The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (5 page)

Meanwhile, Tiger would present Mark as a confidant to whom he could talk about anything. But the reality was that Tiger was guarded even with Mark. Tiger might sound out Mark on business matters, because Mark is very shrewd about career management. But usually the talk was about sports teams and other guy stuff, with some tour gossip thrown in. There were no big discussions about life that I can remember. I know Mark really cared about Tiger. But for all the talk of how close they were, he also felt that Tiger kept a certain distance. It was a space Mark wished he could close, but never really did.

The golf course was where the relationship really worked. Mark, who’d been going through a career lull in which he was fighting to find motivation, was definitely energized by Tiger. He liked being identified as an important influence in the formative years of a player he believed would be one of the best in history. But he was also a prideful competitor who, just because he hates getting drilled, stepped up his game to hang with Tiger in practice. Though it’s not widely known, Mark has one of the best records for turning third-round leads to victories and is very tough to beat head-to-head, mostly because he makes very few mistakes. In their matches—which were usually for something like $10 three ways, with Tiger rarely paying when he lost—Mark used all his guile and skill. In fact, his excellent putting often enabled him to win.

The new regimen really raised Mark’s confidence and enthusiasm. He won twice in 1997, and in 1998, at age 41, Mark had the greatest season of his career. He not only won his first major by taking the Masters with a last-hole birdie, but three months later captured the British Open. He was voted PGA Tour Player of the Year, and he closed out the season by beating Tiger in the final of the 1998 World Match Play, 1 up. In that match, Tiger made some late mistakes and kind of gave it away, but rather than being angry, he was genuinely happy for Mark. It was the only time I ever saw him react to a tough loss that way, and as much as he hates to lose, it said a lot about how he felt about Mark.

Tiger’s end of the deal was just as good. In the course of their play together, Mark, in the manner of a wise and caring friend rather than a would-be rival, passed along many lessons to Tiger. In particular, when the two were home, Tiger got nearly daily demonstrations on the nuances of saving shots. Mark has never had a visually spectacular game—he’s neither particularly long or straight off the tee, and his iron shots don’t paint beautiful lines in the sky—and Tiger would sometimes be left wondering,
How did that guy just beat me?
Figuring out the answer made Tiger a better, more complete golfer.

My role was chiefly one of privileged observer. It was already apparent that Tiger really valued the solitude he found at Isleworth, and the last thing he wanted was anyone breaking that up. So whenever I was around Tiger, I stayed in the background. I didn’t ask a lot of questions, didn’t bring people around to say hello, didn’t ask for autographs or memorabilia. I knew he had enough of that everywhere else, and there was no part of it that he liked. I put my focus into working on Mark’s game, and whenever that intersected with his contact with Tiger, I went with the flow.

I was also very cognizant of Tiger’s relationship with Butch Harmon, whom I’ve always respected as a great teacher. Regardless of which of us happened to be Tiger’s coach over the years, we’ve always been on good terms. Our philosophies on the physical swing differ a bit, but not as much as people might think. Butch, too, acknowledges John Jacobs’s principles as a huge influence. Butch has a big personality and he’s fun to be around. With his tour players, what I admire most is how he connects with them as people. He’s great at both inspiring and relaxing his players so that they’re ready to perform with confidence. That’s a huge part of coaching, and he certainly did that with Tiger.

When Butch was with Tiger at Isleworth and I was there with Mark, we always worked on separate sides of the range. It made good sense. Because Tiger and Mark were friends, it was a way of avoiding banter that could end up being distracting. The four of us all got along, but I don’t remember a time when we sat around and had a bull session about the golf swing. If Mark finished his session before Tiger, I never went over and watched Butch and Tiger work. It was just professional courtesy. Butch knew I was sometimes around Tiger when he wasn’t, and I wanted him to feel confident that I wasn’t doing anything behind his back. We never talked about that; it was just understood.

