The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (30 page)

Steve was upset. “The guy couldn’t even look me in the eye,” he told me. “He hasn’t changed one bit.” His frustration spilled over when he saw the state of Tiger’s game later that day on the practice tee. “I don’t even know why we’re going to Augusta,” he told me. “He can’t make the cut hitting it like this. It’s horrible.”

Steve seemed to be right in his assessment of Tiger’s golf. That evening, on the eighteenth fairway at Isleworth, I made a final plea that was calm but loaded with urgency. “Tiger, you have no chance the way you’re swinging,” I said. “I don’t know what new ideas you’ve been trying, but they haven’t worked, and they won’t work. Here’s what you have to do.” I then reiterated the basic things we’d always worked on, except that I wanted him to exaggerate them to make sure he didn’t fall into the destructive tendencies that had impeded his preparation so far. It meant that he’d have to employ a slightly outside-to-in swing path that would produce a left-to-right ball curve on his shots. It would cost him distance off the tee but keep his missed shots from straying as far off-line. I also knew it was a swing path that would improve his iron play. “You’ve got to eliminate the big miss off the tee,” I told him. “Let’s get the ball in play, where you can rely on your irons.”

Tiger knew time was running out, so he not only listened, he put what I said into practice, almost immediately hitting the ball with more control. It was not a great session. The truth is, we never had a great session in preparation for the 2010 Masters. But now he had a plan and something that he could at least repeat. It had been the logical path all along, and I lamented all the lost time his stubbornness had cost him. Still, I respected that no one had a better track record of being ready for big moments. Maybe he’d be ready again.

As we loaded up to go to the airport the next morning, I didn’t sense a lot of energy coming from Tiger. The only time I’d seen him in a similar state was during the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, which took place less than six weeks after his father had died, and where Tiger missed the cut for the first time at a major in his professional career. Before the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, Tiger had projected total determination. I wasn’t sensing anything similar now.

I had to drop off a rental car, so Tiger and Steve rode to the airport alone. It still wasn’t the face-to-face encounter that Steve had wanted so badly, as Tiger was wearing wrap-around sunglasses and was looking at the road as he drove. But at least they talked, and Steve told me on the plane that he felt better about going forward. All Tiger said to me was, “I talked to Stevie. Can you believe he asked me for a raise?”

Tiger moved into his rented house, along with Steve and a couple of staffers. I’d stayed in the house with Tiger before, but there was so much extra going on that there weren’t any more rooms, so my wife, Suzanne, and I went to a hotel.

On Sunday afternoon, Tiger surprised Steve and me by playing well. That was important because he was facing a big press conference at the club on Monday, the first time he’d be taking questions from reporters about the scandal and its aftermath, and we had been worried the stress could set him back. He was also unsure about how he’d be received by the fans. At his rental house, I heard Mark Steinberg repeatedly telling Tiger that all he had to do was perform well and people would forgive and forget, as they’d done with Kobe Bryant and Michael Vick. Tiger didn’t say much in return, but I got the feeling he didn’t believe it. Later on, Tiger prepared for his press conference with his team, fielding hypothetical questions and discussing possible answers.

Rather than trying to ignore what was being written and said about him, Tiger was taking it in. While we were in Augusta driving back and forth to the course, Tiger sat in the front passenger seat while I sat in the back, and I could see as he surfed the Web on his phone that he was searching for stories about himself on the gossip sites. A couple of times he suddenly said, “Uh-oh, here’s another story,” before immersing himself in it. Worse, he was reading the comments from readers, many of them vicious cheap shots. I was thinking there was no way that could be helping his frame of mind.

When I saw that he chose to play his practice rounds wearing sunglasses, I was disappointed. Tiger legitimately has terrible allergies, and they really affect him at Augusta in early spring. In fact, in each of his four Masters victories, it had rained sometime during the week, lessening the pollen count. The shades helped ease the irritation, but I still thought it was a mistake as far as the first impression he was making. People needed to see Tiger’s eyes.

