The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods

by Hank Haney

  What nobody else knew was that if Tiger looked more orthodox—more upright, less laid off, and employing his old hip release—he wouldn’t perform as well. In his time with me, whenever he’d start to do things that made him look more as he had with Butch in 2000, the worse he hit it. That might sound absurd, but swings are about more than how they look. They change in imperceptible ways over time, often internally more than externally, and what has always worked begins to fail and needs adjustment. My opinion is that the accumulated pressure Tiger played under began to make it difficult to use a swing that required the compensations he had relied on as a younger player.

  I believed in what we were doing, and so did Tiger. Gradually the wild drives started to lessen, but the process was going to require steps through the different levels a touring pro faces. First there would be fewer wild drives on the practice tee at Isleworth, then in practice rounds at Isleworth, then on the practice tee at tournaments, then in practice rounds at tournaments, then in practice sessions before competitive rounds, then in competitive rounds, and finally in competitive rounds at majors. That’s a tour player’s progression, one of the hardest things about the profession.

  After the Masters, Tiger finished tied for third at Charlotte on the Quail Hollow course, which is demanding off the tee. It was a good sign, but at his next tournament in Dallas, I decided to try to install one more significant change. The setting was right because I was at home and Tiger could work with me in private at Vaquero. (Though the media had found out about our practice round with Mark there, no one asked about this session.) Tiger had played well in the first two rounds, shooting 65-67 to take the lead. Normally, I wouldn’t have tried to show him anything new at such a juncture, but I knew Tiger would be in a good mood and I felt an inspiration, so after Friday’s round I asked him if he’d put in some practice with me at Vaquero.

  Tiger was staying at the Four Seasons at the golf course, so he followed me in his courtesy car the ten miles to my place. On the way I had to decide how to introduce the idea in a way that he wouldn’t immediately dismiss. I’d heard his quote about throwing out 90 percent of what he heard from teachers and keeping maybe 5 percent, so when we got to Vaquero, I said, “Tiger, I want you to try something that I think might make that five percent you hear from teachers that you actually keep.” He laughed, and his good mood seemed to continue as we drove a cart out to the back of the range.

  Basically, I believed Tiger would be better off with one more safeguard against the big miss. I’d found that pros who suffered from driver wildness invariably held the club more in the fingers. In my own case, I’d altered my grip so that the club was more in the palms. I had gotten the idea from studying Moe Norman, a Canadian whose competitive career had been hampered by his autism but who was legendary for the repetitive accuracy of his shots. Norman’s simple swing was notable for its relative lack of hand action.

  I’d noticed that when I held the club out with just my left hand, if the grip was in the fingers, the club head would quiver and shake with any change in grip pressure. But when I held it in my palms, the club was much more stable and would barely twist.

  Grip changes are huge decisions for pros, because in the short term they’re uncomfortable and greatly affect feel. So I told Tiger, “Look, I just want to show you something. Just keep an open mind and try it for me, OK?”

  He looked at me skeptically. I demonstrated the grip I wanted him to try, then put his left hand on his 5-iron and showed him how I wanted him to hold the club more in his palm. He immediately said, “I can’t do this.” I quickly said, “Yeah, I know it feels weird, but just try it.” He took the new grip, placing his right hand also with more of his palm, and waggled the club. “There is no way,” he said. I repeated my urging, putting a ball in front of him to hit. He got over the ball and complained, “I can’t even cock my wrists.” I said, “Just hit one.” He stood over the ball for a longer time than usual, then swung.

  The sound of the impact was distinctive. Tiger’s shots always made a great sound, but this was even more “flush.” The ball flight was ideal as well. Tiger was visibly astounded that he’d hit such a perfect shot with such an uncomfortable feeling. He looked at me and said, “Show me that grip again.” I put his hands on the club and he once again said, “I can’t hit the ball with this grip.” I answered, “You just did.” He flushed two more shots solidly and went, “Wow.” After about a dozen more balls, he looked at me and said, “I’m going with it.”