In spite of having to be careful, I really enjoyed getting to know Tiger in those early days. He was a little more innocent, a little less guarded, and a lot less cynical than he’d become. I got a sense of his life and a feel for the pressure he was under to reach a ridiculously high level and be a role model at the same time. For a kid in his early 20s, he got points with me for handling it all without screwing up. Sometimes I even felt a little sorry for him.

But I also realized my attraction to Tiger was about his being “Tiger Woods”—something bigger and more mythic than the young man himself. What drew me to him was his being potentially the greatest golfer of all time, not his personality. Because of my passion for understanding the game, Tiger was going to be interesting to me no matter what he was like. What he clearly understood and never had to say was that anyone who was brought into his world was lucky and would be playing by his rules. Those were never spelled out, but anyone with any sense could tell that the wisest course was to err in the direction of invisibility. At the same time, even at a young age, he had to know that the eagerness to be around him was not about him as a person but about who he was and what he could do. It was another reason he had a hard time developing trust and friendships.

The most concentrated time I spent around Tiger in his first six years as a professional was during practice rounds at the four major championships. In those days, Mark and Tiger routinely played 18 holes together on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. That was 12 rounds a year where I walked every hole inside the ropes with the players and their caddies, and perhaps a few more at the odd overseas events that Mark brought me to in which Tiger also played. Butch might have been there for half of those rounds, for he had other players to coach, as well as a commitment to commentate for Sky Sports.

At the beginning of this period, after his first Masters victory, Tiger embarked on some key swing changes with Butch. Perhaps the most important was altering his position at the top of his swing, an effort that Tiger would continue when I became his coach. Tiger knew my ideas on that position from observing and talking to Mark, but for more than a year he never asked my opinion about his goal or his progress, and I certainly never volunteered anything. If I’d been asked, I would have said what I believed, which was that he and Butch were working on the right thing.

The first time I had a conversation about technique with Tiger was at the 1998 Dunhill Cup at St. Andrews, where Tiger, Mark, and John Daly represented the United States. The eleventh hole at the Old Course is a short par 3 that usually plays into a hard left-to-right wind to a green that slopes sharply the same way. The proper shot in such conditions is a low draw without much spin, and Mark was really good at it. Tiger marveled at the way Mark’s ball stayed under the wind without upshooting, then admitted it was a shot he didn’t have. Tiger’s method at the time for hitting a short iron low was to play it back in his stance and pound down on it. But such a strike would produce a lot of backspin on the ball, which would invariably lose penetration and be carried off target by the heavy wind. He startled me by looking my way and asking how Mark hit that shot. I explained that it came from hitting a less lofted club and relaxing the arms into an abbreviated finish. He tried a shot, didn’t like the results, and declared, “No way I can do that.” But I knew he’d file it away.

Early 1999 was the first time something substantive passed between us in terms of technique. Tiger was working alone at Isleworth on the other side of the practice tee from Mark and me. At that time, one of his biggest problems remained controlling the distance on his short irons. He and Butch had been working on it, and I’d been noticing Tiger’s progress. At the time, Tiger was coming off a 1998 season in which he’d won only once on tour. Tiger insisted he wasn’t discouraged because he knew his swing changes would take some time to pay off, but as the new year started, the pressure on him to perform as he had in 1997 was increasing.

I was as interested an observer as anyone, and during a break in our practice, I said to Mark that I thought Tiger, in golf-speak, had the club “shut and across the line.” And Mark kind of surprised me by saying, “Why don’t you tell him?” And I said, “I’m not going to tell him. It’s not my business.” And Mark said, “No, he wants you to. He wants to know.”

This suggested that Tiger and Mark had discussed what I taught, and that Tiger was curious. So when Tiger came over to where Mark and I were hitting, I made my first comment a joke, saying, “Tiger, you look like the pizza-delivery guy, where you’ve got the club at the top.” This was touchy territory. Over the years several of Butch’s most successful students—most notably Greg Norman—had the club in a position most teachers considered across the line at the top of their swing.

