Tiger’s Sunday warm-ups are traditionally works of art, especially when he’s in contention. After 3 competitive rounds, he’s usually distilled what is working to its essence, and using a mix of adrenaline and focus, he can go through the whole bag without missing a shot. Despite having watched Tiger hit thousands of balls, I still feel that thrill that comes with seeing him with full command at close quarters. His swing begins with serene poise at address, continues with a smooth gathering of power, and then, with the coordinated explosion that announces a supreme athlete, uncoils in a marriage of speed and control, the ball seemingly collected more than hit by the clubface. As he relaxes into his balanced finish, the look Tiger gets on his face as he watches his ball fly is more peaceful than at any other moment.
Tiger doesn’t respond well when underlings ask him if something’s wrong, or worse, when they’ve done something wrong. His longtime but now former trainer, Keith Eleven, was always fretting about whether Tiger was mad at him. Rather than taking Keith’s concern as a show of loyalty, Tiger saw weakness. In his world of testosterone-fueled heroics and military hardness, that’s unacceptable.
Ultimately, there may be a far simpler reason for the chill I’m feeling from him: He’s firing me in the non confrontational way that’s more common to a breakup than a professional relationship.
Five days before the 1st round, his game was so ragged it forced me to suggest a limited swing that has cost him distance and shot-making versatility but kept his misses playable.
It’s been a theme of my work with Tiger for much of our time together. Although it’s commonly thought that Tiger plays go-for-broke golf and tries the most difficult shots with no fear, it’s a false image. Tiger is, above all, a calculating golfer who plays percentages and makes sure to err on the safe side. What he abhors, and has built his career on avoiding, are the kinds of mistakes that produce boys or worse and kill both momentum and confidence — wild tee shots that produce penalty strokes, loose approaches that leave no chance to save par, blown short putts. These blunders are the stuff of high scores, and after such a round, a tour player or caddie will often lament “the big miss.” Avoiding the big miss was a big part of what made Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus so great, and it’s a style that Tiger has emulated. Until recently, his entire life seemed free of the big miss.
He hasn’t being going through our practice progression of the Nine Shots — in which he hits the 9 possible ball flights with each club — in a regimented way. Somehow, his devotion to excellence, the quality that most identifies him to the world, is missing.
But what I’ve learned at close quarters is that excellence, year after year, is exhausting.
What is going on? Scandal or no scandal, aren’t these the moments Tiger has always said he worked for? Lived for? The times when his ability to hyper focus and be mentally bulletproof give him his most important advantage over the competition? The times he’s always said he relishes the most?
More than any junior golfer ever, he’s famous. He’s won his age group at the Optimist Junior World tournament every year since he was 8. He’s won the US Junior Amateur twice, and in a few months he’ll make it 3 in a row. No male player has ever done those things.
Tiger is a black kid in a white sport,, visiting a Southern state, where he’s not wrong to assume that a lot of people who’d rather not see him rise to the top of the game are going to be nice to his face. I remember reading his account of “the look” he’s gotten at some country clubs, and how he’s been schooled by his dad on the subtle forms of racial prejudice.
But the swing of any kid at 17, no matter how impressive to the eye, is still in the embryonic stage as measured against what it must evolve into for a competitive career.
Mark was skeptical, as touring pros tend to be about prodigies. He’d point out that Tiger had never had a high finish in the several PGA Tour events in which he’d received a sponsor’s exemption. Most pros were stars in childhood, and they all remember the kid who was better than they were who was projected for professional stardom but never made it.
At the same time, I already had the sense that he wasn’t going to let societal pressures become extra baggage. The way he’d blocked me out at our first meeting told me he’d be able to build a wall around his game. As I observed him, I began to see him as a lone wolf. Nobody else in golf was like him: the son of an African American father who was a career soldier and an Asian mother who was a devout Buddhist, both of whom had poured all they had into their only child together. They’d raised an outsider and sent him on a singular journey.
