The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (18 page)

At Baltusrol, I made a bad call on the practice range before the final round. Tiger was trailing the lead by six, really in need of a low one, and during his warm-up, I saw that he was getting a little too upright in the middle of his backswing again. A teacher’s constant dilemma is when to say something about a fault. Bringing it up can introduce doubt or get a player obsessed with making the correction. But staying silent might allow the problem to ruin the round. At what variance does the bad tendency warrant a comment? In this case, I thought Tiger’s mental plate was already pretty full. I wanted him to go out and play freely, and I decided saying something could mess that up.

After a 68 in which he hadn’t hit the ball that well, I told Tiger what I’d seen on the range and said, “I probably should have said something to you.” He didn’t say anything right then. But the next time we got together, a couple of weeks later, he said, “I need to talk to you. At Baltusrol, you told me you saw something and didn’t say anything. You can’t do that. If you see something, I want to know.” He didn’t say I cost him the tournament, but in my mind, to this day, I think maybe I did. I made a mistake at Baltusrol.

Tiger ended the 2005 PGA Tour season with six wins, four seconds, and 13 top tens in 21 events. He was back on top, and the critics were temporarily muffled. Still, my predominant thought was that it was a year Tiger could have won the Grand Slam pretty easily with a little better putting at Pinehurst and Baltusrol.

During the holidays, Tiger and Elin stayed at my home in Park City for another ski vacation. He was a lot more sure of himself than the first time and was obsessed with improving. He kept saying, “Watch me, I’ve got to work on my turns.” He was still in learning mode, his happy place.

On Tiger’s 30th birthday, on December 30, Elin’s gift to him was a border collie they named Taz. Tiger is a true dog person, and he really liked that Taz was smart, focused, and task-oriented. He didn’t mind that Taz wasn’t very cuddly. They were a good match.

Before playing in 2006, Tiger took a 24-day break from touching a club, the longest, he said, that he’d ever taken. It helped him feel refreshed, but he also spent time with his father, who was in the last stages of his battle with cancer. Tiger kept all that private when we got together before his first tournament of the year—at Torrey Pines, where he was the defending champion. He’d go on to win in a playoff, win his next start in Dubai, and then again at Doral. He’d put a 5-wood in the bag—he called it his “old-man club”—to replace the 2-iron, and he was using it to hit the low stinger off the tee. It was also a good club for second shots into par 5s, because Tiger could hit it higher and stop it faster than he could a 2-iron. But he also hit it under the heavy South Florida wind at Doral, which added up to a net gain in versatility.

Tiger really threw himself into his Masters preparation. For the first time, Earl wasn’t going to be able to attend, and Tiger’s preparation was determined and intense because he wanted to give his father one last thrill. But the extra emotional burden was less than ideal.

At Augusta, Tiger simply tried too hard. His state of mind showed up most in his putting—he had six three-putts, three of them in the last round. The final one came on the seventeenth when he jammed a last-gasp 12-footer for a birdie well past and missed coming back. “As good as I hit it, that’s as bad as I putted,” Tiger said, his rounds of 72-71-71-70 leaving him in a tie for third, three strokes back.

Phil won his second Masters in three years, and even on a course that had been lengthened and redesigned, it was becoming clear that his left-handedness combined with the newest driver technology was giving him an advantage at Augusta. The course still favored a right-to-left ball flight off the tee because of several holes that doglegged left. Whereas right-handed players were having a harder time curving the ball that way with the big-headed drivers, Phil could go with the power fade that was the easiest shot to repeat with the new technology and cut off a lot of distance on some crucial holes, particularly the par-5 thirteenth.

As he left for California to see Earl, Tiger was subdued. While he was out West, he left an image for posterity. Two weeks after the Masters, he went to a Las Vegas sound studio to film a commercial for Nike. The cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who won an Academy Award for
Schindler’s List
, used a super-high-speed camera and shot Tiger hitting a driver. The angle was face-on, and Tiger wore black. As captured in the commercial, Tiger’s swing took a full 53 seconds, from takeaway to follow-through, the entire sequence accompanied by a cello solo. Tiger later told me that he’d made about 25 slow swings for the cameras to make sure he executed all the changes we’d worked on just right, and gave final approval to the one that was chosen. What I loved about it was how quiet his head was, how tall he stayed on his downswing, and how free and unencumbered he was as he released his upper body and arms. It was the swing I envisioned him making with the driver, which really hadn’t come out in competition. Of course, I’m biased, but I think that commercial is a record of the greatest swing in history. I’m proud to hold that swing up as what I was after.

