The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (3 page)

At the time Tiger joined the tour, I never in a million years thought that I’d ever be his coach. He and Butch had a great relationship that seemed destined to last for Tiger’s entire career. I was an experienced instructor with a good name. I ran three golf centers in the Dallas area, had been chosen the 1993 PGA of America Teacher of the Year, and was mostly known for coaching Mark, who’d developed into a top player on the PGA Tour. But Mark had yet to win majors, so our partnership didn’t get the attention of David Leadbetter’s work with Nick Faldo, or Butch’s with Greg Norman.

Still, I was very much living my dream. I’d wanted to be a golf instructor from the time I was a teenager. I was born in 1955 and grew up in Deerfield, Illinois, in the northern suburbs of Chicago in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. My dad was a successful advertising salesman. My mom stayed at home, where she always stressed hard work. She was also very inquisitive, which I think helped me be curious about people, especially successful ones. She also told me at a young age that patience would be my greatest virtue.

As a kid, I noticed my parents seemed most proud of me when I did well in sports. I always wanted to excel, I was willing to do what it took to be good enough, and it used to bother me that so many of the guys on my teams in hockey or baseball just didn’t want it as bad as I did.

I’m sure that’s part of what appealed to me about golf. It was just me, and I could work at it as hard as I wanted to. Our family had a membership at Exmoor Country Club, and my dad started taking me to the course when I was 11. I’d played a lot of hockey, and that probably helped me make pretty good contact with the ball right away. I enjoyed batting it around the range and the practice green. When I started going out on the course, I did so mostly alone. But I didn’t mind, because I was really intrigued by the challenge of the game.

When I was 13, I went to a summer golf camp in Indiana, with a couple of good instructors, Sam Carmichael and Joe Campbell, the latter an old touring pro people remember for the cigar that was always in his mouth when he played. They fixed my slice in a way that I could understand, and that process encouraged me to become very analytical about the swing and the game. I found that what I liked most about golf was that you could diagnose a problem and try to correct it technically, and then see if the changes held up on the course.

I worked hard at my game and had a bit of success in local tournaments, but even as I dreamed of the future, I never really envisioned myself becoming a touring pro. I remember playing in the biggest high school tournament in the state, the Champaign Invitational at the University of Illinois golf course, when I was 16. I shot 73-72 in windy conditions, the best I’d ever played. I finished second, 11 shots behind the winner, Jay Haas, who is now winning tournaments on the Champions Tour. That told me something.

In high school I was probably better at hockey, but golf became my sport. I wasn’t recruited, so I wrote letters to colleges inquiring about golf scholarships. I got one answer, from the University of Tulsa, whose golf coach, an education professor named Carl Oliver, invited me to come down for a visit. I flew down there on my own, talked to Coach Oliver, was given a tour of the campus, and even practiced with the team. I took the round with them really seriously and performed well, shooting a 73 on a tough course called Cedar Ridge. In doing so, I beat everyone but one player, another future touring pro, Ron Streck. Right on the spot, I was offered a scholarship, and I very proudly took it. It was a great day.

With teaching golf in mind, I chose education as my major. I roomed with Ron, who was a phenomenal golfer and an amazing athlete who could dunk a basketball even though he was just six feet tall. I remember I beat Ron only once in a match, on an easy par-70 municipal course, when I shot a 61 and he shot 62. And he got so pissed that he wouldn’t talk to me. It was my first exposure to how crazily competitive really good players can be.

In March 1974, my freshman year, I decided to go home to Chicago for a long weekend. I got into my Camaro, drove 12 hours, and went straight out to Exmoor, which had a new head pro named Jim Hardy. The temperature never got higher than the low 30s that day, and the place was pretty deserted. In the golf shop I met Jim, a dynamic guy who couldn’t have been nicer. I asked him if I could use one of the holes near the clubhouse to practice with my shag bag, and he said to go ahead, and that he might come out to watch me. To my surprise, Jim came out soon after and worked with me on my game for a good four hours.