Like Jim, his quest to become a better player led him into a study of the golf swing, and he came up with maybe the best sentence in the history of teaching: “Golf is what the ball does.” In other words, the flight of the ball tells the teacher where the student’s club was at impact. From there, the teacher can make the appropriate corrections to grip, posture, alignment, ball posit, plane, club path, or clubface angle.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, so many of the most consistent and enduring ball strikers had a slight “over the top” move, rather than the classic “inside-out” path, in which the shaft flattens out on the downswing. Bobby Locke, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, and Bruce Lietzke are just a few examples of players who started down with their arms a bit farther from their body, the club taking something close to the “outside-in” path that slicers are always warned against. John said that way of hitting the ball held less danger for good players than dropping the club down and hitting from inside to out. “Hitting too late from the inside with an open face not only misses the fairway, it can miss the golf course. A little over the top never misses by too much. In competitive golf, it’s not so much where the good ones go. It’s where the bad ones go. You’ve got to build a swing that will eliminate the big miss.”
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. And the less I played, the more I lost my proficiency. In particular, I’d experience helpless moments with my driver. I got to where I couldn’t play 9 holes without losing at least 1 sleeve of balls, and usually 2.
I’d practiced a bit for the event and hoped I had my problem under control. But instead, I was all over the course.
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.
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 things changed when Tiger accepted that, despite his best efforts, he wasn’t getting better on his own.
It doesn’t look like you have a real step-by-step plan. I think when you’re trying to improve, the most important thing is to always have a plan.
Tiger had tried it on his own, with Mark O’Meara sometimes watching him or suggesting things. But players, even great ones, aren’t trained teachers. They tend to impart the things that they’re working on, which an experienced teacher might conclude are exactly the wrong things. Mark certainly knows my ideas, but he doesn’t know the best way to impart them, and he probably doesn’t know which parts are best for Tiger.
On the way over, he spelled out an overall goal. “I want to get more consistent in every phase, so I have the kind of game that at majors will always get me to the back 9 on Sundays with a chance. I don’t want to just have a chance on the weeks when I’m hot. I want to have a chance all the time. Always putting yourself in the mix, that’s the only way you can win a lot of them.”
Eventually I would see that getting stuck was simply one of Tiger’s individual tendencies, so ingrained that he’d always have to fight to keep it suppressed. His goal was to get rid of getting stuck forever, but though I thought that was worth trying for, I knew the probability was that the tendency would always lurk, ready to come back when he didn’t take specific measures against it, especially under pressure. That’s golf, even at the highest level. Every player has his or her set of chronic mistakes that are as personal as a fingerprint. Teachers don’t give players these mistakes. Their role is to provide ways to control them.
Underlying my instruction was a unifying principle: All good things in the golf swing flow from achieving the correct swing plane. I’d studied all the ways to correct ball flight, and it was that revelation that enabled me to make a giant leap as a teacher.
The importance of swing plane was especially true at the highest level, where players do so many things right and are trying to address the very few things — or even one thing — they do wrong. I found that getting a tour pro’s club on the correct plane got them hitting more good shots, but more important, made their bad ones better. There are very few perfect shots hit in golf, even by experts. It’s above all a game of managing misses.
Briefly, my concept is this: The plane of the swing is established by the angle of the clubshaft in the address position. When the shaft retains the angle of that plane as it moves through the swing, a player has the best chance to hit good shots.
Hogan’s swing was so correct, with no mid-swing compensations, the club seemingly grooved inside a tilted wheel that went from the top of the swing to the finish.
I quickly sensed the extra effort and focus that Tiger gave a major championship. In his professional career, his emphasis has been on being totally ready 4 times a year, and because of the way the schedule was constructed, he had more preparation time for the Masters than any of the other majors.
