The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (22 page)

In the time I coached him, I never saw Tiger get hurt from playing golf. He might wince after hitting a practice shot, sit there and make a face until the pain subsided. But he’d never say why the pain was there, and he’d start hitting again without a problem. Except for a short period after his surgery in April 2008, when he was getting ready to play in the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, and after his major surgery following that event, I never saw his swing speed go down, never saw flexibility restricted, never saw his ability to hit shots physically impaired in a noticeable way.

On the other hand, I witnessed at least one occasion when Tiger ended a fitness workout limping. One afternoon in the summer of 2007, I was coaching him through a practice session on the range at Isleworth when he took a break and went home. When he did this, sometimes I’d move over to watch Corey hit balls, or even hit some myself, until Tiger came out again to finish the session. About five p.m., Tiger came back in a workout outfit wearing a weighted vest. He then ran the length of the practice tee, about 60 yards, in a full sprint. He then walked back and did it again, until he had completed 10 wind sprints and was drenched in sweat.

After about the fifth wind sprint, I noticed Tiger was limping as he walked back. I couldn’t help myself and said, “Tiger, you’re limping. C’mon, what are you doing?” He said, “No, I’m fine. This helps me build up [body] speed.” He said he got the idea for the workout from his friend Vencie Glenn, a former defensive back for the San Diego Chargers, who sometimes visited Tiger in Orlando. The source of this advice was ironic, because in the past I’d heard Tiger make comments about how NFL guys broke down their bodies not just with the hitting in the games but also through the intensity of their workouts, and here he was doing something an NFL guy did.

It seemed that the harder the workout was, the more enthusiastic Tiger would get about its possibilities. But Keith and I both believed that such an approach would inevitably have a bad end.

By this time I had begun to doubt that Tiger’s knee complaints were brought on by golf. He would soon tell
Golf Digest
that the original injury to his left knee was caused by skateboarding spills when he was a kid. If that was true, then it seemed likely that his habit of hyperextending his left knee at impact, a move he blamed on Butch, hadn’t had much to do with his problem. If I had known that to be the case, I wouldn’t have tried to immediately eliminate the straightening move altogether, because it was an action that Tiger was used to and it had helped him fade the ball and keep it in play. Instead, I would have tried to gradually install some knee flex at impact—for purely technical rather than injury-prevention reasons—which I think would have made Tiger’s transition to my teaching less drastic and lessened our early struggles.

Of course, Tiger still could have worsened his knee with heavy workouts or Navy SEALs activities. But Tiger preferred that people see his injuries related to his sport, so that he could wear them as an athletic badge of honor. To him, injuries were a way of being accepted into the fraternity of superstars who played more physical sports than golf. For example, a couple of times when I knew he’d just gotten off the phone with Derek Jeter, I’d asked what they had talked about. Both times Tiger said the conversation was about injuries they were each dealing with. Once in the clubhouse at Isleworth, Shaquille O’Neal came by the lunch table and exchanged pleasantries with Tiger. When Tiger asked him how he was doing, Shaq said, “Trying to get through this thing with my knee,” and Tiger had nodded knowingly.

Until Tiger came along, professional golfers were never really considered athletes in the same sense as football, baseball, and basketball players. For a long time, a popular debate was, “Are golfers athletes?” It didn’t seem to matter that, growing up, a lot of them had been very good in other sports. The stereotype was that golfers were mostly out-of-shape white guys. It really wasn’t until Tiger that the whole perspective on golfers changed. Earl Woods had a lot to do with it when he called Tiger the first “golfer who is a true athlete.” That was actually a ridiculous statement, but it caught on. I believe the biggest reason it did was because of Tiger’s black heritage. Though other sports had a preponderance of black athletes, golf remained almost exclusively white. Yet here was Tiger, about the only black man in the sport, and the best player by a lot. To the casual eye, it wasn’t a coincidence, and there were always narrow-minded sports fans out there who believed a black athlete “got by” on physical talent rather than work ethic or smarts. Golf stereotypes were bad enough, but racial stereotypes took even longer to die.

At the same time, Tiger took a lot of pride in changing the way pro golfers are perceived. He liked being one of Nike’s so-called golf athletes. He liked being considered buff. He liked using terms from other sports, like “reps,” “game speed,” “taking it deep,” or “getting good looks,” and applying them to golf. And he liked the impression that his swing was so violently athletic that it put him on constant guard against injury.

