The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (21 page)

The recklessness of Tiger’s military adventures made me wonder whether he had self-destructive urges when it came to his golf. Joining the SEALs would have been, if not the end, at least a major interruption of his career. And yet he definitely had some kind of plan that made me believe he might really do it. Steve and Keith thought the same thing. But when I told Mark Steinberg that this was a serious possibility, he couldn’t seem to process it. “He’s not going to do that,” he said. “There is no way. He can’t. He’s got obligations. He’s got to pay for that sixty-million-dollar house,” referring to the beachfront property near Palm Beach where Tiger and Elin were building a new house.

Tiger never went into the motivation for his military obsession. I got a better understanding after talking to one of my good friends, Ken Hitchcock, who at the time was the coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets in the National Hockey League. Ken has been around a lot of elite athletes and was always interested in Tiger. When I told Ken about Tiger’s military fixation, he said very confidently that it related to Earl being an ex-soldier. “It happens a lot with our players,” he said. “Their fathers die, and they have the urge to go back to their hometowns and do what their dads did: work in a coal mine, fix cars, whatever. It usually lasts about six months.” Ken pointed out that baseball had been Michael Jordan’s father’s favorite sport.

It made sense. Tiger had very seldom brought up Earl while he was alive, but since his death the previous May, he’d started speaking about his father a lot more. Sometimes he’d talk about his dad’s military career and how Earl taught Tiger to always complete the mission. Or he’d repeat Earl’s golf lessons, saying wistful things on the practice range. Once, on the range at Isleworth, Tiger was struggling with a new move I wanted him to try, and he said, “My dad always said I was a slow learner.”

Tiger also started allowing another distraction to interfere with his practice. His cell phone was going off a lot more, and whereas before, he either turned it off or simply ignored it, now he was taking time to answer it or check out the texts. He always used a flip phone, which allowed more privacy as far as the number or message being readily visible. Of course, the whole world would eventually see and hear some of the messages, but at the time, I never suspected that he was texting women.

History would show this was a time when Tiger’s affairs were going pretty strong, and they couldn’t have done much for his peace of mind. As he said at the Masters in 2010, “When you live a life where you’re lying all the time, life is not fun.”

In early 2007, Tiger had to deal with a thorny problem. According to sources in a December 2009 story in the
Wall Street Journal
, the
National Enquirer
obtained photos of Tiger having an encounter with a woman in a parking lot near his home, sometime in the late winter or early spring of 2007. This led to an alleged deal in which American Media, the owners of the tabloid, agreed not to publish the photos in exchange for Tiger’s doing a cover story for the American Media magazine
Men’s Fitness
. The interview for the fitness magazine, which centered on Tiger’s workout but also talked about fatherhood and his marriage, was done in May, and Tiger appeared on the cover of the August issue. When it came out, I wondered why Tiger went public about his workout, which he’d always kept so private. I was hoping that it was to give some credit to Keith, but that wasn’t the case. He’d been forced to do it. Although neither Tiger nor Mark ever said anything to me about this crisis, in hindsight, Tiger had to have been quite stressed, contemplating the possibility of his world somehow falling apart.

Amid all this chaos, Tiger—incredibly—kept performing at an extremely high level. After winning at Doral, he went into the 2007 Masters with victories in eight of his last 10 official events. The media was again writing about him as if he was without peer, declaring that he’d conquered his latest swing changes, but most of all, that his biggest advantage was mental. Fellow players Stewart Cink, for example, said, “I think we should cut him open and find out what’s inside.”

However, at the Masters, Tiger seemed particularly stressed. In my experience, Tiger was always more tense at majors. It was the reason he’d often get sick before the tournament, coming down with a cold, flu, or headache. At Augusta, he had the additional problem of dealing with heavy spring pollen that made his allergies act up.

But Tiger was more noticeably impatient in 2007. The week before, on the practice tee at Isleworth, he seemed to challenge me more often. It was on the range that I always felt the most pressure teaching Tiger, because it was where I had to prove I knew what I was talking about. If Tiger hit a shot that flew a certain way and then immediately asked, “OK, what was the cause of that?” I had to have a good answer. Usually, I had about 30 seconds to explain what happened and how to correct it before he hit the next one. And then if the fix didn’t make sense to him or the next shot wasn’t a good one, I knew that he was going to file that away.