Steve is the best caddie I’d ever seen. His greatest gift is that he stays completely calm and retains a commanding presence under the greatest tournament pressure. His former boss Raymond Floyd once said that Steve is the only caddie he ever had who didn’t choke. He proved it many times with Tiger, either by saying the right thing at a nervous moment, staying solidly silent in a moment of crisis, or calling Tiger off a shot if he believed it was the wrong one. Steve prided himself on being able to read Tiger’s mind, and Tiger respected Steve’s guts, judgment, and instinct. He also relied on Steve’s ability to be gruff and intimidating so that fans and media would give him a wider berth.
The toughest guy on the team was Tiger. I knew going into the job that Tiger had a strict goal of constant improvement. There was always the assumption that Tiger’s best golf was ahead of him, but he and I knew there was no guarantee that would be true. His stated vow to keep getting better made for a whirring machine of effort and pressure.
After a few weeks I came to see not only that he was far from a perfect player, but also that he wasn’t quite as good as I’d thought. That didn’t mean I stopped thinking of him as the greatest ever to play, but when I looked at him, I had to stop seeing a myth and deal with the actual player.
It took me a while convince Tiger that the percentages simply weren’t in favor of making many putts over 20ft, and that the smart play was to make sure to leave an easy 2nd putt, if not a tap-in, rather than having to constantly make energy-draining 5ft comebacks.
Although Tiger said Butch had encouraged him to snap his left knee at impact to gain distance, the move had another, more positive purpose. Basically, the fast and dramatic clearing of the hips that caused the hyperextension was a way to “hold off” club rotation and not hit a hook, even when Tiger’s plane was slightly across the line. Hyperextending, or “snapping,” his leg allowed Tiger to more easily hit a power fade with his driver, as well as controlling his irons with shots he knew had little chance of curving left. Especially, snapping his knee allowed Tiger to eliminate one side of the golf corse, a hallmark of great players from Hogan to Locke to Nicklaus and Trevino.
Simply put, Tiger played the driver with a lot of fear.
It was a shocker to me. One of the adjectives most often used to describe Tiger Woods was fearless. But the more I observed him close up, the more it became clear: He wasn’t. We never talked about it directly. I didn’t want to say anything that could undermine Tiger’s confidence, which was more important than any technical improvement. Sometimes, to make it less of a big deal, he’d reminded me that he had never considered himself a particularly good driver, at least in comparison with the rest of his game.
Over my years with him, Tiger got better with the driver, but it was a gradual, hard-earned improvement with no big breakthroughs. We tried a lot of different strategies, including coming very close to developing a driver “stinger” — a low-flying shot intended to increase accuracy that would in theory be easier to repeat. He could execute it flawlessly in practice but never trusted it enough to put it into competition.
I can now admit I never felt totally comfortable when Tiger was standing over a drive in competition. When he hit a good one, I felt relieved. I was always worried about the big miss. And I know that most of the time, he was too.
Tiger’s basic strategy with the driver was to play away from the side of the hole with the most trouble, even if it meant going into the rough. Generally, he favored missing to the right, because a pushed or faded shot would land more softly than a hook and have less chance of bouncing into a really bad spot. He knew that from a reasonable lie in the rough, he was good enough to get the ball on or around the green most of the time and avoid bogey. Indeed, it was his incredible ability with the other 13 clubs that made him so conservative with a driver. All Tiger needed was a shot, and he could not only survive but even go on to win. One of his playing thoughts was to capitalize on holes where he hit good drives, especially on par 5s, to shoot low scores.
Because of this strategy, the fairways were in effect half as wide for him as they were for most other players. He played to one side of the middle of the fairway, to defensively compensate for where the trouble was. He was good enough to afford half a miss, but even he couldn’t afford a big miss.
His fear was really only with the driver. It might have been because it was the one club with which he was more concerned with distance than control.
“Tiger knows his place.” What I think John was saying is that Tiger knew he was special, but with so much certainty that he never had to talk about it. He knew everyone else knew it as well, and he was content to let them make all the noise. He left no need to prove it or revel in it or lord it over people. He never pulled rank with a “Do you know who I am?” Routine in public places.