It got to the point where Steve Williams and Mark Steinberg would just roll their eyes when Tiger had another injury complaint. I’d be concerned, because if he
was
hurt, I didn’t want to make it worse by having him hitting shots or making certain swing moves. But Steve would tell me, “Don’t worry about it. It’s always something.”

I thought Tiger was more susceptible to the whole injury drama because of his self-image. It occurred to me that he never forgot being the skinny kid who was an outsider. Even though he was a golfing prodigy, he was never the popular jock or the big man on campus. He was the nerdy kid with glasses and braces, the golfer who wore uncool clothes. When Tiger first got to Stanford, Notah Begay called him Urkel, after the hopelessly geeky character on
Family Matters
.

In that context, it’s not surprising that Tiger overcompensated by putting big muscles on his narrow frame. In the
Men’s Fitness
story, Tiger said that he’d really wanted to put on weight in his early 20s but hadn’t been able to. It wasn’t until his mid-20s that he was able to “lay down muscle.” He said, “It was exciting. I’d never experienced that before.” As Mark Calcavecchia, who is friendly with Tiger, once said, “He wants us all to think he’s Superman.”

Eventually, the two people most in charge of his body thought he overdid it. Keith Kleven always wanted Tiger to be leaner. After performing ACL surgery on Tiger in 2008, Dr. Thomas Rosenberg would recommend that he get down to 165 pounds. Tiger told me that and said, “No way.”

He was a long hitter, and he enjoyed that image. When the great majority of players switched to hybrids, Tiger continued to carry a 2-iron—the most macho club in the bag. He insisted on using the “spinniest” ball, contending he needed it to be aggressive around the green. I didn’t agree, and one day when I challenged him by asking, “Why do you need this ball?” he said, “Chicks dig the spin.” We laughed, but I began to think that there was something to it.

When Tiger would eventually get out of control with women, he knew that racking up “conquests” played big in the jock culture. In the end, having once been a bit nerdy, Tiger had too much to prove, not just to others but to himself. A friend of mine has called what happened to Tiger a “geek tragedy.”

Tiger had always been such a detail-oriented person, and yet I began to think that his preoccupations were causing him to become careless. One example occurred before the 2007 U.S. Open at Oakmont. About a month before the championship, mutual friend Tom Barton arranged for Tiger to play a practice round at the course with one of its most prominent members, Stan Druckenmiller. Stan is one of the richest men in America and one of the most charitable. In 2006, he gave $25 million to the Harlem Children’s Zone, which helps disadvantaged kids and their families. He’s a huge golf fan. To ensure that Oakmont got the U.S. Open, he wrote a check in the neighborhood of $800,000 to build a spectator bridge across the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Stan was an admirer of Tiger and had long wanted to play with him. He’s also a single-digit handicapper who knows Oakmont’s famous greens inside out and might have been able to offer some suggestions that could help Tiger with his preparation. But where Stan could
really
help Tiger was with his foundation. Before we played, I told Tiger all about Stan.

We had a great day. Tiger and Stan, who is very personable, got along very well. After the round ended, Tom, who understands the world of charitable donations, told me, “OK, here’s how this thing can work. Tiger should play with Stan one more time in the future, and at that time he should ask him to be on his board. Stan would love to do that, and he’d be very good at it. And if that happened, there’s no doubt that Stan would open the doors to a lot of money getting donated to Tiger’s foundation.”

The foundation was important to Tiger. He put on two annual events, his Tiger Jam in Las Vegas and his Block Party in Anaheim, California. Tiger told me the Block Party netted about $400,000 a year. When I told Tiger about the opportunity with Stan, he nodded. But to my knowledge he never played with Stan again or asked him to join his board.

Tiger played solidly at Oakmont, a course where ball-striking matters. Elin was back in Orlando in the last days of her pregnancy, with the birth expected early the following week. The baby would come earlier than expected. Tiger never said anything to me about Elin experiencing any problems, but he did seem distracted. In the tournament he got off to a slow start of 71 and 74 that put him five behind. And on Saturday, he hit the first seventeen greens but missed the eighteenth to finish with a deflating bogey for a 69 that should have been 65. Still, he was only two behind the leader, Aaron Baddeley, whom he’d be paired with in the final round.

