The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (27 page)

It was discouraging, and I wrote him a long e-mail after the Masters that recapped his performance and offered some thoughts going forward. I thought the most important issue at Augusta had been his attitude. I wanted him to realize that as much as his great attitude at Torrey Pines had helped him, his poor attitude at Augusta had hurt him.

“No one in the world, not me or anyone else, can even come close to knowing the pressure that you are under as Tiger Woods and I don’t pretend to,” I wrote, trying to show some sensitivity. But I added, “What I know is that having a positive attitude and patience is a big key to making any bad situation better. You didn’t make any friends or fans with the way you acted at the Masters. You just looked stressed and pissed the whole time you were there.”

I also tried to ease into another delicate issue. “Your greatness is undeniable. The records you will set will never be broken. You are probably the greatest athlete in the history of the world. But your Isleworth and practice tee game is better by a long shot than your tournament game. It is obvious that you have an issue with taking your game from the driving range to the course.”

Finally, without mentioning his quotes after the last round, I wanted Tiger to know that he’d hurt me with both his demeanor and his words at the Masters, and that going forward it was up to him to tell me how much I could help him. “At the tournaments it is sometimes a difficult situation because you just don’t seem to want much input at all and then when I do say something it doesn’t seem like you like what I have to say,” I wrote. “Anyway, I am the most loyal person in the world. I love helping you and I have worked my ass off for you. You just let me know when you want me to help you and I will be there.”

As anticipated, Tiger’s form at the Masters had led to some rumors that I was about to be fired. At his next tournament, in Charlotte, he didn’t exactly come to my rescue when the question was put to him, saying only, “That’s complete speculation.”

Tiger’s outlook changed at the Memorial Tournament in early June, where he won by a stroke with birdies on the last two holes. It was a notable week because Tiger had finally acceded to suggestions from me and others to try a driver with more loft, going up a degree from 8.5 to nearly 10 and having one of the best driving tournaments of his career. Muirfield Village’s fairways are generous, but Tiger was impressive in hitting 49 of 56 fairways, his best statistical week for driving accuracy since 1998. With his mood improved, he was more open with the media and blamed himself for his relatively slow progress since coming back by admitting that in his first few tournaments he’d been inhibited by a fear that his newly repaired ACL might still be susceptible to reinjury. He also took some heat off me by saying, “Hank’s been absolutely phenomenal for my game and helped me through a lot.”

Those words improved our partnership, and we worked well together at the U.S. Open at Bethpage, where Tiger hit the ball beautifully but missed 20 putts inside 15 feet and would finish four strokes behind the winner, Lucas Glover. I had to miss the British Open because I was finalizing my divorce, and I felt bad when Tiger missed only his second cut at a major as a professional.

At the next major, the PGA Championship at Hazeltine near Minneapolis, Tiger again was very good tee to green and mediocre with the putter. Still, his ball control earned him a four-stroke lead after 36 holes and a two-stroke lead after 54 holes. Because Tiger hadn’t lost when holding the lead alone after three rounds since the first time he’d faced the situation as a pro in 1996 at Quad Cities, his victory was all but conceded.

But Tiger’s poor putting cost him in the last round, as he missed seven putts under 10 feet, the first one a six-footer on the first hole for a birdie. That set the tone for the day. I contend that Tiger’s biggest opponent at Hazeltine was the law of averages. He was simply due for things to not go his way on the final day of a major, balancing out what had gone so right at Torrey Pines. Besides his own mistakes, he saw Y. E. Yang make the kind of winning shots that he was used to pulling off, especially Yang’s chip in for eagle on the fourteenth hole. Tiger could have tied on the 71st hole with a par, but after he hit a solid 7-iron over the flag and into the rough, he made a mediocre chip, and missed the kind of eight-footer he customarily buried in such situations. He came to the 72nd a stroke behind, but Yang, continuing the magic, stiffed a hybrid approach from 210 yards to close it out.

Tiger knew that he’d let one get away, but he wasn’t as upset as I’d seen him after some other losses at majors. He’d been proud of his 14–0 run of winning majors after holding or sharing the third-round lead, but he never expected it to last forever. He was well aware of how many close calls Jack Nicklaus had suffered in major championships, and with only six second-place finishes in majors compared to Jack’s 19, Tiger knew he was due for at least a few frustrating runner-up placings.

As was becoming his habit, Tiger played at an extremely high level the last part of the year, finishing either first or second in six of his last seven official tournaments. Without a major, it didn’t seem to matter much, and I could see his outlook souring as he received the latest evidence that for him, the expectations would always be impossible to fulfill. In September, he threw his driver in anger at the Deutsche Bank event near Boston, and in his last appearance of the year, a victory at the Australian Masters in November, he whipped it down so hard after a poor tee shot that it bounced into the gallery. Tiger was lucky nobody was hurt, but I thought what was most telling was the way he barely looked at the person who handed the club back to him, as if it was other people’s role to clean up his messes. I didn’t go to Australia, but watching it on television, I thought,
This is a troubled guy
.

I and everyone else would soon find out the reason, and Tiger’s life issue would reduce the strides he was making in his game to irrelevancy. As his coach, I found that sad, because I still considered it a noble undertaking to help the most gifted golfer ever fulfill his awesome potential.