Jim had played on the PGA Tour, where he’d been known as a very long hitter, a good ball striker, and a terrible putter. He had a beautiful action reminiscent of Ben Hogan, whose books he’d studied as the basis for his teaching. Jim was and remains a tremendous communicator, and when he started talking and demonstrating, I was overwhelmed by his knowledge and how well he conveyed it. And as much as I was having a blast, I also noticed how energized he was by helping me. I thought,
This is so cool. This is really what I want to do
. It was one of those moments that change your whole life.

When I got back to school, my studies included teaching golf at recreation centers in Tulsa, and I found that I got a lot of satisfaction from the challenge of getting a complete beginner to execute the fundamentals and become a golfer who could enjoy the game. As a player, in a couple of tournaments I rose to number-two man on the team and made all-conference my junior year, but I knew I wasn’t going to try to play competitively. I wanted to teach.

After graduation, I worked at MeadowBrook Country Club in Tulsa, where I was mostly responsible for changing the batteries in a fleet of more than 100 carts. I wasn’t given the opportunity to teach, so after six months I headed back to Chicago, where John Cleland, the new pro at Exmoor, gave me a chance to give lessons.

It was the break I needed. Jim Hardy had left Exmoor to help run the John Jacobs’ Golf Schools, but we stayed in touch, and after about a year he asked me to work with him at some winter schools. I was the low man on the totem pole at the Jacobs schools, basically charged with grunt work like setting up the range, picking up balls, and getting drinks for the students. But I got to watch Jim and John Jacobs teach, and it was a revelation.

John is the most important teacher in golf history, the man whose ideas and system of diagnosis, demonstration, and correction have influenced more teachers than anyone else. Butch Harmon, David Leadbetter, Jim McLean, Jim Hardy, myself, and so many others all owe a huge debt to John. As I write, he’s 86 years old and remains an amazing man. He’s generous, patient, dedicated, and, with that movie-star face and big personality, still charismatic. As a professional he played in the Ryder Cup and 14 British Opens, and won several events. Like Jim, his quest to become a better player led him into a study of the golf swing, and he came up with maybe the best sentence in the history of teaching: “Golf is what the ball does.” In other words, the flight of the ball tells the teacher where the student’s club was at impact. From there, the teacher can make the appropriate corrections to grip, posture, alignment, ball position, plane, club path, or clubface angle. It’s a sound formula and basically all I do, whether it’s with a beginner or Tiger Woods. A lot of teachers know much more about the biomechanics and physics of the swing than I do. When it comes to terms like ballistics and the kinetic chain, they can talk circles around me. But I feel very secure in my ability to fix ball flight.

Sitting around a table at night listening to John, Jim, and other respected golf instructors hold court was one of the most valuable experiences of my career. I remember one discussion in which John was talking about how, contrary to conventional wisdom, so many of the most consistent and enduring ball strikers had a slight “over the top” move, rather than the more classic “inside-out” path, in which the shaft flattens out on the downswing. John clicked off the names of Bobby Locke, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, and Bruce Lietzke as just a few examples of players who started down with their arms a bit farther from their body, the club taking something close to the “outside-in” path that slicers are always warned against. John said that way of hitting the ball held less danger for good players than dropping the club down and hitting from inside to out. “Hitting too late from the inside with an open face not only misses the fairway, it can miss the golf course,” he said. “A little over the top never misses by too much. In competitive golf, it’s not so much where the good ones go. It’s where the bad ones go. You’ve got to build a swing that will eliminate the
big miss
.” It was a concept that stayed with me.

After a few months, I was teaching in the Jacobs schools in the winter and Exmoor in the summer. In 1980, the Pinehurst resort asked the Jacobs people to teach at one of their schools. While we were at Pinehurst, their director of golf, Mike Sanders, asked me if I’d be interested in taking a permanent position as the head of instruction for the Pinehurst Golf Advantage Schools. I was 25 years old, single, really ambitious, and willing to work for a modest salary in the remote Sandhills of North Carolina. Mike took a chance on me, and I was soon running the schools at the biggest golf resort in the world as well as teaching every day.

I was getting a lot of confidence in my ability to correct ball flight, and I was slowly developing some of my ideas about the swing. I also got to keep furthering my teaching knowledge because sometimes the Golf Digest schools would also come to Pinehurst, and we got to watch those instructors teach. It allowed me to pick the brains of such men as Bob Toski, Jim Flick, Davis Love Jr., Paul Runyan, and Peter Kostis. Toski and Flick in particular had great presentation skills. I’d try to take a little from everyone and keep improving.