  And just like that, he did. He used the grip the next two rounds at Dallas, and though he shot 70-69 to finish in a tie for fourth, he never complained about it. It was the fastest Tiger accepted any change I ever proposed to him, and the astounding thing is that it was probably the biggest change we ever made. Even though it was a grip that cost him some distance because it slightly restricted his hand action, Tiger never complained about the sacrifice and continued to hold the club more in the palm the entire time I coached him. The whole weird way it happened remains improbable to me and is a good example of how Tiger was simply different. I can’t imagine another player adjusting to a grip change so quickly.

  Off the course, I was also getting to know Tiger better. I stayed at his house about thirty days in 2004, the amount I’d average per year while we worked together. I tried to be a low-maintenance guest. I obviously knew by now that Tiger was allergic to people who even faintly crowded him, so I demurred on all things except his golf game.

  Probably the least satisfactorily answered sports question of the last twenty years is, “What’s Tiger Woods like?” The reason is that even for those who are actually around him a lot, never mind his millions of observers, he is very hard to know. There is a lot going on behind those eyes, but very little is shown.

  I saw Tiger in many modes. He could be very gracious in public when he chose. But when the mood struck him, he could be coldly aloof with media, autograph seekers, or even officials. In private, I found that he could either be good company—conversational and intelligent in a way that made you wish he’d allow that side of himself to come out all the time—or completely distant.

  As I’d learned from being around Tiger before coaching him, his public persona forced him to operate in a very tight box. Whereas some athletes and celebrities could actually enhance their images by behaving badly, Tiger could never do any wrong in public without it being pointed out that he was betraying the ideal Earl had promoted and that his endorsement contracts were built on. It made him wary of being in public or engaging with people other than the few in his inner circle. Whenever I was with him in a restaurant or a hotel or a casino, he was eerily good at avoiding eye contact. He acted impervious to his surroundings, but it struck me that he wished it could have been different, and that on some level he resented his situation.

  I never sensed that Tiger wanted to be treated like a king. He never had a big entourage. He never bragged about what he’d won or how much money he had. Tiger didn’t big-time. The most entitled I ever saw him act was when he drove around Orlando. It wasn’t that he favored fast cars. He owned a McLaren and a Porsche that were basically race cars, but they stayed in the garage from what I could tell. Mostly he just drove his Escalade, but in a way that reflected an impatient guy who wasn’t going to follow the silly rules of regular schlubs. He’d go over the speed limit, but not by a lot. Mostly it was rolling stops, turns over double lines, parking in a restricted spot—time-saving stuff he thought was worth the risk. When I was in the passenger seat, sometimes I’d say “Nice” after one of his illegal moves. That would draw a smile from Tiger as he enjoyed the rare feeling of breaking rules. But I never saw him get a ticket or even get pulled over.

  I remember once reading something John Cook, who played a lot of practice rounds with Tiger at Isleworth, said about him that I thought rang true: “Tiger knows his place.” What I think John was saying is that Tiger knew he was special, but with so much certainty that he never had to talk about it. He knew everyone
else knew it as well, and he was content to let them make all the noise. He felt no need to prove it or revel in it or lord it over people. He never pulled rank with a “Do you know who I am?” routine in public places. When he walked into a restaurant, the red carpet was rolled out, a special room was provided, and the owner came by to pay homage. But all he cared about was that the meal came right away, and he’d try to slip in and out unnoticed. He might have needed indulging from those around him, but he didn’t need attention from them. I guess he’d had too much from too young an age.

  It always struck me that Tiger was at his most outgoing with kids at clinics. The few times I saw him in one of those situations, he took a lot of time helping individual kids with their games and talked with them freely. During the Q&A sessions, he answered 10-year-olds much more completely than he did the media. Being around youth seemed to relax him, which made me wonder if it was because he missed his.