The stakes were high, because depending on when it occurred, a bad shot on the range could ruin a whole practice session and be a confidence killer. And when Tiger left a session, he had to feel sure that he knew the cause of a swing issue, and more important, what he was going to do to address it in his next session or round.

Tiger came to Augusta hitting the ball pretty well, but I still felt put on the spot. In the practice rounds, Tiger hadn’t been happy with his putting, but on Wednesday evening when we met on the practice tee he told me he was really excited about how he had just rolled the ball on the putting green. I asked him what he changed, and he said that Mark O’Meara had watched him hit some putts and suggested that he put more weight on his left foot at address. Tiger said it worked and that he was making everything. I didn’t really know what more weight on his left foot was going to do, but a lot of putting is mental, so I figured that if Tiger thought it would help it probably would. As it turned out, though, his mind was eased only temporarily.

On the morning of the first round, Tiger went to the putting green for a quick session before going to the range. He didn’t like me hovering around him when he was putting, so I’d stand off to the side of the green with Steve Williams and wait. But Tiger was missing some short putts, and he kind of waved me in. “It doesn’t feel good,” he said. When I wondered about the fix of more weight on the left foot, he tersely said, “That’s not working.” Because I thought I detected a very small inside-to-out loop in his backswing, I suggested he try to do the opposite with a slight outside-to-in loop. He tried it for a few minutes, but as he left to go to the range, he told me quietly but in a hard tone, “You better fucking figure something out before we get back here.”

I was used to Tiger being sullen, but he’d never snapped at me before. I was kind of stunned, but just figured,
Man, he is really nervous
. It was so out of character that I actually found it kind of funny. After Tiger had warmed up on the range, we came back to the putting green, where I offered the same advice I’d given him 45 minutes before, which he accepted without comment.

It was a Masters in which the course was very difficult because of wind and firmness. Since 2002, Augusta National had been lengthened and redesigned twice, and it was pretty obvious that the changes hadn’t helped Tiger. The extra length didn’t hurt him, but the narrowed landing areas for the tee shots did. In the old design, three of the par-5 holes—the second, thirteenth, and fifteenth—had allowed Tiger to smash the ball off the tee without much fear and position himself for easy birdies. Now those holes required a much more accurate drive. Whether the club’s leadership realized it or not, the changes more fully exposed Tiger’s weakness with the driver.

In round one, he sprayed his drives on the final two holes and closed with two bogeys to shoot 73. In the second round, he hit shots into Rae’s Creek on the twelfth and thirteenth holes and shot 74. On Saturday, he again bogeyed the final two holes to shoot 72. Still, the course was playing so hard that when Tiger teed off on Sunday, he was only a stroke out of the lead.

Tiger started strong and actually went into a tie for the lead on the fourth hole. But then he hit some poor shots, making bogeys on the sixth and the tenth. He eagled the thirteenth with a great 5-iron to three feet. But he didn’t make a birdie the rest of the way. He shot 72 and finished tied for second, two behind Zach Johnson, who’d closed with a 69. Tiger students noticed that he finally didn’t win a major after taking a Sunday lead. Once again, three-putts had been his undoing.

Whenever Tiger didn’t win at Augusta, I’d just leave after the final round without saying good-bye. He wouldn’t be in the mood to go over his performance, so I’d go back to Dallas and wait for him to call or text me. When we got together in person a couple of weeks later at Isleworth, we discussed the Masters. I didn’t want the way he’d snapped at me to linger in any kind of negative way, so I chose a light moment to say, “By the way, that was nice before the first round—your saying you were going with the weight on the left leg and then telling me I’d better fuckin’ figure something out.” Tiger only laughed, his way of saying he was sorry.

He won his next tournament, at Quail Hollow in Charlotte. The victory was notable for the comments of the runner-up, Rory Sabbatini, who said this of Tiger: “I’ve seen Tiger where there is not a facet of his game that you’re not amazed by. But I think, Sunday, he struggled out there. He had to battle for that win. And I think that made me realize … he’s as beatable as ever. I’ve seen him when he figures it out. It’s scary. I don’t want to see that anymore. I like the new Tiger.”