It was a matter of timing. I had another life-changing event—and the most fortunate single moment of my career—occur in October of 1982, my second year at Pinehurst. The PGA Tour’s Hall of Fame Tournament was being played at the resort, and on Friday evening one of the pros who missed the cut, Mark O’Meara, was on the iconic practice range, known as Maniac Hill, desperately trying to find a swing that would work.

After winning the 1979 U.S. Amateur, Mark had been the PGA Tour’s Rookie of the Year in 1981. But he’d fallen into a deep slump, and with just three tournaments to go was 120th on the money list and in danger of falling out of the top 125 and losing his exemption for the next year. He was desperate, so when he saw one of the assistant pros on the range, Ken Crow, he asked if he’d watch him. To my everlasting gratitude, Ken said that he’d get the head of instruction.

When Ken came into the teaching center and asked me to come out and watch this young pro, I confess I didn’t really want to. It was late in the day, and I suspected that the student was one of Ken’s local assistant pro buddies. I reluctantly went out on the practice tee.

I was shocked when I saw it was Mark O’Meara. I said hello, and Mark barely looked up. He was clearly agitated and said sort of sharply, “Would you watch me and tell me what you see?” I said, “Sure.” Mark was the first touring pro I’d ever helped, but I wasn’t intimidated. I could see that his swing was built on feel and talent but not good technique. He got the club way too upright at the top, forcing him to drop the club sharply to the inside of the target line on the way down and then flipping his hands at impact to square the club. When he was on, he could get away with it. But when he was off, he was lost. For players with poor mechanics, the week-to-week grind of the PGA Tour is a brutally exposing place.

After about ten minutes, Mark asked, “Well, are you going to say something?” I kind of took my time, wanting Mark to calm down a bit, and said, “I’m just thinking about what you’re going to need to do.” I suggested we go inside to the clubhouse and talk about it over a Coke. Mark looked up and said harshly, “I’m about to lose my card. I don’t have time for a Coke.” But after a few more swings, he agreed to go inside.

What I formulated for Mark was a plan to get better. I explained the parts of his swing that needed to improve and the sequence of the steps ahead. I made it clear that achieving the ultimate goal was going to take time and a lot of discipline, but that in the short term I could give him something that would help him in the next few tournaments. He didn’t know me, but something told him it was time to trust, and he said, “OK, let’s get started.” We practiced all weekend, and then he left for the next tournament. Mark made the next three cuts and kept his card. We kept working together, and the next year he finished 76th on the money list. In 1984, he won his first tournament and was second on the money list.

Mark’s swing very quickly looked dramatically different. By virtue of getting the backswing and downswing on the correct plane, it became flatter in angle and rounder in shape. Mark made a bigger swing change—with success—than any other pro I’ve ever seen. Much greater than what Tiger did under Butch Harmon or me. Bigger even than Nick Faldo’s reconstruction under David Leadbetter in 1985, which culminated in Nick’s victory at the 1987 British Open and his subsequent rise to number one in the world. In fact, in 1983, Nick, knowing what Mark had gone through, asked his advice about committing to an overhaul with David, and Mark told him he should go for it.

Both Mark’s and Nick’s success marked a shift in golf instruction. Prior to that, the best-known instructors built their reputations helping average golfers. At times, they’d work with touring pros, but never on any sort of full-time schedule. For example, Jack Nicklaus’s lifelong teacher, Jack Grout, would see Jack only two or three times a year and spent most of his time helping the members at Scioto in Columbus and La Gorce in Miami Beach. Harvey Penick never went out on the tour with Ben Crenshaw or Tom Kite. He just stayed put at Austin Country Club and gave thousands of lessons to average players. But the publicity given to overhauls of pro players’ swings, especially the attention paid to the success David had with Nick, changed the model. Not only did it drive more tour players to seek full-time teachers; it led more instructors to travel the tour looking for business and developing stables. Whereas previously the only “lessons” on tour practice ranges had been one pro passing a quick tip along to another, soon there were so-called swing gurus walking the practice tee with video cameras, often serving multiple players at once.