The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods

by Hank Haney

  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?”

  Over my years with him, Tiger got better with the driver, but it was a gradual, hard-earned improvement with no big breakthroughs. We tried a lot of different strategies, including coming very close to developing a driver “stinger”—a low-flying shot intended to increase accuracy that would in theory be easier to repeat. He could execute it flawlessly in practice but never trusted it enough to put it into competition.

  I can now admit I never felt totally comfortable when Tiger was standing over a drive in competition. When he hit a good one, I felt relieved. I was always worried about the big miss. And I know that most of the time, he was too.

  Tiger’s basic strategy with the driver was to play away from the side of the hole with the most trouble, even if it meant going into the rough. Generally, he favored missing to the right, because a pushed or faded shot would land more softly than a hook and have less chance of bouncing into a really bad spot. He knew that from a reasonable lie in the rough, he was good enough to get the ball on or around the green most of the time and avoid bogey. Indeed, it was his incredible ability with the other 13 clubs that made him so conservative with a driver. All Tiger needed was a shot, and he could not only survive but even go on to win. One of his playing thoughts was to capitalize on holes where he hit good drives, especially on par 5s, to shoot low scores.

  Because of this strategy, the fairways were in effect half as wide for him as they were for most other players. He played to one side of the middle of the fairway, to defensively compensate for where the trouble was. He was good enough to afford half a miss, but even he couldn’t afford a big miss.

  His fear was really only with the driver. It might have been because it was the one club with which he was more concerned with distance than control. The biggest flaw in his swing—a tendency to let the shaft get too flat on the downswing—was more exposed with the longest club, which comes into the ball on a flatter plane. It’s probably no coincidence that Tiger was a better driver early in his career, when he still used a steel shaft that was 43½ inches long. When, around 2003, he finally joined other players in using 45-inch graphite shafts, which were also lighter and could be swung faster, he had more problems. Ironically, for a lot of lesser players, the drive, teed up invitingly, was the easiest shot to play. For him it was the hardest.

  It wasn’t a unique phenomenon. Driver problems had attacked many top players after years of competing, among them Seve Ballesteros, Ian Baker-Finch, and David Duval. Typically issues began with a flaw in technique, and then became as much mental as physical. Although Tiger’s mental strength seemed to make him the most unlikely candidate for such a problem, after a few weeks of working with Tiger I came to believe that he had the beginnings of such an issue as well. To deal with it, without ever mentioning it to him, I drew on my own experience with the driver yips.

  From studying the problem, I learned that only a very small percentage of the golfing population was even a candidate for the driver yips. It was definitely a good player’s issue. The power and speed to hit massive blocks and big hooks are possible only with certain swing characteristics: across the line at the top, powerful lower-body motion, inside-out swing path, and an overreliance on hand action to square the club in the hitting area. Such players also tend to grip the club with their left hands in a “stronger” position—turned more clockwise—as well as hold the club more in the fingers than in the palm. Those had been my tendencies, and Tiger had them as well—though to a much smaller extent.

  Just as I’d done with myself, with Tiger I started to apply some opposites. It was basically Golf 101. To correct his getting the shaft across the line and stuck behind him, I began to give him drills that exaggerated getting the shaft pointed to the left of the target at the top. On the way down, I wanted him to not only feel the club more in front of him but actually come across the ball from outside the target line. This is the swing path of about 95 percent of all golfers; it produces the slice that is the signature of the hacker. But it was the fix for Tiger.

  I knew that if he mastered this feeling, it would give him a bail-out shot when he got uncomfortable on the course. He could “saw off” a cut by exaggerating the feeling that he was swinging from the outside. By teeing it low and accepting that he was going to lose some yardage, he could hit a playable “spinner” that at worst would go into the right rough. When we played together after I began coaching him, he’d noticed me hitting this shot. It didn’t go anywhere, especially compared to his drives, and he’d make fun of me for such a “wuss” shot. But he also noticed that I almost never missed the fairway.

  The shot served the further purpose of not requiring him to straighten his knee to keep the club from turning over. What he’d done with superaggressive lower-body action he could now do with the path of the club. It cost him a bit of distance, but it helped preserve the knee.

  I also implemented an opposite fix for his head movement. I suggested that he let his head turn toward the
target on the downswing so he was not even looking at the ball as he hit it. It was the signature move of Annika Sörenstam, one of the straightest drivers in history. Annika had picked up the habit from a drill her teacher, Henri Reis, gave her as a teenager to essentially keep her from getting stuck. She found it helped so much that she put it into her competitive swing. A lot of good drivers had a similar move, including one of the perennial leaders in driving accuracy and greens in regulation on the PGA Tour, Joe Durant. Not looking at the ball had helped me conquer my driver issues by reducing anxiety, and I thought a less drastic variation would help Tiger.

  I knew I was taking quite a risk in giving Tiger so many compensations. The golf world was expecting me to make changes that would bring him back closer to perfection, and here I was, at least temporarily, giving him a swing that was going to look less than classic—a little flatter and closer to his body, with a bit of a quicker tempo. Of course, once it became clear I was coaching Tiger, people thought that I was imposing my version of the ideal swing on him. I wasn’t. I know what textbook looks like, and that was my ultimate goal for Tiger. But in the short term, with a slightly unorthodox technique, he would be better off hitting more spinners into the right rough, even though it would tag me as the guy messing up the world’s greatest player. I began to think of the popular notion of Tiger as the perfect player—who was sure to display his awesomeness if not tampered with—as the Tiger Trap.