Tiger would use those words for motivation later, but in the short term, like everything said about Tiger, it caused a stir. Despite his finishing first at Quail Hollow, because he hadn’t won at the Masters, the comments got some traction. And when Tiger played mediocre golf at the Players, tying for 37th, and had an ordinary performance at the Memorial, tying for 15th, where he’d won three times before, there was more talk that he wasn’t what he had been, and that his new swing wasn’t as good as his old one.

Maybe Tiger was right. Whatever he did was never going to be enough.

I started to notice that he seemed more consumed with his workouts. Lifting sessions were a major part of how he filled out his off-season time, and when Tiger showed up at Torrey Pines for the start of the 2007 season, his upper body and biceps looked bigger and more defined than ever. The tighter fit of Nike’s latest styles enhanced the effect, especially because Tiger also wore a size medium shirt, which for a buff guy weighing 185 pounds is pretty snug. Tiger told me he actually got up to over 190 pounds for a short time.

I thought that, for a golfer, Tiger was inordinately interested in muscle-building. He had a lot of muscle magazines in his house, and he’d read the articles. No doubt he was well built and looked great in clothes. But my view was that it didn’t help his golf. To me the best golf body is lean and flexible. The only place big upper-body muscles arguably help is in the rough, but even that is marginal. I’d never seen anyone get appreciably longer off the tee by developing bigger muscles in the weight room. I’d also seen a lot of guys get injured lifting weights and really damage their games, the most prominent being David Duval.

I’d questioned Tiger on the effects of his working out so heavily in my long e-mail the previous year, writing,

You seem like you’re determined to get too big before you realize that you are too big, and then you will do something about it. That is your pattern. Realize it and don’t let it happen. You are already the fittest guy on the planet. Isn’t that enough?

But I didn’t keep pressing him on the subject, mostly because I didn’t think he’d listen. Anyway, I could tell that the lifting was important to Tiger. I reminded myself that it was another thing that was different about him, which probably meant it was another reason he was better. And there were definitely some positives to be gained. I know that Tiger believed the mental discipline required in hard training made his mind tougher in competition, that by paying the price in the gym he earned success on the course. And it also made sense that all that physical exertion and concentration relieved stress.

But I wasn’t alone in being skeptical about Tiger getting bigger. Steve Williams thought Tiger was getting close to muscle-bound and that it was affecting his touch in the short game and in putting. Keith Kleven always held to the view that Tiger was naturally slender and small-boned, more like a racehorse than a Clydesdale, and didn’t have the frame to carry too much weight without risking injury. Keith would have liked Tiger to drop 10 pounds and especially stay away from lifting heavy weight with low reps. My advice to Keith was to keep changing Tiger’s workout in a way that would achieve the objectives they were after, but that was still different enough that Tiger wouldn’t get bored or try to experiment or increase the load. This was what I tried to do with golf practice to keep him eager. For Tiger, as Butch found out and Keith was finding out,
maintenance
was the poison word. But I think being in Las Vegas made it difficult for Keith to monitor Tiger, and there was no guarantee he’d listen anyway.

Keith really got worried when Tiger started incorporating a lot of military training into his workouts. Keith believed the exercises Tiger saw on the Navy SEALs DVDs were overly hard on the joints, especially the pull-ups that are such a big part of military workouts. Corey Carroll told me that Tiger did a lot of pull-ups whenever he worked out with Navy SEALs, and Corey believed that Tiger had strained his shoulder more than once. Most trainers want their golfers to have loose shoulder joints unencumbered by a lot of muscle, and they’re careful to avoid strain on the rotator cuff.

But Tiger was adamant that all his injuries came from golf, never from his workouts or military stuff. In the
Men’s Fitness
article, he maintained that he always lifted light with high reps and had never injured himself. “I’ve never, ever hurt myself lifting,” he told the magazine. “I hear people say, ‘I hurt this,’ or ‘I hurt that.’ I don’t even know what that feels like. I’ve been sore, but I’ve always been able to function and do whatever I wanted to. A lot of people have had injuries or been so sore they can’t do anything. I’ve never experienced that. Some people let their ego get in the way. You have to listen to your inner self. Your body knows what it can and can’t handle.”