He played his practice round on Monday with Fred Couples, someone he has always felt comfortable with and who has always been one of Tiger’s biggest supporters among the players. I know Fred well, and he’s very adept at acting as if everything is fine even when there’s a lot of chaos in his life. He and Tiger saw each other on the practice tee for the first time since the scandal, and Fred greeted him with an easy casualness, putting his hand on Tiger’s shoulder. Tiger’s game improved, which seemed to calm him before going to the dreaded press conference.

It went better than the apology from Ponte Vedra. Without a script, his answers were credible, and he stayed poised in the line of fire. A couple of times I thought his choice of words revealed the profound pain he’d experienced, as when he said that because he forgot his core values, “I lost my life in the process.”

Afterward, Tiger seemed unburdened, and his practice play got better each day leading up to the tournament. He was staying with our swing plan, and I gradually began to believe that he had a decent chance to turn in a respectable performance.

In our last two practice rounds, a couple of men Tiger had gone to rehab with followed us. Tiger had gotten them tickets, and he thoughtfully went over to talk to them along the ropes of the practice area. Tiger introduced me, and the three of us talked quite a bit as we followed Tiger on the course. They were hopeful about Tiger, and I thought,
This is good. He’s got some new friends
. I knew that rehab counselors encourage patients to shed enablers. Although I realized that it would always be complicated for Tiger to trust anyone outside his inner circle, I thought he’d benefit from developing confidants beyond those who worked for him.

But as we talked, I learned that Tiger hadn’t kept in touch with these guys or others he’d met in therapy, even though the clinic encouraged staying in contact. I heard later that Tiger had gone back only once for aftercare treatment, a week or so after his inpatient care had ended.

On Wednesday, Tiger got publicly slammed by Augusta National chairman Billy Payne, who said, “He disappointed all of us.” When asked about it, Tiger took the high road, saying, “I disappointed myself.” Privately, I didn’t hear him complain about what Payne had said. On the ride from the course back to his house, I expressed my view that I thought Payne had unnecessarily piled on, saying, “Man, how about Billy Payne?” All Tiger said was “Yeah,” but he didn’t look like he was suppressing any anger. I thought that on the eve of the tournament, he didn’t want to waste any energy and was homing in mentally.

Still, I really had no idea how Tiger would react once play began on Thursday. I was nervous for him when he got on the first tee, which was more jammed with people than I’d ever seen it. The reception he got after being announced was respectful and supportive, but the air was tense. I was really proud of Tiger when he rose to the occasion. He smoked a driver down the middle with a little cut, just as he’d been practicing. Considering the occasion, I believe it’s one of the best shots he ever hit.

As he walked down the fairway, a plane with a banner that read T
IGER:
D
ID YOU MEAN
B
OOTYISM
? flew overhead. There was no way of knowing if Tiger saw it, because his eyes were still hidden by sunglasses. I was grateful, though, that I didn’t hear any other negative comments from fans during the round.

Tiger started well, then hit a couple of loose shots that led to bogeys, but he made eagles on two par 5s, the eighth and the fifteenth. His 68 was the lowest score he ever shot in the first round of a Masters, and it could have been lower if he’d converted short birdie putts on the last two holes. The missed five-footer on eighteen was concerning because Tiger was always conscious of the importance of ending rounds on a positive note and was usually deadly with short putts on the last hole. Especially worrisome was the way he missed—hitting the ball too hard and pulling it to the left with a clearly anxious stroke. But overall, he’d dug very deep and once again found a way to meet the moment.

Friday he hit the ball even better but had three three-putts to shoot 70. The three-putts were a bad sign. Even for Tiger, it was very hard to win a tournament if he had more than three three-putts over 72 holes. He was two shots behind the leaders.

He shot another 70 on Saturday. It wasn’t a perfect round, but a pretty darn good one. He’d hit 15 of 18 greens in regulation, and though he’d hit a couple of errant drives and one or two poor iron shots, I thought the good far outweighed the bad. He’d ended the round with a birdie after stiffing a 6-iron on the eighteenth hole. He was trailing leader Lee Westwood by four shots and Phil Mickelson by three. Considering where Tiger had started from a month earlier, I was amazed.