By the end of 2009, I believed that even though Tiger’s putting had started to cost him major championships, he could easily solve the problem by rededicating himself to that crucial part of the game. I didn’t see any evidence that he was losing his stroke or his nerve, only that he wasn’t putting in the time necessary to be exceptional on the greens.

For me the ultimate challenge was Tiger’s driving, which for the myriad reasons I’ve discussed had been his biggest weakness since I’d become his coach. But I was proud that he’d made slow but steady progress in the last few years, and before things fell apart I was looking at 2010 as the year he’d make the breakthrough that would truly put his golf on a level never before seen.

What Tiger had long been missing—and perhaps never really had—was the kind of automatic go-to shot with the driver that could be relied on no matter how he was playing. The great drivers of the ball—in particular Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and Lee Trevino—all had such a shot, and it had lent an ease to their games that was a joy to watch and, more important, a joy to possess. I thought that, for the sake of his own longevity, Tiger needed something similar because his driver had forced him to work awfully hard during his rounds, and I thought the strain was starting to tell.

What I’d set my mind on installing in 2009 was a driver “stinger” to go along with his cut shot as a go-to shot. I knew in my bones Tiger could master the shot because he already did it well with the 5-wood and 3-wood. It would be a low-flying shot with little curve that he’d find was easy to keep on line, and though it might cost him 15 yards or so in distance, the ball would go far enough. Tiger already had the technique down and could perform the driver stinger on the range, but I hadn’t been able to get him to trust it on the course. He never gave a reason, but it seemed as if the pressure he felt to perform had gotten so great that it had turned him conservative when it came to risking a new shot in competition. There was also the fact that the big miss was for him more possible with the driver than any other club.

But he also understood that the whole point of the stinger driver was to make the big miss go away. I could feel that he was getting closer to trusting the shot, because he’d often break it out in a practice round or on the range, often unannounced. He knew how much I loved the shot and wanted him to use it, and he’d enjoy hitting it and silently sharing with me an admiration of its flight. He might then give me a sly look, or even keep his head down but say, “Like that one, huh?” In 2009, he was tantalizing me with that routine more and more, and it was heartening. I’d seize the opportunity to implore him, saying stuff like, “Tiger, that’s the ultimate shot. No one else has that shot. No one else is good enough to hit it. Put that in your bag and you jump ahead of everyone even more. That shot gives you the whole package.”

It should have happened.

“Hank, I want to give you a heads-up.”

The voice on my cell phone belongs to Mark Steinberg. He’s just returned from Australia, where a few days before, Tiger had won the 2009 Australian Masters in Melbourne. I’m on my way to China, where I’m working on establishing a junior golf academy at Misson Hills Golf Club.

Mark’s tone is brisk and businesslike. “There’s going to be a story coming out about Tiger and this girl,” he says. “It’s not true. Everything is going to be fine. But if anybody asks you about it, don’t say anything.”

I assure him I won’t. Mark is clearly in a hurry and says good-bye. The conversation has lasted about 30 seconds.

A little more than a week later, I was still in China when I received another call, this one at about two a.m. It was from a reporter calling from America, who asked if I’d heard about Tiger’s car crash in Orlando. I said no, and after hanging up got on the Internet and began reading about Tiger hitting the fire hydrant.

I called Mark, who was back in the United States. My concern was about Tiger being injured, but Mark said, “He’s going to be fine.” He sounded even more hurried than in his earlier call, so I said good-bye and hung up.

By the time I returned home to Dallas several days later, Tiger’s whole world had changed. The story Mark had been talking about, in the
National Enquirer
, had been the first of a series of reports that made it pretty clear Tiger had been having multiple extramarital affairs.

My first reaction was shock. I began coaching Tiger a few months before he married Elin in October 2004, and I’d known them as a couple since 2002. During that time, on the road or in Orlando, I never saw Tiger flirting or acting inappropriately with another woman, or even heard rumors that he was seeing others.

He had, very occasionally, commented on how attractive a woman in our presence might be, but that was the extent of Tiger being a “player” from my view.

I’d noticed that while he and E had been playful in the early years of their relationship—competing against each other in tennis, Ping-Pong, skiing, or running—there was some distance between them as the years went on, a certain coolness. But a lot of marriages are like that. I hadn’t jumped to any conclusions.

I have no doubt that many people will have a hard time believing I knew nothing about Tiger’s women. Almost automatically, they’ll consider me, at best, an enabler. So be it. Probably nothing I can say will change their minds. In the aftermath of Tiger’s scandal, I didn’t issue a public denial because I knew such a statement would also have gotten me labeled a liar. But after the shock, there was recognition. Whether working with me on his game or during downtime, Tiger always had a wall up, behind which I’d long imagined there was some kind of personal turmoil. His scandal brought home the uneasy sense of pressure building that I’d always had around Tiger. On some deep level, I’d been expecting something to break.

As I reflected back, I realized that I’d never thought of Tiger as happy. Whether with friends, business associates, other players, his mother, or his wife—indeed, with just about everyone except an audience of kids at one of his clinics—he seemed to keep the atmosphere around him emotionally arid. Part of it was the insane drive that was vital to his greatness. It seemed the longer he was the best, the more isolated and lonely he became.