quickly enough on the firmer and faster surfaces of today. I also thought it was telling how Tiger publicly referred to Hogan as “Ben.” There was none of the “Mr. Hogan” deference that many modern players showed. Same as he did with “Jack,” “Arnold,” “Byron,” and “Sam.” Some people thought Tiger wasn’t being respectful enough, but I thought he was just being honest. He knew he’d earned his way into that club.

It was a very good week at Isleworth preparing for the 2005 Masters, probably our most productive to that point. At our last practice session on Saturday before leaving for Augusta the next morning, he told me, “This is the best I’ve ever hit the ball in my life.” Once we got there, I thought his biggest challenge would be not getting too keyed-up. He hadn’t won a major since the 2002 U.S. Open, and the scrutiny was going to be higher than ever. As much as he wished otherwise, whatever pass he’d gotten for his swing changes was over, and his Hank Haney swing would be on trial.

On Thursday, because of rain that threatened chances of the tournament’s ending on time, Tiger started on the tenth tee and was one over par when he reached the par-5 thirteenth. He had a downhill 70-foot putt for eagle that he hit too hard and watched roll into Rae’s Creek, leading to another bogey. After making the turn, he bogeyed the first hole, where his second shot hit the pin and ricocheted into a downhill lie in the bunker. He followed that bogey with a drop-kicked 3-wood off the second tee that barely got off the ground. When play was stopped, he was two over for 12 holes.