The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (23 page)

Steve privately told me that he didn’t see the point in Tiger’s putting more time in on the practice range. Tiger always hit the ball well on the range, Steve said, so what was the point? But implied in this view was that Tiger was having a harder time taking his range game to the course, something I was beginning to notice as well.

I agreed that there was more than just a waning of physical effort involved. There was a big psychological component as well. In my mind, its root was the enormous pressure on Tiger to perform, and the wearing effect that had on his ability to be truly great. Tiger showed some self-awareness in continuing to bring up “Ranger Rick,” his nickname for himself as a player who hit the ball beautifully on the practice range but not in competition. Usually the comment came across as a bid for a laugh, but I saw in it an acknowledgment that he was feeling the pressure of being Tiger Woods.

So began a vicious cycle. Because it was discouraging and confidence-killing to see great practice not followed up on the course, Tiger began to become reluctant to be at his best in practice. Rather than hit it great and be disappointed later, he found that hitting it just OK in practice would make hitting it just OK on the course easier to take mentally. But this didn’t confront Tiger’s performance issue, and it also led to less practice altogether, which hurt his performance even more.

Tiger was so good that even with his practice drop-off he could still win with less than his best stuff. But that was harder to do at majors, where the conditions were most demanding. If I had to point to one reason Tiger won only two majors with me in our last three years, versus the four he won in the two years prior, it was work ethic.

The British Open at Carnoustie was a good example of Tiger’s not being “there” enough to really focus and do the work. For the second major in a row, his sand play was shoddy, as he got up and down only twice in eight tries. Like putting, it was an area of the game in which Tiger excelled when he practiced hard, but quickly lost its sharpness when he didn’t.

Tiger was in a bad mood all week. He was going for three claret jugs in a row, but it was not with a sense of joy. He was more resistant to me in practice, at one point dismissing a point I tried to make about his putting by saying, “My dad never said anything about that.” Tiger also complained about pain in his right shoulder. When I asked him to describe its intensity on a scale of 10, he said, with total seriousness, “Nine-point-nine.” And the tone of his complaints implied that the golf swing we were working on had caused the injury. I already knew about all the pull-ups he’d been doing, but I just let him vent.

A couple of weeks later, I’d ask Tiger about the shoulder, and he said he’d undergone an MRI that had found the “labrum was torn off the bone” along with rotator-cuff damage. From talking to Keith, I knew that was exaggerated, but I played along and asked, “Wow, that sounds really bad. I guess you’re going to need surgery, huh?” He said that he’d be all right with some rehab and rest. I thought,
Labrum torn off the bone—yeah, right
.

At Carnoustie, Tiger opened with a pretty solid 69, but the course was playing soft and the scores were low. In the second round, his opening tee shot with a 2-iron had Ranger Rick written all over it. After striping that club on the range, Tiger hit an awful, low hook that shot way left and bounced out-of-bounds. He made double bogey, shot 74, and fell seven shots back. He could make up only a couple of shots on the leaders over the weekend with scores of 69 and 70, and finished tied for 12th.

I didn’t think Tiger had the right game plan at Carnoustie. As he had the year before at Hoylake, Tiger chose to go mostly with a 2-iron off the tee. But Carnoustie is a bigger course than Hoylake, with wider landing areas and fairways that weren’t running nearly as fast. It led a lot of players to hit driver off the tee, which meant Tiger was giving away a lot more yardage than he had at Hoylake. From where he was playing most of his approaches, it was hard to hit the ball close.

Tiger was smart enough to know that with his strategy he had to play almost perfect golf to win, and he simply didn’t. I thought he should have gone with more drivers and 3-woods, but I was never asked. Tiger made his own game plans. He’d consult strategy with Steve and occasionally with me, but other than occasional over-aggression on the greens that could lead to three-putts, I always considered him a superb course manager who didn’t need much help in that department. Carnoustie was the exception.

I think Tiger was influenced in his decision by the way he’d played at Hoylake, and also by so many commentators saying that the Hoylake victory proved that all he had to do to win was be in the fairway. I thought that was simplistic thinking. To me, he needed the driver more often at Carnoustie, but his lingering driving issues kept him from pulling the trigger on that club.