Tiger was sensitive to being across the line—it was the area he most wanted to fix with Butch. He looked at me and said, “No, that just happens when my backswing gets long. I just need to keep it short of parallel.” Though I knew I would be close to encroaching on someone else’s student, I decided to voice my honest disagreement. “Well, even though it’s short of parallel, the club can still be across the line,” I said, and then demonstrated what I thought was the proper top-of-the-backswing position. “That club should be over here,” I said, pointing the club more to the left. He kind of took it in and went back to his work, and Mark and I left him alone.

In the next few tournaments, including the Masters in which he finished in a disappointing tie for 18th, I noticed that Tiger had altered his club position more toward what I’d demonstrated. I have no doubt that this was something he and Butch worked on, and I’m also sure it was the key reason his swing came together in early May when he won in Dallas and started on a tear. Tiger won seven more official tournaments before the end of the year, and would get even hotter in 2000. What was interesting was that several other golf instructors came up to me during this period, and knowing that I was often around Tiger through Mark, asked, “Hey Hank, are you working with Tiger? Because at the top he’s starting to look like what you teach.” I always said no, that it was a position Tiger had worked on with Butch. But David Leadbetter, along with Butch the biggest-name instructor at the time, was telling people that Tiger didn’t get that swing from Butch Harmon, he got that from Mark O’Meara, who got it from Hank Haney.

That was unfair to Butch. It’s hard to imagine that Tiger’s thinking about the swing wasn’t influenced by being around Mark, but Mark wasn’t Tiger’s teacher; Butch was. Talking about an idea like his position at the top, as Mark and I had, and actually working with a student to implement that position are two very different things. The other thing is that Butch and I didn’t see Tiger’s swing all that differently. Although everyone questioned why Tiger wanted to make swing changes after being so dominant at the 1997 Masters, those changes made good sense. From what I could tell, Butch was trying to get Tiger to the same place in his swing that I would have tried to take him, even though we might have used different drills and terminology. Those first big changes Tiger made with Butch were the most dramatic of his career up to that time. The transition was quite difficult because rather than taking some time away from competition to really ingrain the changes, Tiger decided to incorporate them while still playing a full schedule of tournaments. Most players don’t have the talent to pull that off, and even for Tiger, it might have been a slower way to go. But because the changes were right, they ultimately paid off.

In 2000 and 2001, Tiger played better than he ever had. At the same time, he was showing signs of getting tired of Butch. Tiger particularly disliked Butch’s habit of holding court on the practice tee, drawing a lot of people into the area where he did serious work. Tiger hadn’t minded when he was young and the stories were new, but after he became the world’s most famous athlete, he craved quiet. During one of our practice rounds, at the 2000 British Open at St. Andrews, Mark told me that Tiger had gestured toward me and said, “I wish Butch would be a little more like Hank. Just kind of blend in, instead of bringing people around and being loud.”

Butch was being himself, and he wasn’t about to change his approach, especially after he and Tiger had had so much success. I suppose that Tiger was willing to put his annoyance aside while he and Butch were winning five out of six major championships through the 2001 Masters, but after that came the beginning of a long good-bye. Even while Tiger was winning the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage, they seemed a little distant, and it was at the PGA at Hazeltine a couple of months later that Tiger told Butch he wanted to work alone on the practice tee.

I think what really turned the tide was Butch’s belief that the best approach with Tiger after he solidified his swing changes was maintenance. This is definitely an old-school view that has a lot of merit. It holds that a person’s swing is basically that person’s swing and that once the big issues have been resolved, refinement rather than more reconstruction is the wisest policy. Golf history is littered with good players who got worse trying too hard to get better, and Butch didn’t want Tiger to fall prey to the same syndrome. But such an approach went against Tiger’s grain. He wanted to always be consciously doing something to get better. It was as if he needed the stimulation and the challenge to stay motivated. It was a compulsion. Certainly in some ways it was a strength but perhaps also a weakness. Tiger didn’t grow tired of Butch the person as much as he grew tired of what Butch was teaching him.