  At Isleworth, he played a lot with Mark and John, veterans who’d helped him when he first turned pro and whom he trusted, but he was loosest with a group of much younger guys, several of them teenagers. They were all good players, but Tiger liked to work with them on their games, encourage them with needling and prods during their rounds, or just listen to their jargon and expressions. Sometimes he’d play the best ball of a couple of them and me; sometimes everyone would just play his own ball. Or Tiger would bet them that they couldn’t make a certain shot, and the payment would be push-ups, which might leave Tiger’s victim sore for days afterward. The push-up bet had started after Tiger admitted he couldn’t feel nervous playing for money. But the pain from hundreds of push-ups raised the stakes. Tiger’s most intense push-up matches came against Corey Carroll, the son of a member at Isleworth, who is 11 years younger than Tiger. Their matches would be stroke play, with Corey getting a few shots. The standard bet was 150 push-ups per stroke, with payment to be completed by midnight. Tiger loved to “collect,” usually laughing as he stood over the loser. But he sometimes lost, once having to pay Corey with 600 push-ups.

  Overall, Tiger wasn’t much of a bettor on the golf course. He had a habit, if he lost, of asking to play more holes, double or nothing. Mark would occasionally make jokes about it, even telling the media that Tiger was “kind of slow to go to the hip.” In his rare high-stakes games against non-pros, Tiger set bets that would be very hard for him to lose. Former baseball pitching great John Smoltz came to Isleworth once to play with Tiger and Mark. Smoltz is a good golfer, maybe scratch or plus-1, and Tiger said he’d give him three strokes a side at stroke play. Even though Isleworth is one of the hardest courses in Florida, especially at the maximum length of 7,700 yards that Tiger played it from, Tiger’s par was about 66. That meant Smoltz had to shoot around par to be competitive, a very tall order because according to the course rating, par for a scratch player from those tees is about 77. My recollection is that they were playing for $10,000. On the first hole, Smoltz pumped one out-of-bounds, and I heard Mark needle him with, “No big deal, Smoltzie. Normally a round with Tiger is worth at least six figures. You’re getting off cheap.”

  There has long been a lot of talk about Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley being close to Tiger, but I didn’t see those two guys that much. Each visited Tiger once at Isleworth that I know of, and Tiger met them in Las Vegas a few times. Tiger clearly admired Michael for what he’d accomplished as an athlete, and I think Michael gave him advice on how to handle fame. Charles cracked him up, but he also gave him some brotherly advice. But I got to know Charles well, and I know he was baffled by Tiger being closed off and keeping him at a distance. Someone else who’s been identified as a confidant, Notah Begay, I saw just a couple of times when he stayed at Tiger’s house when he was coming through Orlando. I know they’d been teammates at Stanford and that Tiger plays in Notah’s charity event, but Tiger never talked about Notah.

  I don’t mean to imply that Tiger didn’t consider these guys friends. Rather, I’m saying that Tiger didn’t let anybody very close.

  In my experience, the person Tiger shared the most with was Corey. They met on the practice range at Isleworth in 2004 after Tiger noticed how hard Corey worked on his game. Corey is an academically brilliant kid who did stuff like build computers and study quantum physics. He told me he missed one question on his SAT. Corey wanted to become a tour player and, even as a teenager, knew a lot about the golf swing. Tiger liked debating technique with him, especially because Corey was deep into the very complex cult instruction book called The Golfing Machine when they first met. Corey shared Tiger’s work ethic, and they practiced and played together a lot. Corey also became Tiger’s workout partner in the weight room.

  Corey was a little nerdy, but I realized that for all the super-jocks whom Tiger is said to be friends with, nerds—smart, diligent straight arrows—are the guys he most relates to. That’s the way I’d characterize two of his long-standing friends, Bryon Bell and Rob McNamara, who also work for him. It seemed to me that on those rare occasions when Tiger sought advice, it was those guys, along with Mark Steinberg—who had that same buttoned-down character—whom Tiger confided in most.

  In private, Tiger’s humor was young. Sometimes he was clever or droll, but often what tickled him was something as mindless as belching. The larger the group, the more he stayed on the sideline, offering asides but never taking the stage to tell a joke or share a story on himself.

