by Hank Haney
All I knew for sure was that Tiger was better at the end of 2006 than he was at the beginning of 2004, when I began coaching him. He’d restored his edge over the competition. It’s an incredibly hard thing to establish in pro golf. Everyone really is so close and, with more good players from all over the world and advances in equipment technology, constantly getting closer. Having an edge is the definition of a dominant player, and when you really look at history, there have been only a handful who sustained one. In my book, only Vardon, Jones, Nelson, Hogan, Nicklaus, and Woods had an edge based on varying degrees of power, precision, putting, and nerve. The fact that Jack and Tiger kept their edge for the longest time is why they’re the greatest ever to play.
The more I was exposed to Tiger, the more I began to think he was an incredible mixture of extremes, all of which added up to an ability that was so remarkable he was probably better at his sport than any other athlete was or had been at theirs. Which led me to what I began to think of as the Package.
The Package was the sum of all of Tiger’s qualities and characteristics, the good and the bad. Working from the starting point that Tiger was better and different from any other player, it followed that those differences were things that made him better. It meant that tampering with the Package was perilous. To put it another way: Messing with Tiger was like fiddling with a solved Rubik’s Cube.
Though he never articulated it, I know Tiger believed in the idea of the Package. It went along with the sense of destiny his father had passed to him—that he was put on this earth to do something extraordinary with his special qualities, to “let the legend grow.” But those qualities, foremost among them an extraordinary ability to focus and stay calm under stress, also included selfishness, obsessiveness, stubbornness, coldness, ruthlessness, pettiness, and cheapness. When they were all at work in the competitive arena, they helped him win. And winning gave him permission to remain a flawed and in some ways immature person.
I was one of Tiger’s many enablers. As a person who grew up with sports and loved sports and was always trying to figure out how to succeed in sports, there was part of me that was in awe of Tiger. Better than anyone else who ever lived, he could do that thing that other great athletes from Michael Jordan on down thought was harder than anything else in sports—close out a golf tournament. And my admiration for what that took kept me from ever really challenging Tiger to be a better human being—though, honestly, I never saw anyone else step up to the challenge, either.
Maybe Earl had, and maybe that was the thing Tiger would miss most. It was telling that when Tiger was asked to assess 2006, he called it his worst year, because of his father’s death. That comment might have been a bit calculated, the thing he knew other people would be impressed to hear. But even as he was playing better than ever, perhaps he could sense something essential beginning to wear down.
As Tiger stands over his short putt in the bright Tucson sunlight at the 2007 WGC-Accenture Match Play to end his third-round match against Nick O’Hern, everyone watching is thinking the same thing: He never misses these.
The three variables—a simple four-footer, a big moment, and Tiger Woods—add up to a guaranteed result. Tiger will simply access his superpowers under pressure, pop in what for him is a gimme, and move on to the quarterfinals.
Except that the ball misses the hole on the right, not even lipping out. Time seems to stop as the collective thought becomes, Did that just happen?
On the next hole, Tiger fails to get up and down from a bunker, and watches as O’Hern, a journeyman from Australia, makes a 12-footer for par to win the match. Tiger takes off his hat and shakes O’Hern’s hand. He is out of the tournament. There will be no eighth consecutive victory.
No one could remember Tiger ever missing a short putt on the final hole to win a tournament or a match. Some recalled a missed five-footer for par on the 71st hole at the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst, but even if he’d made that one, he still would have finished a stroke behind Payne Stewart. I’d seen him miss plenty of short putts, a lot of them very important. But in the time I’d coached him, and even before, it was the first time I’d ever seen him fail on a “close-out” putt from short range. Part of Tiger’s aura with the other players was his ability to “make the last putt.” He seemingly always had, and now he hadn’t.
I was interested to see how Tiger was going to talk about the miss to the media. There were a few ways he could go. The tried and true was to say he’d made a good stroke but misread the line. I didn’t expect him to concede that he’d hit a poor putt, or admit that thoughts of his winning streak came into his head. Either of those would be messing with his confidence and unleashing the monster of questions, speculation, and analysis.