After Baddeley made a triple bogey on the first hole, which Tiger parred, Tiger was in a tie for the lead with Stephen Ames. But on the par-4 third hole, Tiger went over the green with his approach. He faced a difficult shot, because if he didn’t hit it hard enough, it would roll back to his feet. Instead, he did the opposite, blading the chip across the green into heavy rough, and took three more to get down for double bogey. It was a big miss.

He fought back at the fourth, but it was his last birdie of the day. He trailed by one when he got to the seventeenth hole, a drivable par 4. He put his 3-wood into the right greenside bunker, leaving a 25-yard bunker shot. Tiger appeared to have a good lie, but his ball shot out too far and without much spin, forcing him to chip and one-putt for his par. At Oakmont, Tiger got up and down from greenside sand only three times out of ten. If he had been able to achieve just an average conversion rate of 50 percent, it would have given him a one-stroke victory.

In that final round, Tiger hit a good drive on the eighteenth, but it kicked right and rolled off the edge of the fairway. From the rough, he couldn’t get enough spin on the ball to keep it by the pin, and his wedge shot didn’t stop until it was 25 feet past the hole. To tie Angel Cabrera, Tiger was left with the kind of double-breaking putt that makes Oakmont’s greens so difficult. He looked it over from every angle, and trickled the downhiller toward the hole. It hung to the right and never came back, stopping a foot away.

It was the second major championship in a row where Tiger had a piece of the lead on Sunday but failed to win—the first two times that had happened to him. Even more than he had at the Masters, Tiger felt he’d let this one get away.

“Man, is he hot,” Steve said as we waited for Tiger to clean out his locker. On the ride to the airport, Tiger barely spoke. Before we boarded Tiger’s plane to Orlando, Steve said, “It’s going to take a while to get over this one.”

By the time we landed in Orlando at about eleven p.m., Tiger was in a better mood but hadn’t said anything about Elin’s condition. We said good-bye, and I went to stay in a hotel because I had an early flight out. I later learned that Tiger went straight to the hospital and that Elin had given birth within an hour of his arrival. The next morning, a couple of minutes before the press release went out, he called me in Dallas and told me about his new daughter, Sam. It was a short conversation, but he sounded genuinely happy. Whenever I’ve seen Tiger with Sam, and later with his son, Charlie, he’s been a doting father.

The U.S. Open made two straight majors in which poor putting had cost Tiger the W. He seemed to be trying to remember his father’s lessons about putting by saying them to me more often—mostly Earl’s favorite, “Putt to the picture”—but it was as if Tiger felt he was missing the one person he could trust on the subject to check on him.

He was so consistent and so correct in his form that, for the most part, I left his putting alone. He occasionally lapsed into a tendency to aim too far to the left with his shoulder alignment, but that was about it as far as flaws went. Still, he often doubted his putting and always blamed his mechanics. I’d arranged to have installed in Tiger’s house a SAM Puttlab—a computer that graphically traced the putting stroke as well as measured 28 different putting parameters. It was a device on which hundreds of tour pros had been measured, and Tiger had achieved the most consistently solid impact. My suggestion to Tiger was to record his good stroke and use the machine as a reference point when he got a little bit off. We recorded his stroke when he first got the SAM, but as far as I know, he never used the computer again, despite my urging.

But I didn’t do a lot of worrying about Tiger’s putting. In 2011, PGA Tour statistics would retroactively show that in the new and revealing “strokes saved putting” category, throughout my time coaching Tiger he was consistently one of the three best putters on the tour. To me, it was about his eliminating the occasional unforced error—the silly three-putt from a relatively short distance. It all came down to Tiger doing the necessary work on the greens. When Tiger practiced his putting, he putted well.

The trouble was that as Tiger’s devotion to the weight room was going up, his golf work ethic was diminishing. It wasn’t a big drop-off, but I noticed it. He wasn’t as focused, and he wasn’t giving the extra effort he used to give before major championships. Even Steve seemed to be getting a bit complacent. Rather than urging Tiger to hit balls after rounds, he was preaching more rest.