The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (16 page)

Tiger wasn’t happy when he left the course. On the way to the parking lot, Elin asked me if I was coming to dinner at the house they’d rented. When I said I didn’t think so, she surprised me by saying she thought I should come because Tiger was down and it would help if I talked to him. It was a rare case of Elin independently imposing her judgment on Tiger’s behalf, and naturally I accepted the invitation.

When I got to the house, Tiger was discouraged, but I emphasized the positives about his round, and his mood improved. We then worked on his swing in the living room, which had suitably high ceilings. As a teacher, I like to manually guide my students into positions so that they can know what correct and incorrect feel like. Although I almost never did this with Tiger on a tournament practice range because of all the cameras and comments it would have drawn, we did it all the time at Isleworth, and we did it in private in Augusta. Once Tiger knew the right feelings, I encouraged him to ingrain them with practice swings. In my time with him, one of the ways he was different as a player was in the number of practice or “rehearsal” swings he’d take before hitting a shot. From those swings I’d often learn more about his comfort level on the course, or his understanding of what he was doing, than from his actual shots.

He felt good about his swing when he resumed his round on Friday morning, and he finished with a 74 after making an annoying bogey on his second-to-last hole, the par-5 eighth. But things were turning. He got in only nine holes of his second round before more lightning came, but he played well and shot three under. On Saturday morning, he shot another 33 to post a second-round 66, then after a break went out for his third round. He was able to get in another nine, and as darkness fell, he closed with three birdies to shoot 31. For the day, he made 12 birdies in 27 holes, and with another 27 holes to play, he was four behind Chris DiMarco.

On the eve of the final day, we went back to the living room to continue work on staying taller, but also to work on another move. I wanted him to get the club on a wider arc coming down by creating more separation between his arms and shoulders. It was an anti-stuck move, and I knew with the pressure of the final round, he might need an extra safeguard against his always-lurking habit. Before I went to bed, I sent him a text: “All you have to do is what you’re doing. There is no one here who can beat you. Even if it takes you extra holes, this is your tournament.”

On Sunday, Tiger came out and had a great warm-up. His first shot of the day was going to be a 6-iron off a side hill lie on the tenth hole. The practice range at Augusta is flat, but the short-game area isn’t, so when Tiger went over to work on his short game, he found a spot where he could exactly re-create the lie that he was going to have on the tenth fairway, and he hit one 6-iron from that lie. Tiger always would make his last ball warming up the exact shot that he was going to play on the first shot of the day, and that day was no exception. I remember thinking how smart that was. Sure enough he went out to the tenth hole and hit his 6-iron to two feet and birdied the hole. He followed with birdies at the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth holes. The amazing run of seven birdies in a row gave him the outright lead. Even though he three-putted the fourteenth hole and bogeyed the fifteenth—his third bogey on a par 5 for the week—he shot 65. At the end of the round, his lead over DiMarco was three.

At the time, Tiger had held or shared the 54-hole lead in a major eight times and never lost, and he’d lost only twice from that position in 34 official events total. When he began the fourth round with birdies on the first two holes to stretch the lead to four, he looked to be in full closer mode, but it turned out to be a very nervy round. DiMarco was really dogged, hitting a bunch of short irons and wedge shots close and making big putts to keep hanging around. Tiger opened the door a bit with a three-putt on the fifth hole from 25 feet. He led by only one on the sixteenth tee when, after DiMarco put his tee shot inside of 15 feet, Tiger badly pulled an 8-iron into the hollow left of the green. Such a wide miss with a short iron was a sign that his swing was becoming uncomfortable.

Of course, he holed perhaps the most dramatic chip shot in history to actually expand his lead, but he still felt uncertain about his swing when he got up on the par-4 seventeenth. It was a hole that went from being an easy driving hole for him on the old Augusta to a difficult one in the redesign. He used to be able to bail to the right with impunity, but that shot would be punished after tall trees were planted where his misses used to go. Now, reverting to his fault under pressure, he hit a big push into the trees. He couldn’t get to the green and failed to save his par. With his lead back down to one, he pulled his drive on the eighteenth but still faced only a fairly straightforward 8-iron. But he pushed it into the bunker—a shocking miss for Tiger under the circumstances—and again failed to get up and down.

