The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (4 page)

I did only a little of that with Mark because I preferred working with players at my facility or at their home courses away from tournaments. When I moved to Sweetwater Country Club outside Houston, it was then the headquarters of the LPGA Tour, so I worked with over a dozen women pros there. Later, when I moved to Dallas, I bought the golf ranch, where I worked with the Kuehnes, eventually expanding to four facilities.

Although I was following my calling, before I could really excel, I had to conquer a personal issue. For about a dozen years, from the mid-1970s to 1986, I drank too much.

My grandfather was an alcoholic, and my father was an alcoholic. He was never abusive to me. Rather, he was distant. He was a functional alcoholic. My parents argued a lot, but growing up I was never aware of my dad’s addiction. Eventually he and my mother divorced when I was in college, and he got treatment and stopped drinking. I admire that he finally got help and is living a better life. I only wish I’d been more aware of his problem before I started to develop one of my own.

Growing up in a home with an alcoholic left a mark on me. Although I’ve never gone through therapy for my problem, I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject and have spoken to a lot of experts in the field. I know that children of alcoholics are vulnerable to certain syndromes like approval-seeking, perfectionism, overwork, sensitivity to criticism, a desire to rescue others, inability to enjoy success, and, most fundamentally, repeating alcoholism. They tend to have trust and self-esteem issues. I know that to varying degrees all those patterns have been part of my life.

I never drank in high school. But when I got to college, I quickly fell into the culture of kegger parties and began drinking beer. I consumed a lot. Looking back, my excuse was that it was just “partying” or “growing up.” I had some good times, in part because under the influence I was more open with people than I might have been otherwise. But even then, I was aware that the whole deal wasted a lot of time and energy and didn’t leave me feeling very good physically or psychologically.

Drinking was an even bigger part of my life when I entered the golf business. In those days, it was common for golf pros to hang out in the club bar after work to drink and talk. At Pinehurst, the social life seemed to revolve around a few favorite local bars. I’d drink six or seven nights a week and have as many as ten or twelve beers at a time.

When I became director of golf at Sweetwater in Houston in 1984, I had more responsibility and not as many cronies. I was still drinking, but it was becoming an empty experience. I was getting tired of the cycle of waking every day with a hangover and a headache, taking all morning to feel better, and then starting the whole thing over again at night. I considered cutting back but didn’t take a decisive step until one day in 1986. I woke up with another headache after another long night. And that’s when I told myself, out loud, “I don’t want to feel this way anymore. And I’m never going to have another drink the rest of my life.”

At first, my approach was simply “just make it to tomorrow.” I strung enough individual days together to make it to a year without a drink, and then two years, and then 20. Today when I’m with friends at a party, I’ll get the urge to have a beer. But now I have a streak of more than 25 years. I can’t break it.

Until now, I haven’t talked about my path away from alcohol because I don’t want to send the message that people don’t benefit from professional help. Although I’m proud of where I got to, there’s part of me that wishes I’d gone through therapy, both for the self-knowledge and to be able to better help people I’ve cared about in their battles with addiction. Still, to some extent, I feel like I’ve been there.

Ultimately, I think I made it because I’ve always been a very hard “tryer” with a strong will. I want to excel, and I like being recognized for success, not failure. I realize that the drive to prove myself carries its own issues, but life’s complicated. I’ve learned everybody has issues, and the solution, if there is one, is to keep doing the best you can with who you are and who you want to be.

Having dealt with a lot of high-achievers, I’ve learned that anybody who is really successful at anything has an incredible passion that is basically an obsession. My mother and my sister used to complain that all I ever talked about was golf, that all I ever wanted to do was practice. My college teammates would make fun of me for constantly standing in front of the mirror looking at my swing, always trying to figure it out. But that’s what it takes to separate yourself. No doubt it carries a cost, but so does every life decision.

It was probably the biggest similarity Tiger and I shared, perhaps even a big part of why we ended up working together. He never said so, but to me it was part of our bond.