Those he genuinely liked tended to be quiet, modest, hardworking guys like Jim Furyk and Steve Stricker, whose ability he respected but whose talent didn’t elevate them to the position of serious rival. He kept the supertalented at a distance. He didn’t want players who could be a threat to feel comfortable around him.
He was averse to loud and cocky players, especially if he felt their records didn’t warrant all the talk.
It can sound petty, recalling a slight so ludicrously tiny, but my point is, it was that quality of paying attention only to his own needs that was so central to his ability to win. It allowed Tiger to walk past little-kid autograph seekers who were begging him to stop.
He was after something bigger than being adored.
I felt like a witness to history. But more than that, I temporarily felt that warmth you have with a golf buddy, because golf is one of the best games for nurturing a friendship.
But what I sensed most was that golf was special to Tiger, that a real golfer should always try to do it as well as he could, and that the process of improving was the best part of the game.
I’d realized that some of his sayings, like “Second place is first loser,” were borrowed from the SEALs instructors. I was also struck by how the instructors accepted absolutely no excuses for a candidate’s not completing the task, no matter how difficult that task was.
What I came to realize that Tiger had to be judged in the context of what he was trying to accomplish, which was to be not just the best golfer int he world, but the best golfer he could be. In his case, the latter was a much higher goal. He was after something unique — something others couldn’t realistically aspire to — and part of the price was having some missing pieces as a person. Whenever I was around Tiger off the course, I always felt that so-called normal life was just passing time for him, as if he were storing energy for his real purpose.
Steve has a lot of willpower, but he reported that after about 20 minutes, he finally broke down and said something. And Tiger answered him like everything was normal. “It was getting ridiculous. He was just warming up like I wasn’t there. He is definitely in his own world.”
With no offense to me, Earl said he didn’t think it was particularly important which swing coach or technique Tiger decided on. He believed he was good enough to adapt to anything and still beat everyone. But Earl did say that it was important for Tiger to have structure, because that was the way he operated best.
No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
All this was something Tiger didn’t want to get into, and if asked, I wouldn’t have, either. It would only raise questions about why the great Tiger Woods still hadn’t mastered his new swing after a year, and by the way, why did the change it again? To the outside world, unfamiliar with the concept that golf is a game of controlled misses, it simply appeared that Tiger had lost his superpowers.
Tiger slows down and looks at his wife. Gently but firmly, he says, “E, that’s not what we do. I’m not Jesper. We’re supposed to win.”
But in analyzing the sources of Tiger’s greatness as a player, one can see that this sort of reaction makes sense. Tiger never allowed himself to be satisfied, because in his mind satisfaction is the enemy of success. His whole approach was to delay gratification and somehow stay hungry. It’s the way of the super achiever: the more celebrations, the less there’ll be to celebrate.
All his winning since junior golf had taught him the way he had to think for the winning to continue. When everybody around him wanted him to look at past glories or look ahead to his assault on Jack Nicklaus’s major championship record, Tiger stubbornly stayed in the present. He ran his career the same way a golfer shoots a low round: one shot at a time. When I worked with him, he never talked about Jack’s record: how many more he needed, when he might surpass it, how much he wanted it. I also noticed that whenever we had discussions that assessed his performances, he never used the word great. After a tournament in which he’d been essentially flawless, he might go for “not bad” or “pretty good.” A streak of 6 straight wins might be called a “nice little run.” Great was a level he was planning to reach in the future. Or a word he could use when his career was over. But not while he was still playing.