I met with Steve after the final round and found him depressed about Tiger’s attitude. “We’ve just walked eighteen holes, and he spoke to me twice,” he said. “The first time was on fifteen, where he goes, ‘I think this chip might go right.’ Then in the fairway on seventeen he says, ‘It’s getting colder out here, isn’t it?’ Like we’d been chatting all day. I don’t know what his problem is, but he was horrible to me all week.”

After Carnoustie, Tiger went home and kind of hunkered down. Several months later, he’d reveal that this was the period when he tore his ACL taking a bad step while running on a golf course. He never got any more specific than that about the injury and had never told me he hurt his knee. Short of getting an MRI, there was no way he could have known if the ACL was fully torn. But assuming it was, his subsequent vagueness, along with Corey’s later account, makes me doubt Tiger’s public version of how the injury occurred.

By this time, Mark Steinberg had acknowledged that Tiger’s military obsession had to be confronted. Mark always hosted a dinner at his home near Cleveland the week of the WGC Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone in Akron, and he told me that it was where “I’m going to have a talk with Tiger.” On Tuesday night, Tiger, Steve, and I met at Mark’s home, and after dinner, he and Tiger went into Mark’s downstairs office, where they spent about an hour.

I don’t know what Mark told him, but afterward, Tiger was different. To my knowledge, he at least cut down on the military trips. It was a moment that proved to me that Mark had a good feel for how to reach Tiger, and on this occasion the message had gotten through.

As it turned out, Tiger went on to win the Bridgestone at Firestone. In the last round, he was paired with Rory Sabbatini, who had made the “he’s as beatable as ever” comments after Tiger’s April victory in Charlotte. Tiger accessed his A-game, shooting a 65 to Rory’s 74, and won by eight. It was Tiger’s favorite scenario, a silent beat-down of a cocky foe. “Everyone knows how Rory is,” Tiger told the media. “I just go out there and let my clubs do the talking.”

I’d left the tournament on Thursday because my wife at the time, Jerilynn, was having health problems. It was a difficult situation that required my presence for an extended period of time. I wouldn’t see Tiger again until December.

It was during this period that Tiger most demonstrated friendship toward me. We spoke on the phone nearly every day about his golf, but the conversation would also veer into the personal, and he was quite supportive. He’d inquire about Jerilynn’s progress and ask me how I was holding up. He’d often say, “Don’t worry about me, you’ve got more important things to deal with. Do what you gotta do.”

Tiger’s surprising empathy, and my temporary absence from tournaments, led me to imagine how our relationship might ideally evolve. I hoped for a situation where Tiger wouldn’t feel he needed to see me in person as much, and certainly not as much at tournaments. I envisioned some long sessions at Isleworth to start the year to lay down a foundation and a plan, and perhaps a few others before and during the majors. The rest of the time we could check in by phone. I foresaw a modern-day version of what Jack Nicklaus had with his lifelong teacher, Jack Grout, who used to visit Nicklaus at the start of the year, then basically leave him alone unless Jack asked for help. The more self-sufficiency a player can manage, the better. A coach hovering all the time can be a crutch. I never felt I became that for Tiger, but as his knowledge of the plan became more sophisticated, I actually wanted him to need me less.

But in the meantime, Tiger started playing tremendously. He won the PGA at Southern Hills in Tulsa, a tight, classically designed course that I’d played many times in college. He used mostly 3-woods and 5-woods off the tee to find the wide part of the many doglegs, and when he had to, he got the driver in play as well. In the second round, Tiger shot a 63 that would have been a major-championship-record 62 if his 15-footer for birdie on the eighteenth hole hadn’t gone all the way around the cup without falling.

Tiger and I were having productive phone conversations daily. Before the final round, Tiger told me he felt in control. We went over the usual few swing keys, but I could tell it was one of those weeks when he didn’t have many doubts.

Still, it wasn’t easy on Sunday. After getting his lead up to six, he made some mistakes. When he bogeyed the fourteenth, he was up by only one. But that’s when Tiger tapped the extra energy he saves for such occasions. He birdied the fifteenth, and then on the very long and difficult sixteenth, which required a driver to set up a reasonable approach, he made the “good swing” I always wanted him to trust and piped one down the middle. It was a proud moment for both of us, and Tiger showed his satisfaction with his trademark flourish, giving the club a hard twirl on the recoil of his follow-through.