Earl died on May 3, 2006. I attended the funeral in Southern California and was struck by how composed Tiger was in his eulogy and later at a gathering at the Tiger Woods Learning Center. I wondered how his father’s death would affect him. I hadn’t had much contact with Earl, and Tiger very rarely talked about him in my presence while he was alive. But everything about Tiger’s story in golf went back to his father. It was he who set Tiger off on his journey, first acting as a leader and then as an always available guide. Now Tiger would be on his own.

He didn’t seem any different when I next saw him at Isleworth a week before the U.S. Open at Winged Foot. Tiger had skipped the Memorial Tournament in the wake of Earl’s death, but he definitely didn’t want to miss a major championship. By now I realized that he loved the stage of the biggest events, that he considered them his showcase as a champion. He never put it in those terms, of course. When he’d called me to say that he was going to play at Winged Foot and I asked if he was sure he was ready to go, his answer was matter-of-fact. “Gotta get back sometime. Might as well be now.”

Tiger worked hard in his preparation at Isleworth, but for some reason, something went out of him once we got to Winged Foot. He kind of rushed through his sessions, and his focus was lacking. Once play began, every part of his game was at least a little off, and he shot 76-76 to miss the cut by five shots. Not that it was on his mind, but it meant he’d only tied Jack Nicklaus’s record of 39 straight cuts made in major championships.

In retrospect, it was clear that Tiger came back too soon, though he never admitted he had. But even taking into account the emotional upheaval, Tiger’s performance bothered me. A microcosm of the week occurred on the very first hole. During our practice rounds, I’d urged Tiger to practice his long chip shots because Winged Foot presented a lot of those and they required an extra degree of touch. Tiger had kept saying he would but never did. Sure enough, he was faced with a 50-foot chip right out of the gate, and predictably, he hit a poor one that led to a bogey.

That incident stuck in my mind and led me to send Tiger a long e-mail in which I made some pointed comments that—considering Tiger’s predictable nonresponsiveness—would have been awkward saying face-to-face. I began gently, alluding to the short time since Earl’s death as the main reason for his poor play, and referring to myself as the Bear, which was what Tiger would sometimes laughingly call me during our more grueling practice sessions in the Florida heat and humidity. But once I got rolling, I decided to get in some shots I thought were necessary.

We’d managed only one full practice round at Winged Foot, so I expressed regret that Tiger had waited until Monday of tournament week to leave Isleworth, particularly because in New York he could have stayed on his boat, which had been docked in a harbor near the course. “I should have made a suggestion that we go up early,” I wrote, adding, “not that you would have listened.”

I was miffed that Tiger suddenly decided he was going to emulate Ben Hogan and not employ practice swings during competition. I felt strongly that, particularly because he was still mastering the techniques we’d worked on, practice swings were an important tool in his preshot preparation. He’d tried forgoing practice swings at the 2005 Byron Nelson, which was the last time he’d missed a cut.

I know it is a pain in the ass to work as hard as you do taking a bunch of practice swings, but on the course it is one of the only things that you can do in an effort to get a feel for what you are doing. [Instead], you came with your Ben Hogan routine that came out of nowhere.

That led to my venting about Tiger’s habit of going off plan, and I included this zinger:

Your track record for ball striking when you are flying the plane alone and I am hanging onto the wings isn’t real strong since I have been on board.

I also chided him for getting annoyed about people taking pictures of him in the practice rounds:

Either make it your mission to talk to the commissioner and get the cameras off the courses in the practice rounds, or make it your goal not to let it bother you. Anything other than those two options is not helping you at all … it is pure craziness to let something like cameras going off distract you so much. That act is a total waste of time and energy.