One of Tiger’s gifts was the ability, when he needed to, to turn off emotion. It was why after a tantrum he could still be serene over the next shot. No doubt he’d learned early on that strong emotions unchecked adversely affect coordination and focus and generally impede winning. His knack for shutting down emotion was a big reason he closed out victories better than anyone else in history, and why he was so incredibly good at making the last putt. It was also why he could win half a dozen tournaments in a row and seem just as focused and collected coming up the 72nd hole in all of them. Meanwhile, it was normal for other players, even regular winners, to admit that a victory mentally exhausted them and would lead to a flat performance the next week. This was especially true with majors. Mark O’Meara was an extremely hard worker and very driven, but when he won his only 2 majors in 1998, at age 41, he attained a deep satisfaction, and could never again quite summon the kind of will that had gotten him there. That’s closer to a normal human reaction. Tiger, who once won 4 major championships in a row, was beyond abnormal.
The converse of this was Tiger’s ability to flash intense anger after a bad shot. He did this a lot and was always criticized, but he was expert at getting rid of all negative emotion by the time he’d arrived at his next shot. He told me that he often got angry on purpose because it allowed him to get rid of frustration, and also served to motivate him and improve his focus.
I came to realize that he’d already put that accomplishment in the past.
Tiger genuinely enjoyed the extra challenge of a showdown, and he strove to silently send his rivals messages that he believed could have a lasting effect. Early in his career, when Ernie Els was the next-best player, Tiger handed him a string of hard defeats, and he frankly thought it broke Ernie as a serious rival. Tiger was always looking to do that with anyone who challenged him.
Phil is a really verbal, high-energy guy who, for Tiger’s taste, is too opinionated, is too much of a know-it-all, and just revs too fast. Tiger is much more at ease around low-key, understated, droll people who can come up with a knowing one-liner — older guys like Jay Haas, Jeff Sluman, and Fred Couples, and younger guys with a sly edge to them like Sean O’Hair. Tiger liked it when there didn’t have to be many words, and Phil was just too much work.
But Tiger took that comment as negatively as possible to give himself a competitive jolt. I always thought Tiger was going overboard when he’d privately call Phil lazy or make fun of his body, but it was mostly the spillage from revving himself up. It was interesting that after Michael Jordan was criticized for bringing up petty grudges in his Hall of Fame induction speech, Tiger was asked about it. “I get it. That’s what it takes to be as good as MJ. You are always finding ways to get yourself going.” Sometimes they’re genuine reasons; sometimes they’re manufactured. The bottom line is that to keep beating everybody, fuel is needed.
Rather than respond in kind, Tiger, it seemed to me, would go out of his way to be even more distant — a kind of competitive bully move that he didn’t hesitate to to use if he thought it might increase his edge.
Tiger also knew that despite the victories, he still had a lot of work to. We’d pretty much eliminated his bad shots at Isleworth but they still cropped up in on-site practice rounds and continued to plague him in competition. That’s the pattern of swing-change improvement — the fastest gains come where the pressure is lowest.
Theoretically, the extra size in the head created an internal weighting system that would lead to straighter shots and faster ball speed, while the longer shaft increased clubhead speed.
Dominating the par 5s had always been one of Tiger’s main advantages, and it was lessened as other players got longer. Unfortunately, though many others retained or even increased their accuracy with the bigger heads, Tiger saw his ball flight become more crooked.
The big head and new ball were distance-oriented and designed to produce less spin and thus less curve. That made it much more difficult for Tiger to hit his natural draw, a right-to-left shot that carries less backspin than a fade. The bigger the heads got on tour, the more players went from favoring a draw off the tee to going with a left-to-right “slider,” which had enough spin to retain its carry but didn’t lose nearly as much distance as a spin-heavy fade used to with the older drivers and balls.
After he switched to a 460cc driver, when Tiger wanted to hit a draw off the tee, he’d pull out his 3w, its 15 degrees of loft producing more spin.
He finally tried more loft at the 2009 Memorial, and had one of the best driving tournaments of his career. He hit every fairway in the final round, and later told me that was the 1st time he had ever done that.
The whole round, players hadn’t been able to get sand wedges to stop by the pin, but Tiger powered an 8i sky-high that landed behind the ball and spun back to within a foot. It was that kind of shot, not his drives, that other players conceded they simply didn’t possess.
