The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (9 page)

The last question had to do with Tiger having joined Mark and me for a practice session at my home course, Vaquero. The media understandably saw this as evidence that I was in some way helping Tiger. Tiger was on the spot with his answer, but he defused things so well it was almost scary.

Q
: You guys played nine at Vaquero. Was that more of just him as a teacher or a friend going along that day?

TIGER WOODS
: I was just playing with Mo and looking at Mo’s swing. Mo has been working on a few things and hasn’t been feeling all that comfortable with his game. I asked Hank one question about my takeaway, where it was, and that was it.

At that time, most of the media believed that Tiger was basically truthful, even when he wasn’t being candid. All the detail Tiger added in this case made his lie more believable. He wouldn’t officially admit that I was his coach until the Tour Championship in early November.

After Mark Steinberg, the next-closest person to Tiger was Steve Williams. Without a doubt, Steve is the best caddie I’ve ever seen. His greatest gift is that he stays completely calm and retains a commanding presence under the greatest tournament pressure. His former boss Raymond Floyd once said that Steve is the only caddie he ever had who didn’t choke. He proved it many times with Tiger, either by saying the right thing at a nervous moment, staying solidly silent in a moment of crisis, or calling Tiger off a shot if he believed it was the wrong one. Steve prided himself on being able to read Tiger’s mind, and Tiger respected Steve’s guts, judgment, and instinct. He also relied on Steve’s ability to be gruff and intimidating so that fans and media would give him a wider berth. Steve is certainly a rugged New Zealander who didn’t have a hard time playing enforcer, but there’s definitely a warmer and more personable side to him. Privately, I found him a very honest person who was easy to talk to and very loyal to people he trusted. He always knew what Tiger and I were working on, and he had a good eye for helping Tiger when I wasn’t at a tournament. He would also give me really useful insights about Tiger’s rounds. Steve wanted me to succeed in part because he and Butch had clashed, Steve feeling that Butch’s extroverted personality distracted Tiger. After Tiger’s Masters victory in 2005, Steve sent me an e-mail saying he believed I could take Tiger to heights no other golfer had ever reached. He also said he was personally relieved by the Masters victory because since the split with Butch, he had been growing more uneasy the longer Tiger had gone without a major victory. With the win at Augusta, Steve said he felt like “the sky is the limit from here.”

The toughest guy on the team was Tiger. I knew going into the job that Tiger had a strict goal of constant improvement. I accepted that and really believed that, given his ability, youth, and passion, I could help him with that goal for a number of years. There was always the assumption that Tiger’s best golf was ahead of him, but he and I knew there was no guarantee that would be true. His stated vow to keep getting better made for a whirring machine of effort and pressure.

More difficult, though, than offering the correct instruction was playing the perception game. The fans and the golf media and other insiders considered Tiger as near to perfect as any athlete in history. The image he created from 1999 through 2002 was so pervasive that my work was going to be judged not against his relatively poor play in 2003 and early 2004, but against the very best he’d ever done, that incredible period when he won seven of eleven majors, including that streak where he won four professional majors consecutively, one by 15 strokes and another by 8.

Intellectually I understood this. Everyone in golf naturally wondered why Tiger would leave Butch. Because the only logical conclusion was that Tiger was pursuing a method that he figured might be better, there was great eagerness to see if Tiger’s Hank Haney swing was superior to his Butch Harmon swing. I resolved to try to live up to the expectations. As good as Tiger swung it in his best years with Butch, I knew there still was room for improvement, and I think Tiger’s record ultimately showed that the swing he developed with my help gained in soundness and consistency.

But Tiger’s swing in 2000 and 2001 was better than the swing he had when I began with him in 2004, and his performance was way better. In recent years, Tiger had become a different golfer, with a bigger body, a less sound knee, and some swing habits that had ingrained themselves for the worse. When I began working with Tiger in 2004, my immediate goal was to make him better than he’d been in 2003, not 2000. I hoped I would receive the same kind of grace period for Tiger to master what we were working on that Butch received when Tiger implemented changes in late 1997 and 1998.