He won by two, earning his 13th major championship and his fifth in the last 12. I would sense more relief from Tiger in the aftermath. He knew he was entering the home stretch toward Nicklaus’s record, and the pressure was making the whole deal harder. No matter how well he played otherwise, a year without a major victory would be a disappointment, and he’d had to wait until the last one of the season to turn the year into a success.

The win at the PGA also relaxed me a little. My absence had already spawned rumors that Tiger and I were splitting, and if he hadn’t won at Southern Hills, they would have grown louder. Because Tiger and I were communicating regularly, I wasn’t threatened that Tiger had won without my being there. Still, the speculation got intense enough that Tiger finally decided it required a rare response. In late October, he wrote on his website:

Contrary to rumors, I have not split with Hank Haney, my friend and swing coach. He’s spent more time at home helping his wife deal with health issues, which is the way it should be. Besides, I’ve become much better at correcting my swing flaws, and that’s ultimately where you want to get to with a coach-pupil relationship. Hank is still going to be my coach; that’s not changing
.

Tiger won four of his last five tournaments of 2007, finishing second in the other. He played as if on automatic. It wasn’t perfect golf, though there were streaks of brilliance. Mainly it was beautifully managed play, the kind that avoids mistakes and produces one clean round after another. Above all, it was winning golf. In a way, the best thing I could say about it was that it didn’t surprise me. He was that good, and I knew that what he was doing was well within his comfort zone.

After his victory at the Tour Championship in September, Tiger played only two more events, the Presidents Cup and his tournament at Sherwood, which he won again. He later said that he used the extra time to build up more leg muscle to protect his left knee, but that was the first I heard about anything like that. In fact, neither Tiger nor anyone in his inner circle gave me any indication his left knee was bothering him beyond the discomfort he’d periodically complained about for years. After Christmas, he even went on one more skiing trip, this time to Colorado with Elin and members of her family.

When he came back in 2008, Tiger picked up where he’d left off, winning his first three events. His latest streak of official victories ended at five when he finished fifth at Doral. Throughout, there was still nothing out of the ordinary that I could tell about Tiger’s left knee. I was still working off what he’d told me in 2004, that he had only 20 percent of his ACL. I didn’t know if he had any less, and certainly was unaware of the ACL’s being completely torn. Tiger would occasionally grimace after a shot, but he’d been doing that since I’d begun working with him. He always went back to hitting without any apparent compensation.

Before Augusta, we spent our normal week at Isleworth. He’d gotten a good handle on his swing issues, including the head-dropping problem, and he was going with his “good swing” more often. I’d made some notes to myself, and one was: “Best I have ever seen him going into a major.”

The first indications of Tiger having a serious physical problem came at the Masters. He’d said early in the week that his knee hurt, and when I inquired later, he said, “Nothing that some drugs can’t take care of. I’m fine.” I later learned from Keith Kleven that Tiger had taken Vicodin during the tournament, the first time to my knowledge Tiger had used that prescription drug during competition. Tiger again putted poorly at Augusta, his 120 putts eight more than winner Trevor Immelman, and Keith said strong painkillers can affect feel and touch. It was why Tiger resisted taking the same drugs two months later at the U.S. Open.

It was another frustrating Masters for Tiger. In the first round, he made an eagle on the fifteenth hole, but it was offset by his two-chip bogey on the par-5 thirteenth, his first bogey on a par 5 since the previous August. Until he made a 60-foot bomb on the eleventh on Sunday, his longest birdie putt of the week was a 12-footer on Saturday. However, he also missed from inside eight feet five times on Sunday.

In the final round, Tiger trailed by three when he came to the par-5 fifteenth hole looking for an eagle. He drove into the second cut right of the fairway. Steve told him a normal 5-iron would be enough. Tiger hit it solidly, but the ball landed on the front of the green and rolled back into the water. It was a rare mental error at a big moment, because Tiger knew that if he was going to miss on that hole, it had to be long. He saved par, but he’d needed at least a birdie. He finished three strokes behind Immelman, tied for second.