In my view, a tour pro not telling the truth in such circumstances isn’t really lying. Rather, he’s being pragmatic. The goal is to protect the ego and scrub the memory of any negativity as quickly as possible. Every famous player, from Jack Nicklaus on down, has made sketchy excuses that don’t acknowledge the possibility of nerves or bad thinking.
So Tiger, in going for something a little more elaborate, both didn’t and did surprise me. He said his ball had hit the remnants of a ball mark and been thrown off line.
This meant that Tiger had somehow neglected to repair the indentation—which he was allowed to fix—before hitting the putt. His explanation was that, somehow, he’d forgotten to do so. “I was so enthralled with the line, I didn’t see the ball mark,” he told the media. “I knew if I hit it left-center, the match would be over. It’s my fault for not paying attention to detail.” He also made it sound as if Byron Nelson’s record of 11 straight victories—one of the greatest records in all of professional sports—hadn’t mattered that much, saying, “It’s not the streak. I’m disappointed I didn’t pay attention to detail, something so simple.”
I didn’t believe it. Especially when it came to big putts, I’d always known Tiger to be thoroughly meticulous with his read and the housekeeping around the hole. Other than a loose impediment like a pebble or a leaf, the remnant of a ball mark big enough to misdirect a putt would be the most noticeable of fixable obstructions. It was hard to fathom Tiger’s not attending to it.
Also, replays of the putt didn’t indicate it had bounced or veered off. It looked as if Tiger had simply started the putt too far to the right. Certainly Tiger had the record to get the benefit of the doubt, but most insiders came away from the miss believing Tiger had been less than straight.
I took it as a humanizing moment. Part of me had expected Tiger to slough it off. After all, he’d made so many, one miss wasn’t going to ruin his reputation, and even mechanical putting machines sometimes miss from relatively short range. Then again, a golfer can never be casual in seeking perfection. To approach it, Tiger had to have zero tolerance.
I realized that, without intending to do so, Tiger had maneuvered himself onto the slipperiest of slopes. Missing the first one means the next one will be easier to miss. Focusing on constant improvement was Tiger’s mental shield against the game’s wounds. But the wounds are inevitable, and they take their toll.
Tiger and I never talked about this process after a loss or even after a victory. He was very good at leaving the past in the past and simply moving forward. But the 2007 season was when I first began to think that Tiger was closer to the end of his greatness than he was to the beginning. In hindsight, I think Tiger did, too.
Not that it was evident in his record. Tiger won seven tournaments, including a major championship, out of 16. As he’d been in 2006, he was first in greens hit in regulation, first in scoring average, first in all-around, first in par breakers. He was hitting fewer and fewer poor shots. His course management was superb. And while it wasn’t really reflected in the statistics, I thought his driver was slowly getting better.
In the midst of his winning streak at the start of the year, Tiger let his guard down just long enough to say the Grand Slam was “easily within reason.” He’d end the
year with another streak of five in a row and seven of eight, the non-win being a second. And at the end, he was blowing fields away. Tiger was only 31, yet Nicklaus contemporaries like Gary Player and Lee Trevino were conceding that Jack had never been so dominant.
But there were subtle changes below the surface. Tiger’s work habits started to slip. There were more distractions. Even as I thought he continued to get better, I could feel the ceiling closing in. I was beginning to think that, except for the driver, there wasn’t much more room for improvement. He hadn’t putted as well as when he was younger, and I knew there was a good chance that wouldn’t change.
And there was the specter of injury. Back in 2004, Tiger had told me that he had only 20 percent of his ACL remaining in his left knee. Was the knee a ticking bomb?