I couldn’t talk about any of this, of course. It would only have sounded like whining, and besides, it would have put Tiger under even more of a microscope.

To begin making real changes in Tiger’s game, I also had to lose some of my awe. Though my first reaction to landing the job was that Tiger would continue winning while I’d barely have to tell him anything, I soon found that this wasn’t true. After a few weeks I came to see not only that he was far from a perfect player, but also that he wasn’t quite as good as I’d thought. That didn’t mean I stopped thinking of him as the greatest ever to play, but when I looked at him, I had to stop seeing a myth and deal with the actual player.

Earl used to have a saying after Tiger did something historic: “Let the legend grow.” The legend did, and it led a lot of people to believe stuff about Tiger that just wasn’t so. One misconception was that he knew more about the golf swing than any other modern player. Though Tiger definitely possessed a great deal of knowledge, he’d proved that he didn’t have enough to fix himself. The fact was, purely self-taught guys like Lee Trevino and/or idiosyncratic swingers like Jim Furyk probably knew more about how to correct their games than Tiger did about correcting his. Another misconception was that Tiger was a “sponge” who could assimilate and apply new information seamlessly. In reality, he was something of a chronic experimenter who could get off track without guidance, as the previous couple of years had showed. He was generally very stubborn when it came to my proposed changes, as opposed to ideas he’d come up with himself, forcing me to devote a lot of thought to coming up with ways to convince him to try things, many of which involved making the change seem like his idea.

His short game and putting weren’t as good as I’d expected. He was incredible with difficult shots around the green, those that required a lot of height or a lot of spin and precise contact. But surprisingly, by touring-pro standards he was mediocre to poor on straightforward chips. He tended to overplay them with too much spin, instead of getting the ball on the ground and letting it run. This was always Steve Williams’s pet peeve, in part because he’d caddied for two of the best chippers ever in Floyd and Norman, but also because he couldn’t convince Tiger to stop putting so much backspin on his standard chip shots.

As good a putter as Tiger was—and I think the level he attained on the greens when he won seven of eleven majors has never been equaled—he had too many careless three-putts. They didn’t come from lack of touch or poor short putting. Invariably, the cause was taking overly bold runs at birdie putts of 20 feet or more. It took me a while to convince Tiger that the percentages simply weren’t in favor of making many putts over 20 feet, and that the smart play was to make sure to leave an easy second putt, if not a tap-in, rather than having to constantly make energy-draining five-foot comebackers. Steve was always pointing out that, according to the statistics he kept, when Tiger went through 72 holes without a three-putt, he won 85 percent of the time.

As for Tiger’s swing, sometime in the murky period when he began working less with Butch, he’d picked up a bad habit of getting his arms out too far away from his body on the takeaway. I think this was born of trying to keep width in his backswing—one of Butch’s main tenets—and create a path away from the ball that if simply retraced on the way down would keep the club “out in front of him” rather than “stuck.” But the problem was that such a path created an unstable “disconnected” position at the top, from which Tiger’s very strong and fast lower-body movement would actually cause his arms to drop even more on the downswing, encouraging more stuck swings and more foul balls.

In short, Tiger had become a diminished golfer who’d lost many of his old advantages over the other top players. If that continued, as it did during several winless months in 2004, I knew that as his new coach, I was going to get the blame. I decided that if I was going to get the blame anyway, I’d teach him not as some untouchable icon but as a real player with real problems and not hold back. To be true to Tiger and to myself, I had to truly coach him.

That meant making some noticeable changes, which I knew could potentially make me the man who tried to remodel the Taj Mahal. As Butch had predicted, what I thought would be an easy job had turned into something much harder than it looked.

Tiger’s swing situation and the changes required were complicated by three issues.