Finally, I challenged his work ethic, which I knew would hit him where he lived:

When we practice and prepare, we need to kick it up a couple of notches. I feel we are getting outworked and that is not a good feeling for the Bear. Not my style and definitely not yours.

By the end of the e-mail, I’d softened, but I made one last plea for Tiger to become a more active student during our sessions:

This is all for now, but I never stop thinking about this shit. I wake up every day thinking about it and I go to sleep every night thinking about it. I have a lot to share but one thing [I’ve learned] is that to really teach someone the student needs to ask for help.… I always have ideas that I think will help you but I am not fond of talking just for the sake of talking. Talking doesn’t teach anyone anything, listening does and someone will only listen when they want to.

I concluded the e-mail, “Your friend and greatest fan who will always be there to help, Hank aka the Bear.”

Tiger did not answer the e-mail or even acknowledge that he received it. However, a couple of weeks later when I was back at Isleworth, Elin told me, “Hank, Tiger really liked your e-mail. He read it twice.”

It might have been a backhanded acknowledgment, but Tiger’s practice spark was back when we went to the Western Open, where our sessions at Cog Hill were nearly as good as they’d been a year before. Tiger again finished second and went into his preparation for the 2006 British Open at Hoylake with a lot of momentum.

The biggest challenge in playing the links courses in the British Isles, which all lie on firm, open ground near a coastline, is controlling the ball in heavy wind, mostly by being able to hit it low. Before Hoylake we worked on getting Tiger’s release more “condensed” into a shorter follow-through. It was a different finish from what he’d use on an American course, where carrying the ball in the air is important, achieved with a fuller “throwing” release. But the more compact swing was always a good antidote for Tiger’s tendencies, and usually led to his striking the ball really well.

Nobody knew much about Hoylake because it hadn’t hosted the British Open since 1967. We’d heard the layout was kind of tight and quirky and might not be ideal for Tiger’s game. The spring had been dry, so the course was going to be really firm and fast. Such conditions had become a comfort zone for Tiger because he knew he wouldn’t have to hit many drivers.

What we found when we got to Liverpool was that, in an unexpected way, Hoylake suited Tiger as well or even better than St. Andrews. The course’s main defense was its deep, steep-faced fairway bunkers. They were basically like water hazards because it was almost impossible to advance the ball more than 100 yards from one of them. The bunkers were about 290 yards out, and in his first practice round, Tiger hit a driver off the first tee and put it in the right fairway bunker. He immediately took another ball and hit a 2-iron that rolled out about 15 yards short of the bunker. That shot set the pattern for the week. Tiger tried the driver on a couple more holes in the practice rounds, but once the championship started he used it only once, on the sixteenth hole of the first round.

Tiger’s 2-iron stinger was the perfect shot at Hoylake. Because he was swinging well, he was hitting it very straight, and in fact would lead the championship in fairways hit with 48 out of 56. He could hit it hard without fear of reaching the bunkers except when he was downwind, when he might drop down to a 3- or 4-iron. He had an advantage on the field because his straightest driving club was the one he could hit the lowest, which just enhanced his accuracy. Because the fairways were so fast, he could get the 2-iron out farther than other players. They either hadn’t mastered the technique for hitting a 2-iron in such a way or didn’t have the power to hit it as far. Those players were forced to hit hybrids and fairway woods, which were harder to keep low in the wind and so more difficult to hit straight.

Regularly hitting his approaches from the fairway, Tiger was a true virtuoso at Hoylake. Although he was often left with shots of 200 yards or more, his swing was on such a good plane that it didn’t matter much whether he was hitting a 7-iron or a 4-iron, and Tiger would end the week second in greens in regulation with 58. On the long par 4s and par 3s, Tiger aimed at the middle of the relatively small greens, leaving himself a bunch of 30-foot putts. He made a few, but more important, he was able to string together a lot of low-stress pars. He knew the birdies would come on the three par 5s and the shorter par 4s. If he’d hit a driver or 3-wood and left himself some shorter approaches, it might have led to three or four more birdies, but it would have surely produced some bogeys or bigger numbers.