by Hank Haney
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.
Late 2002 is when Tiger entered a shadowy period. He basically started working on his own, in part with Mark as his eyes. There was speculation that I was working with him, but that’s simply not true. I wasn’t even seeing him as often. Mark himself had stopped playing and practicing with as much intensity, and my trips to Isleworth were becoming fewer. Sometimes I’d ask Mark how Tiger was doing, and Mark would give me a summary of what he was working on. I knew that Tiger had a lot of knowledge about the golf swing, and so did Mark, but neither had ever demonstrated much success working on his own. Very simply, they were players, not teachers. That’s usually not a problem when a player is “maintaining,” but making real swing changes is another matter.
Tiger won a couple more times in 2002, but he’d dropped off slightly from his high level. His left knee started to really bother him, requiring painkillers, and that undoubtedly led to a worsening of certain bad swing habits, such as dropping his head to the right on the downswing. In December, he had arthroscopic surgery on his left knee to remove some benign cysts and drain fluid. During the procedure, it was determined that his anterior cruciate ligament was fraying. The surgery took place in Park City, Utah, where Mark and I both owned condos that we’d try to get to every year for a ski trip. Tiger’s surgery coincided with our trip, and Mark was present when Tiger was taken into surgery and when he came out. I met them later, and Tiger told me that because of the condition of the ACL, which he estimated was only about 20 percent intact, “I’m going to have to change my swing.”
The recovery required Tiger to miss the first five tournaments of 2003. Then he won three of the first four he played, including an 11-stroke victory at Bay Hill. But Tiger would later say he did it mostly with superb putting, and that year he didn’t win a major for the first time since 1998. Worse, he didn’t really come close, his tie for fourth at the British Open being his only top ten. It would later come out that the last time Tiger worked with Butch was during a visit to Las Vegas a week before the 2003 U.S. Open at Olympia Fields, where he finished tied for 20th.
I’d occasionally hear rumors that I’d be Tiger’s next coach, or that in fact I was already secretly working with Tiger, but I never paid much attention to them. I honestly believed that Tiger was determined to work things out on his own, that he liked the notion of not having a coach, and felt that he was at a point in his career where he could essentially fix himself. Even if he was looking for a new coach, there were several bigger names than mine. My approach was to keep working hard on the tasks at hand, which included coaching Mark and running my golf schools. I didn’t drop any hints to Mark, and he never talked about what he thought Tiger might do in the future. I’m sure Mark would have liked me to become Tiger’s coach, but the subject was such a touchy one with Tiger that Mark never even talked about it to me away from Tiger. I definitely didn’t make any comments about Tiger in the press or respond to any of the rumors, because that would have only been perceived, by everyone from Tiger on down, as angling for the job. As 2003 ended, I had no more reason to think I’d ever work with Tiger than I had when the year began.
But things changed when Tiger accepted that, despite his best efforts, he wasn’t getting better on his own. He won the WGC Match Play in early 2004 but wasn’t happy with the way he hit the ball. A week later he traveled to the Dubai Desert Classic. There Mark won for the first time since 1998. He’d been fighting a case of the yips, and he finally switched over to an unconventional “saw” putting grip that I’d encouraged him to try at the end of 2003. He putted like his old self and held on to win by one over Paul McGinley. Tiger, who finished five strokes back, waited for Mark off the eighteenth green to congratulate him, something I never saw him do for another player. According to Mark, Tiger told him, “I’m as happy for you as I’d be if I’d won myself.”
Everyone was in a good mood when they boarded Tiger’s leased Gulfstream 550 (nicknamed TWA, for Tiger Woods Airlines) for the ride back to the States. Mark later told me that when the subject of Tiger’s game came up, he was feeling so good about his victory and his friendship with Tiger that he just decided to stop holding back. First Mark said, “Tiger, you’ve got to get someone to help you with your game.” Tiger answered, “OK, who should I get?” Mark said that Tiger mentioned Butch’s younger brother, Billy, who was Jay Haas’s coach and whom Tiger liked, but then dismissed the idea because the sibling connection would probably cause complications. A couple of other names came up before Mark finally said, “Tiger, I know Hank’s my friend and I’ve been with him for years, but Hank’s the best teacher in the world. Besides that, he’s the one who suggested you make the big change in your swing in the first place.”
Tiger paused for a moment and said, “Yeah, I know. I’m going to call him tomorrow.”
When the plane landed in Orlando, I got a call from Mark’s agent, Peter Malik. “Hey, Hank,” Peter said. “Stay loose. You’re going to be getting a phone call.”
The next day, March 8, 2004, I’m having dinner at Bob’s Steak & Chop House in Plano, Texas, with my father, Jim, who’s in town for the day. It’s the kind of traditional Chicago-style steak place from my dad’s expense-account days, all mahogany and white linen. I rarely eat steak, but I order a New York strip, medium rare. The waiter has just brought us our food when my cell phone rings.
I’ve told my father I m
ight be getting a call from Tiger sometime in the next few days but that I’m not really holding my breath. I don’t have Tiger’s number, but when I look down and see the 407 area code on my screen in front of a number I don’t recognize, my stomach jumps. “Excuse me,” I tell my dad, “I gotta take this call.”
I walk quickly toward the entrance, and answer. “Hey, Hank,” I hear on my cell, “this is Tiger.” I give my normal “Hey, bud” greeting, but there’s no small talk. Barely pausing, Tiger says, “Hank, I want to know if you’ll help me with my golf game.”
My mind flashes on that winter day at Exmoor with Jim Hardy, and as I stand on the sidewalk watching the valet-parking guys running around and people going in and out of the adjoining shops, I feel disoriented. Everything around me is normal, but I know my life has just changed forever. I’m talking to Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer who’s ever lived, and he’s asking me to be his coach.
Because of Tiger’s tone, I try to hide any excitement from my voice. “Sure, Tiger. Of course,” I say, adding, “Thank you for the opportunity.” Tiger stays all business, asking, “What do you think of my game?”
I kind of surprise myself with how easily I snap into professional mode. I don’t say, “Tiger, I think you have the best game of all time,” which is what I believe. I realize he is a tour pro asking a tour teacher to measure him purely against his own abilities. I say very straight, but aware of how odd it sounds, “I think your game is pretty good.”
The next question isn’t a surprise. “What do you think I need to do better?”
I’m in my wheelhouse now, and I tell him exactly what I’ve observed in him for over a year. “Looking from the outside, and not knowing everything, it looks like you’re working on a lot of great things,” I say. “It looks like you know a lot about the swing. But it’s hard for me to tell what your plan is. It doesn’t look like you have a real step-by-step plan. I think when you’re trying to improve, the most important thing is to always have a plan.”