The first was his left knee. Protecting Tiger’s knee during the swing and still getting performance wasn’t a simple thing. Although Tiger said Butch had encouraged him to snap his left knee at impact to gain distance, the move had another, more positive purpose. Basically, the fast and dramatic clearing of the hips that caused the hyperextension was a way to “hold off” club rotation and not hit a hook, even when Tiger’s plane was slightly across the line. Hyperextending, or “snapping,” his leg allowed Tiger to more easily hit a power fade with his driver, as well as controlling his irons with shots he knew had little chance of curving left. Essentially, snapping his knee allowed Tiger to eliminate one side of the golf course, a hallmark of great players from Hogan and Locke to Nicklaus and Trevino.

But now to preserve his knee, Tiger wanted some flex in his left leg at impact. This meant not turning his hips as aggressively through the ball, making it easier for Tiger to turn his hands over in the hitting area and hit a hook. It was the shot he most dreaded, because with a clubhead speed of more than 125 miles per hour, a hook for Tiger could easily turn out to be a big miss.

The second issue was the movement of Tiger’s head. Tiger was very attached to the idea of moving his head to the right on the backswing and leaving it there on the downswing. It was a move that had served him well as a skinny junior golfer trying to keep up in distance with the bigger kids. By staying behind the ball, Tiger could produce a “slinging” action with the club that, though not consistently accurate, generated a lot of speed and gave him the distance he believed he needed to win. Even as he got older and longer off the tee, he felt he needed to keep his floating head position to continue to outdrive the majority of other pros.

He wasn’t completely wrong. It was just that in his case, the head movement had developed into a contributing cause of getting stuck. He could have gotten away with moving his head to the right if, on the downswing, he had put it back where it started. But with the longer clubs and especially the driver, he usually didn’t. Instead it stayed to the right and lowered. There were periods in which I won this argument with Tiger, and in my opinion it’s when he produced his best golf. But it was an ongoing battle.

The third issue was the biggie. Simply put, Tiger played the driver with a lot of fear.

It was a shocker for me. One of the adjectives most often used to describe Tiger Woods was
fearless
. But the more I observed him close up, the more it became clear: He wasn’t. We never talked about it directly. I didn’t want to say anything that could undermine Tiger’s confidence, which was more important than any technical improvement. Sometimes, to make it less of a big deal, he’d remind me that he had never considered himself a particularly good driver, at least in comparison with the rest of his game. “That’s why my name is Woods,” he’d joke. “Maybe it would have been different if I’d been named Fairway.”

I’d seen signs of driver anxiety before I became Tiger’s coach. I knew that Tiger tended to struggle on courses with tight fairways like Southern Hills, the TPC Stadium Course, or Harbour Town at Hilton Head, which he took off his schedule early on. I remembered in Germany in 1999 or 2000, when he was playing a practice round there with Mark, there was a par 4 with water down the right side, but the target area looked pretty wide to me. Tiger hit a 3-wood off the tee, which surprised me, and I asked him why. “Oh, that water really cuts in tight,” he said. More telling was the first hole at Isleworth, which didn’t present a lot of problems from the tee and where in practice Tiger always hit a driver and almost never missed the fairway. But when the Tavistock Cup was played at Isleworth in 2005, which was the first time Tiger had played the course in an actual competition, he hit a 3-wood off the first tee. When I asked him about not hitting a driver, he said, “That out-of-bounds comes in tight on the left side.” I was amazed because I had never seen him come close to hitting it out-of-bounds.

The most persuasive evidence of Tiger’s fear with the driver was the shot pattern of Tiger’s warm-up versus his competitive rounds. Near the end of his practice session before each round, Tiger would commonly hit a series of long, straight bombs, sometimes putting on a veritable driving clinic before heading to the first tee. Then, as soon as his name was announced, he would fire one way right, or even worse, way left. For the rest of the round, he’d play defensively off the tee, intentionally playing away from trouble even if it meant putting the ball in the rough, and usually in the right rough. It also meant he’d be less committed to swing changes we were trying to install, which had worked so well in practice. Steve and I would wonder to each other before his rounds, “Is this the day he finally commits to his swing?”