The hard work led to more good things happening in my career. A couple of the most rewarding were small moments that connected me to two icons. In the mid-1980s at Sweetwater, I was giving my first lesson to a man from Fort Worth. I always asked people why they’d decided to try a lesson with me, and this gentleman said a fellow member at Shady Oaks had told him that I knew what I was talking about. When I asked who the member was, he said, “Ben Hogan.” A few years later, a father brought his young son to me. When I asked why, he said, “Byron Nelson told me the best thing you can do for your son is take him to Hank Haney for golf lessons.” I’d never met Hogan or Nelson, but they knew of my reputation. Whenever I’ve gotten a little down from criticism, I think of those validations and feel better.

I got a lot of gratification coaching Emilee Klein, who had a successful career on the LPGA. Her dad had brought her to me as a six-year-old when I was Director of Instruction for Landmark Land Company at PGA West in La Quinta, California, in the early 1980s. Emilee was undersized and not really physically gifted beyond having good eye-hand coordination, but she was a great listener and did everything I told her. At age 14 she won the California Women’s Amateur, and at 17 she won the U.S. Girls’ Junior. In 1996, she won the Women’s British Open. All told, students of mine, in the period that I worked with them, have won 17 USGA and R&A championships. That’s not counting the nine Tiger got before 2004, or Mark’s U.S. Amateur.

The thing that
wasn’t
working was my golf game. As I got very busy teaching in the mid-’80s, I found very little time to play. I’d always loved playing the game, and the less I played, the more I lost my proficiency. In particular, I’d experience helpless moments with my driver. I’d be especially prone to spraying the ball way right, though I could throw in a bad snap hook just as easily. Things went from bad to worse, eventually balls to the right starting out at almost comical 45-degree angles and ending up as much as 100 yards off line. I got to where I couldn’t play nine holes without losing at least one sleeve of balls, and usually two.

Swing instructors always have to deal with the fact that a student expects his or her teacher to play or demonstrate impressively, so perhaps my problem was a reaction to anxiety I might have had about my reputation as a teacher being on the line every time someone saw me hit a ball. I’m not completely sure. I hit bottom at an off-season pro tournament at Pebble Beach in 1985. I’d practiced a bit for the event and hoped I had my problem under control. But instead, I was all over the course. Somehow, I lost only a couple of balls, got a lot of fortunate bounces, and made absolutely everything on the greens. Mark was playing behind me, saw a lot of the shots I hit, and after the round asked sympathetically what I shot. I said 73, and he couldn’t believe it. Frankly, neither could I. I’d taken only 21 putts. But I knew that if I’d made a couple of big numbers early instead of some lucky saves, I probably would have shot in the high 80s at least. Right after the round, I was so exhausted from all the stress that I basically stopped playing golf.

For the next 15 years, I played no more than once or twice a year, and never in any sort of competition. I had a serious problem, one that was extremely frustrating because while I could fix others, I couldn’t fix myself. Out of stubbornness and because I missed the game, I’d wait until the end of the day, when every customer and employee had left my facility in McKinney, and go out alone to hit hundreds of balls. I don’t like to use a lot of video when I teach, but because it was the only way I could see myself, I would film my swing constantly. Actually, it looked all right. Its biggest flaw was the “good player” tendency to flatten the club out coming down, causing the disastrous “late from the inside” miss that John Jacobs had talked about. A closer examination began to reveal that I’d sometimes flinch with my forearms and hands in the impact zone.

What I came to understand is that I had the full-swing yips. The putting yips were an accepted phenomenon, and there was even new medical research at the time that classified the problem as focal dystonia, a motor-sensory disorder in which the motor-skill commands from the brain get distorted or blocked. The study of focal dystonia hadn’t really been extended to the full swing, but I’m convinced it’s what happened to Seve Ballesteros and Ian Baker-Finch, and later to David Duval, particularly when they were hitting a driver. It definitely happened to me.

There is still a lot of mystery about the driver yips. In my case, I found that they were not necessarily pressure- or anxiety-induced. I was as likely to hit one off the map while alone on the practice tee as I was in a competition. I came to think of the driver yips as more of a physiological than a psychological problem. However, anxiety tended to make them worse.