Tiger’s reaction was just the opposite. Losing ground to the leaders put him in a bad mood. Rather than the 33 putts he’d taken, he focused on blaming his swing. “I warmed up terrible,” he told the media. “I didn’t have control of the ball.” He also complained of a “two-way miss.” Even though he had, from my perspective, hit the ball better than he had since beginning his comeback, Tiger made a point of telling the media that, for the first time all week, he was going to hit balls after his round. Before meeting Tiger on the range, I got a warning from Mark Steinberg, who said, “Be careful, he’s really pissed.”

When Tiger got to the practice area, he was at his most sullen. Almost under his breath, he said, “I hit it like shit.” It was so contrary to what I saw that I simply said, “Tiger, no you didn’t.” He didn’t respond. He’d said he hit it bad and I was his swing coach, and he wanted me to chew on that.

Tiger hit a bunch of irons in silence. He wasn’t going through the Nine Shots, but he actually hit the ball quite well. Clearly, though, he was steaming, and I decided it wasn’t a good time to engage him. The year before at Augusta he’d come off the course angry and I’d tried to calm him down, which only led to his snapping at me loudly enough for other players and even some spectators and golf writers to notice. About ten minutes later, he semi-apologized, saying, “Sometimes you’ve just got to let me get hot and get over it.” So that’s what I did this time. I thought then that his tantrum had been for effect, and I thought the same thing this time.
Why
remained unclear.

After he cooled down, Tiger went to the practice green to do some work on his putting. It was the first time at this Masters that he’d putted after one of his rounds. For the tournament, he put in less cumulative putting practice than at any other major I could remember—a continuation of the lessening short-game practice trend that had begun in 2007.

Tiger putted for about 15 minutes, and when we left, he seemed in a better mood. He gave Suzanne and me a ride back to the hotel, and before dropping us off, said, “We’re only four back. We can make that up on the front nine.” Somehow, though, I didn’t sense a lot of conviction in his words.

The next day, Tiger seemed tense on the ride to the course. That made the mile-long crawl along traffic-choked Washington Road feel especially long. I tried a standard “How you feeling, bud?” but all Tiger said was, “Yeah, feel good.” He stayed silent as we parked and he walked to the clubhouse.

After he had lunch and changed his shoes, he walked out to meet me on the range. While warming up with an 8-iron early in his session, he suddenly complained, “I can’t draw the ball.”

I was taken aback. We’d decided that his compressed preparation for this Masters made it necessary to rely on a left-to-right fade for the length of the tournament. Now he wanted to hit the ball right to left, the draw that is considered advantageous off the tee on several holes at the Augusta National. But attempting the draw caused him to fall into the destructive swing habits that had made his play in the weeks leading up to the Masters so poor.

I calmly said, “Tiger, we talked about this, right?” He didn’t answer, and that’s when he began hitting faster and not giving a good effort. A lot of the shots were low. I stayed quiet for a long time, but knowing this was my last chance to have some input on his performance, I decided to break the silence.

“Tiger, are you open?” It was the language of rehab. Tiger looked up at me, and with a hard look said, “Yeah, I’m open.”

“You just have to get the ball up in the air.” This was something I’d often said to him, and it was like code. It essentially meant making his downswing plane more upright, so that the club came down in front of him rather than more behind him, opening the clubface and thus increasing the loft at impact.

It was an instruction that I had given him countless times over the years, and it always got immediate results. But this time, Tiger looked at me and said, “What do you mean by that?”

It was no time for me to escalate the conflict, so I explained what I meant specifically. But he kept hitting the ball low. More than not doing what I was asking, he wasn’t really trying. That had never happened before.

And it suddenly hit me: a very strong feeling that this would be the last time I ever worked for Tiger Woods.

I was stoic, but inside I was churning. For a moment I stood outside myself and wondered,
Is this how I really feel?
I thought,
Wow. You’re done with the greatest coaching job ever? You’re going to walk away from the most interesting and rewarding player to teach, probably in history? The guy you’ve studied endlessly and whose game you’ve woken up every morning thinking about. Really?
But that didn’t change my mind. Something inside me had snapped and made all the things I sought when I took the job seem no longer worth it.