Psychologically, Tiger was entering a difficult time. At the top of the bell curve of a career, expectation is greater than ever, but by definition decline overtakes improvement. Certainly Tiger wasn’t going to concede reaching the top of the curve, but even he had to know he was very close, and it was going to take all he had to keep pushing against the forces of time. And it didn’t help that the standard he’d established meant criticism—of his swing, of his putting, of his attitude—whenever he didn’t win. No other player in history had ever faced such high expectations. Sometimes, in his attitude or his work habits, the weight of it would all show, and he’d say, “Nothing is ever good enough.”
For me, the job got harder. There was more urgency and less fun. Tiger was more irritable and impatient. The process of improvement had been his emphasis when we first began our work, but he began to be much more concerned about results, or in his words, “getting the W.” He never mentioned Nicklaus’s record, but it started to weigh more heavily at every major. And Tiger’s actions indicated he believed he had less time to do it than everyone else thought.
In retrospect, 2007 was when Tiger began to lose the joy of playing and began to look at his career as something he wanted to get over with sooner rather than later. And the most obvious sign was his growing obsession with the military.
It had gone far beyond video games and into the real world. That its roots were in his connection to Earl, who’d achieved the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Special Forces and served in Vietnam, had been clear for a few years. Right after the 2004 Masters, only a month after we’d begun working together, Tiger went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to do four days of Army special-operations training. With Earl in attendance, Tiger did two tandem parachute jumps, engaged in hand-to-hand combat exercises, went on four-mile runs wearing combat boots, and did drills in a wind tunnel. Tiger loved it, but Keith Kleven went a little crazy worrying about the further damage Tiger might be doing to his left knee.
Tiger’s military activities now began to take the form of two- or three-day sessions at naval and marine outposts involving exercises with Navy SEALs teams, and would increase dramatically. Less than two weeks after Earl’s funeral and three weeks before the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, he’d gone to installations near San Diego for a three-day session in parachuting. In my long e-mail to Tiger after that tournament, here is what I said:
With the US Open 18 days away, do you think it was a good idea to go on a Navy SEALs mission? You need to get that whole SEALs thing out of your system and stick to playing Navy SEAL on the video games. I can tell by the way you are talking and acting that you still want to become a Navy SEAL. Man, are you crazy? You have history to make in golf and people to influence and help. Focus on your destiny, and that isn’t flushing bad guys out of buildings in Iraq, just play the video games some more. That Navy SEAL stuff is serious business, they use real bullets.
I took a dismissive tone in that e-mail because I really thought the military stuff was a phase that Tiger would soon realize was ridiculous. I was trying to shake him back to his senses regarding this G.I. Joe fantasy. But a year later, I realized I’d underestimated. When we were at his house and he was watching the Military Channel or the BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs) DVD, an exercise or training mission would catch his eye and he’d make a comment like, “That would be cool,” or “I’d really like to do that.” He was telling me that this SEAL thing was more than fun and games to him. One morning I was in the kitchen when he came back from a long run around Isleworth, and I noticed he was wearing Army boots. Tiger admitted that he’d worn the heavy shoes before on the same route. “I beat my best time,” he said.
The military became central to his life, and in 2007 Tiger probably went on half a dozen SEALs trips. When the new season began, one of Tiger’s first public acts was to visit a “special warfare” SEALs unit on the Tuesday of Torrey Pines. According to news reports, he told the assembled group at a facility in Coronado, outside San Diego, “If I hadn’t been in golf, I would have been here with you guys. When I was younger, I always dreamed of being a Navy SEAL.” The first PGA Tour event where he was named host—the 2007 AT&T National—took place outside Washington, D.C., over the July 4 weekend and allowed active military personnel into the gates free.
I was beginning to realize that his sentiment ran deep, and that as incredible as it seemed, Tiger was seriously considering actually becoming a Navy SEAL. I didn’t know how he’d go about it, but when he talked about it, it was clear that he had a plan. After finding out that the Navy SEAL age limit is 28, I asked Tiger about his being too old to join. “It’s not a problem,” he said. “They’re making a special age exception for me.”