A key moment in finding a solution came about in the late 1990s when I was doing a clinic for a pretty large group, an experience that had become terrifying for me. When it came time to demonstrate a few shots, rather than take a deliberate stance and risk hitting embarrassing and credibility-killing shots, I sort of faked this casual approach where I’d begin swinging while still looking up at the students. Knowing they’d see this as a less than serious attempt to hit the ball, I felt less pressure. But amazingly, without looking at the ball, I’d hit much better shots than I did when I went through my normal preshot routine and swing.

What I subsequently learned from this experience and further trial and error is that the only thing that cures the yips is radically altering technique so that new pathways from the brain are created. This is why big changes—like the long and belly putter, the claw grip, or other variations on conventional putting—often work so well for people who have problems on the greens.

Following the same idea, I basically went with the opposite of what I’d incorporated into my old swing. It started with the grip. Rather than hold the club in my fingers, where it felt most comfortable and which is the way the grip is commonly taught, I decided to experiment with a grip that I’d read the master ball striker Moe Norman used—more in the palms. I also came up with a wacky preshot routine in which I’d exaggerate a takeaway that started the club way outside, tracing a path that, if retraced coming back down, would give me the sensation that it was impossible to hit the ball from the inside. When it was time to hit the ball, I’d look at the underside of my cap so I couldn’t see the ball during the backswing, and then on the downswing turn it back to the left so that my eyes again never settled on the ball but were directed only at the intended target. My swing path was decidedly outside-in, and whereas I’d always played a pretty powerful draw (curving the ball from right to left), now I was hitting a weak slice (moving the ball from left to right).

It didn’t matter, because my goal was to simply make any kind of swing that wasn’t a yip. I was like a hacker who’d hit crappy shot after crappy shot but could always find his ball. As long as that was the case and I avoided yipping, I was happy and knew I could gradually work on improving the path of the swing. The swing that eventually evolved was kind of short and quick, producing a low cut that carried a lot of backspin—far from ideal and at least 25 yards shorter than I used to hit it—but I became a very straight driver. I did almost all this rehab work on the practice range, but in 2002, when I got up the nerve to start playing regularly again, I was astounded to find that I was soon a significantly better player than I’d ever been. I started to occasionally shoot in the 60s, but the best part was that I stopped fearing the big miss. At one point I played 156 straight rounds without a penalty stroke with my driver. When I’d play with Mark, he’d laugh at my contortions and funky ball flight, but he also gave me props for having pulled my game off the trash heap.

The experience taught me that life—both as an instructor and as a person—is better when I’m able to play golf, because I truly love the game. Long-term, the real significance of what I went through is that it helped me teach Tiger.

As luck would have it, I was being brought closer to Tiger. After he won his third straight U.S. Amateur in August 1996, he turned pro and signed with IMG. Tiger had been introduced to Mark O’Meara, also an IMG client, when the management group was courting him. Mark is a very easy guy to get along with, and he and Tiger shared Southern California roots. Tiger had decided to make Orlando his base when he turned pro, in part because he liked Mark’s situation at Isleworth. He bought a place there, and he and Mark soon became regular practice partners and friends.

When I went to Isleworth to work with Mark and stay at his house, I began to see a lot of Tiger. He’d sometimes come over for breakfast before a practice session or dinner after one, and perhaps stay to watch a game on TV. He was still quiet but also comfortable with Mark and his wife and two kids. He was just 21 when he won the 1997 Masters, living on his own for the first time, and he appreciated the normalcy to be found at Mark’s home during a time that his life outside the gates was being hit by the gale force of Tigermania.

Tiger didn’t discourage the media’s playing up the big brother/little brother dynamic between Mark and him. It was a feel-good story, and it also got the press off his back, because Mark began answering a lot of Tiger questions. At first Mark enjoyed the attention, and he was deft at portraying Tiger as a great young guy without giving away anything private.