It was hard to process, but Tiger had bogeyed the last two holes of a major to give up a two-stroke lead, proving his swing wasn’t quite there yet. I was shaken. If Tiger was, he didn’t show it. But he was now in a sudden-death playoff with DiMarco, and if he lost, I knew it would be open season on the Haney swing change.

But at that moment, Tiger somehow transformed. When he’d missed shots on the last three holes, it had been with the lead. In sudden death, he truly couldn’t afford a miss, and so he didn’t hit one. I could tell from his practice swings as he gathered himself on the eighteenth tee for the first hole of the playoff that his mind was on what we’d worked on. Then he delivered with a perfect 3-wood and striped an 8-iron right over the pin. They weren’t safe swings, like those he’d made at Torrey Pines. Remarkably, they were his orthodox “good” swings. As I liked to say, when Tiger had wiggle room, he’d wiggle. But with no wiggle room, he was a rock.

It was what the great ones do. When Michael Jordan’s team was up by five with two minutes to go, he might miss a 15-foot jump shot. But down by one in the last 20 seconds, it seemed that he rarely did. But the best analogy for tournament golf, especially the way Tiger played it, is tennis. There are regular points and big points: break points, long rallies, tiebreakers. A tennis player can lose points early in a match and not be hurt, just as a golfer can miss a fairway and not lose a stroke. But every golf course presents a player with big shots: a tight drive on a long par 4, a long second over water to a par 5, an eight-foot par save late in a round. The great ones raise themselves for the big points. I don’t think it was an accident that Tiger really liked watching tennis, particularly the way Roger Federer went about winning. Faced with ultra-big shots in the playoff, Tiger delivered.

It will probably always be a mystery where the clutch component of Tiger’s personality comes from, but it struck me that for a pretty straight kid who had grown up following the rules, he liked doing daredevil stuff. It was apparent in his scuba and free diving, his bungee jumping, and his military training. Even his beginning forays into skiing were characterized by thrill seeking. He liked the edge of the cliff. That’s a great asset in competitive golf, where the mental precipice can be dizzying. Sport psychologists always urge their guys to “embrace” the pressure. It’s easier said than done, but Tiger really did.

Of course, after seeing a student make two near-perfect swings when he absolutely has to, it’s tempting for a coach to think,
Why the heck can’t he do that all the time?
With Tiger, I realized that getting past all the fear and discomfort takes a lot of energy. Even someone with Tiger’s makeup can dig that deep only so often. Like a tennis player, Tiger conserved his mental energy for the big points. It was probably why he got more nervous at the beginning of a round than at the end. My guess is that, at the beginning, he didn’t access his mental reserves, and it made him more vulnerable on the first tee. But at the end of a round, when Tiger went to the well, he always seemed to find what he was looking for. In sudden death, he went there one more time on the downhill 15-footer for the winning birdie, and he drilled it.

The Masters victory was a turning point in Tiger’s trust in his new mechanics. Blowing it could have really set him back and perhaps ended our partnership. Instead, he felt vindicated enough to take a shot at his critics. “I made a big, giant leap with my ball-striking since Augusta,” he said. “For all the people who slammed me for making the changes, now you understand why I did it.”

At the ceremonial dinner for the winner in the Augusta National clubhouse that night, I sat at the table with Tiger’s mother, Tida. Over the years I had only polite and always brief interchanges with Tida, and Tiger didn’t talk about her much. But I had sensed from observing her that Tiger’s killer instinct came from his mother even more than it did from Earl. When Tida was the parent driving little Tiger to junior tournaments and following him on every hole, she helped instill in him a “no mercy” attitude in competition, and it had stuck. Tida was a tough lady who had a powerful stoic presence in public, though she could exhibit a playful sense of humor among friends, especially when it came to aiming zingers at Tiger’s rivals such as Phil and Sergio. On this ceremonial occasion she was calm and dignified, as if Tiger had simply done what he always did and was supposed to do—win. To me, Tida’s influence did nothing but add to Tiger’s greatness as a golfer.