I thought, Wow. Here is Tiger Woods, the greatest athlete on the planet, maybe the greatest athlete ever, right in the middle of his prime, basically ready to leave it all behind for a military life. It was Pat Tillman times 100. The only thing that probably rivals it in sports history is Michael Jordan leaving basketball to play minor league baseball. Although Tiger ultimately didn’t enlist, the lengths to which he went to make a SEALs career a real possibility still stun me.
Tiger formed close connections with some ex-SEALs. One was someone whom Tiger would eventually hire as his family and personal bodyguard. The guy had accompanied Tiger on the Torrey Pines visit, and he seemed to be a kind of liaison who was smoothing Tiger’s path toward the military.
He was a muscular guy around 40 with a short haircut and an intense expression. While he was working for Tiger, with duties that included giving Tiger and Elin lessons in self-defense, he’d sometimes stay at the house in Isleworth. In fact, my first meeting with him took place when I got to Isleworth past midnight after a late flight from Dallas. I didn’t have a key to Tiger’s house, but Tiger would leave the door unlocked whenever I came in late. This time, I opened it quietly, only to find the guy peering at me through the darkness with one of those scary Navy SEALs looks. I assumed he wasn’t expecting me, so I just said, “Hi, I’m Hank.” The guy was staying in the bedroom I normally used, so after an awkward introduction he helped me choose another one.
I talked to the guy only a couple more times, and never in depth. He didn’t volunteer much, and I didn’t probe. Steve Williams had been around him more, and he told me he didn’t like his influence on Tiger. He thought the self-defense stuff and other working out with Tiger that the guy was doing could get Tiger hurt. He also thought the guy was weird. Steve said the guy told him that Earl was speaking to him on a regular basis and giving him instructions on how to help Tiger. Steve said he played dumb and asked him, “You mean Earl, Tiger’s father, who died last year?” Steve said the guy answered, “Yeah.”
Tiger’s SEALs exercises were scheduled on the calendars of his inner circle, but everyone knew not to talk about them to anyone. Unlike Tiger’s first trip to Fort Bragg, in 2004, or his PR-oriented visit to the SEALs around the time of Torrey Pines, the other SEALs visits were kept quiet by the Navy. It was understood that if the extent of Tiger’s military activities got out, it would start a media frenzy.
I was never totally clear on the exact nature of Tiger’s sojourns. All I’m sure about is that it
was more than some kind of risk-free fantasy camp. Tiger didn’t tell me a lot, but from what he did tell me and what Corey Carroll, who joined him on several trips, confirmed, he was participating in a program that approximated the training for a Navy SEAL candidate. The purpose was a sort of “dry run” to determine whether he could physically and mentally handle the demands, and if so, whether he wanted to go forward with actually becoming a Navy SEAL.
To my knowledge, he did training in parachuting, self-defense, urban-warfare simulations, and shooting. I never heard of Tiger doing any training in the water with the SEALs, but he was already a pretty accomplished diver. He had his scuba certification and had also done a lot of free diving to depths of more than 100 feet. He claimed to be able to hold his breath a long time—up to four minutes. Supposedly, he used a technique called “lung packing,” in which lung capacity is increased through “swallowing” air after inhaling to capacity.
When I asked Tiger how his trips had gone, he might confirm having completed a training session in a specific discipline by making a comment like, “Yeah, I knocked that out,” as if he was passing progressive steps. When he shared some things about the experience, it was clear from phrases like “total rush” and “intense” that it was all a thrill.
Tiger said that a three-day trip that was focused on parachuting might include as many as ten jumps a day. He’d jump solo or in tandem. Corey told me that Tiger once hurt his shoulder in a tandem jump when he smashed into his partner in midair.
Tiger came back almost boastful from his firearms training, saying that he’d excelled in long-range marksmanship. He talked all about the different guns and how to allow for wind and the flight of the bullet, almost as if he were describing a golf shot.