  One example of Tiger’s humor that he told me about occurred a month before the 2006 Ryder Cup. U.S. captain Tom Lehman thought it would be a good bonding experience for the team to go to the K Club in Ireland to spend two days together. Rather than give each player his own room, Lehman paired up roommates, putting Tiger with Zach Johnson. Knowing that Zach is a devout Christian, Tiger, when he got to the suite first, immediately purchased the adult-movie 24-hour package and turned the television on. When Zach walked in, he saw the sights and sounds, but presuming that it was what Tiger wanted to watch, didn’t change the channel or turn it off. Tiger never commented on the movies, nor did Zach. “It was so funny watching him acting like everything was normal,” Tiger told me. “I got him pretty good.”

  He’d put on a different face in public, offering nothing more risqué than a reference to “my farmer’s tan.” His favorite one-liners for the media were of the Clint Eastwood/Terminator variety. Before their first-round match at the 2006 WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship, Stephen Ames irritated Tiger by telling the reporters who asked him about his chances, “Anything can happen, especially where he’s hitting it.” Tiger put on a birdie blitz that got him 9 up and ended their match after 10 holes, the fewest holes required to win an 18-hole match. Asked to comment on the round, Tiger with a deadpan expression simply repeated the lopsided score: “Nine and eight.” He liked ending interviews with similar getaway lines.

  Although he didn’t let any of them get close, Tiger’s relationships with other players were mostly good. He enjoyed the team competitions for their camaraderie, especially the Presidents Cup, where there was less pressure than the Ryder Cup and the structure was looser. He definitely felt a kinship with those who knew firsthand what it was like to succeed and fail in the arena. He also liked the exalted status he held with the other players. Tiger never seemed to feel the need to say much, in part because what he’d done spoke for itself. With the players, he could just be.

  Those he genuinely liked tended to be quiet, modest, hardworking guys like Jim Furyk and Steve Stricker, whose ability he respected but whose talent didn’t elevate them to the position of serious rival. He kept the supertalented at a distance. He didn’t want players who could be a threat to feel comfortable around him.

  He was averse to loud and cocky players, especially if he felt their records didn’t warrant all the talk. He wasn’t a fan of Ian Poulter, for example. A couple of weeks before the 2007 U.S. Open at Oakmont, a few players drove to the Pittsburgh area course after the Memorial Tournament in relatively nearby Columbus to get in some practi
ce rounds. Poulter was one of them, and while there he was cheeky enough to ask Tiger, “How are we getting home?” He knew Tiger had a plane at his disposal, and that he sometimes gave other players who lived in Orlando a ride. But Tiger did that for guys he liked, and he didn’t particularly like Poulter. Tiger gave kind of a noncommittal answer and hoped Poulter would take the hint and find an alternative. But at the day’s end, there was Poulter at the jetport, acting as if Tiger had said yes. Tiger stretched out on his regular spot, in the two seats in the front right of the plane, and immediately put on his headphones. That left me to talk to Ian, which I didn’t mind because I got along with him. As we were conversing, Tiger texted me, “Can you believe how this dick mooched a ride on my plane?” As far as I know, Ian didn’t get any more rides.

  Most other players never asked. They understood Tiger had to have a killer mind-set to be as good as he was, and going out of his way for other people wasn’t part of the equation. So even when he was distant, there was more respect for Tiger than dislike. In his own way, he was being up-front. They didn’t know him, but they realized he really couldn’t let them.

  Self-centeredness went with the territory. Whenever I joined Elin and Tiger for a meal in their home, the moment Tiger finished, he simply got up and left without a word. If you were with him in a restaurant, when he was done—and he habitually ate fast—you were done. Whenever we got takeout food from outside the club, I’d go pick it up, and I always paid.

  I always remember a quirky aspect of Tiger’s behavior that in retrospect says a lot about how it was with him. When we were watching television after dinner, he’d sometimes go to the refrigerator to get a sugar-free popsicle. But he never offered me one or ever came back with one, and one night I really wanted one of those popsicles. But I found myself sitting kind of frozen, not knowing what to do next. I didn’t feel right just going to the refrigerator and taking one, and I kind of started laughing to myself at how hesitant I was to ask Tiger for one. It actually took me a while to summon the courage to blurt out, “Hey, bud, do you think I could have one of those popsicles?” He looked at me as if puzzled that I was asking, and said, “Yeah, sure, go ahead and get one.” I did, but even after that, Tiger never offered me a popsicle.