Despite Tiger’s breakthrough at Augusta, his swing remained a work in progress. A few weeks later, at the Byron Nelson, Tiger missed the cut, ending a streak of 142 consecutive cuts made that had begun in 1998, one of the greatest records in sports. At the Nelson, Tiger battled his takeaway. He had a lifelong tendency to take it back too low and inside. He would sometimes overcompensate and get the shaft too upright about halfway back. From there he would react by getting the shaft too flat on the downswing and getting stuck.

We continued to work on getting a slightly upward wrist-cocking to start the swing and began to install more forearm rotation on the backswing. This gave him a better, more down-the-line path going back, and the result was a more compact, rounded-off look at the top, with the club pointing the slightest bit left. At Isleworth the week before the 2005 U.S. Open at Pinehurst, I could really see his new swing taking shape. It was flatter than it had been in the past but also longer. My feeling was that though Butch had shortened Tiger’s backswing to keep it from looking as though it was across the line, the adjustments we’d made allowed Tiger to be on plane no matter how far he took the club back.

Tiger had his way of vetting moves before taking them into competition. When I suggested something, he’d try it. Usually there would be some resistance, as there was to his grip change, and then varying degrees of acceptance. Tiger would hit shots trying the new move or position, often not saying anything until after he’d hit a dozen or more. Sometimes he’d reject something with no explanation. Other times he’d qualify a rejection by saying, “You know, this is a good idea, I get it, but right now there’s no way I can go with that under the gun.” This was the case with the low-flying driver stinger that I really had hopes might be the solution to some of his driving problem. It was rare that he took something straight into competition, as he did his grip change. Often he’d go with a modified version of what we were working on, so it wouldn’t feel too uncomfortable under pressure. Sometimes Tiger would actually sabotage a swing-change idea by making intentionally bad shots. It was a way of calling me off—or even calling himself off—something that might be intriguing but that he didn’t want to feel conflicted about. Especially at a tournament site, Tiger always wanted to leave a practice session settled on what to leave in and what to leave out, and what he was going to go with the next day.

When he did commit to learning a new move, one of the things that he had a knack for was finding what I called his feel parameters. In other words, he’d identify the move he was thinking about—let’s say, more forearm rotation—and then tell me before he hit a shot that he was going to hit it in a way that felt extreme. I’d then monitor if it was too much, still not enough, or just right. When he learned what the right position felt like, he was capable of taking it into competition. The tricky thing with this is that a feel that produces the right result will eventually, and sometimes very quickly, lead to overdoing the move. This is why teachers often say “feel is not real.” Tiger had an uncanny ability to keep adjusting his feels in a way that kept producing the move he wanted. Going to Pinehurst, he had a good handle on the right amount of forearm rotation, and it made his ball striking very consistent.

The unique design of Pinehurst No. 2 makes it very difficult to keep approach shots on the putting surface, but Tiger hit the ball superbly all four days and led in greens in regulation, hitting 54 of 72, 18 more than the field average. He also led in driving distance with a 326-yard average. He missed a few drives to the right, but not nearly as many as at the Nelson and not by a lot. After a lot of talk about the so-called Big Five who had emerged after 2002 when Tiger stopped playing as well—a group made up of Vijay, Tiger, Phil, Ernie Els, and Retief Goosen—Tiger was beginning to reassert his superiority.

Tiger lost the Open at Pinehurst because of putting. Officially, he had four three-putts, but there were at least as many times when he putted from off the edge and took three to get down. He took 128 putts, the second-worst total in the entire field. On Sunday he got off to a shaky start with two bogeys but then put on a charge that was undone with two crucial short misses late: an eight-footer for par on the sixteenth after a mediocre chip, and a three-putt from 20 feet on the seventeenth when he thought he had to have a birdie. He lost by two strokes to Michael Campbell, who had the week of his life.

“I just didn’t make enough putts,” Tiger said. But he was alluding to not converting midrange putts for birdies. I felt strongly that second-guessing those midrange opportunities was the wrong way to evaluate the week. I used the freshness of the wound to hammer home my message. “Tiger,” I said, “you don’t have to make putts. Nobody makes a lot outside fifteen feet. Your analysis is wrong. Just don’t three-putt. If you don’t three-putt, they can’t beat you. Charging birdie putts is fine if you’re trying to win by five. But all you have to do is win by one.”