He would begin a typical day by waking at 6am and working out until 8. After he showered and ate breakfast, we would meet on the practice tee at 9 for 90 minutes of hitting balls. From 10:30 to 11 he would practice putt, then play as many as 9 holes on the course until noon. After a 1-hour lunch break, we’d meet at 1pm for an hour of short-game work, followed by another 90 minutes of hitting balls. From 3:30 to 4:45 he’d played 9 holes, and then return to the putting green until 6pm. This would be followed by an hour of shoulder exercises before retiring for dinner at 7.
I never once saw him hit a careless shot in practice.
Watching him in action, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Tiger disagreed strongly with the idea that champions are born, not made. “You’re a product of your environment,” he said, giving credit to his father and mother for providing the conditions that let him fall in love with the game and devote himself to it.
But he was almost always calm and poised on the course or the practice area. There, he was in his element — and observing his comfort there, I could see that he truly loved hitting a golf ball.
He enjoyed the details. He never hit a shot without knowing exactly how far his target was, so he always had a yardage in mind with every shot he hit. He’d pull out the range finder before hitting at a flat on a practice range. When he switched targets, he’d pull put the gun and figure out the new yardage. He never failed to do this.
He’d seldom hit more than 25 balls in a row before stepping away. He might sit down in the cart and just stare out silently for a few minutes. “I’m just thinking about what we just did.” Because what we were working on would usually be something that was uncomfortable, he was making sure he understood where he was in the process and where he was going. To me, it was an example of a great performer doing “deliberate practice.” It’s the most difficult and highest level of practice because it requires painstaking focus on weaknesses. A lot of players hit a lot of balls but focus only on their strengths. The great improvers are willing to get uncomfortable and make the mental and physical effort to correct a flaw, which often involves difficult “opposite-oriented” remedial learning. But that was Tiger in major-championship preparation mode.
The Nine Shots did a lot for him. First, it gave him a mental leg up. He knew other players didn’t practice that way, and he believed that such an elaborate and demanding practice template gave him an edge. His thought was, “I’m better, so what I do has to be different and better.” It matches his self-image and satisfied his ego.
In practical term, it helped him believe he could hit the proper shot under the gun. And the right shot wasn’t just the one that gave him the best chance to get close to the pin. More important, it was the shot that let him most easily play away from trouble either on or around the green. He just wanted the fullest toolbox possible.
With the tools at his disposal, he became a more thoughtful shot maker and thus a better course manager. He steadily began eliminating mistakes because he almost always had the right percentage shot for the situation. As a younger player, Tiger might have forced shots at the pin, but as he gained more ways to work the ball, he could start it at the middle of the green and move it toward the pin. It’s the shot that allows the most room for error because it reduces the chance of missing the green on the “short side” of the pin, from where a recovery is almost always more difficult.
Having more control got Tiger away from trying to blow fields away. When he had fewer shots in his arsenal, he played more aggressively. When he was “on,” it could lead to double-digit victories, but more often it led to mistakes that cost him wins. The Nine Shots helped Tiger understand that he was good enough to never really take a chance and still win. It would mean he’d much less likely to win by 10, but he’d be more likely to simply win. It was Tiger becoming more of an expert at “getting the W.”
I would point out that the increased distance all the players had gained had caused most of their percentages to go down as well.
“I make all the hard ones but miss all the easy ones.” He responded, “Hank, that’s because there are no easy shots. There are just shots.”
Ben Hogan was probably the only player whose whole swing Tiger admired. He watched videos of Hogan closely. He could relate to Hogan’s athleticism, but he especially focused on how Hogan kept the club on plane even with a really aggressive lower-body move.
As a teacher, I like to manually guide my students into positions so that they can know what correct and incorrect feel like. 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.
Of course, after seeing a student make 2 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 1st 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.
Tiger’s killer instinct came from his mother even more than it did from Earl. When Tina 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.
Usually the aggression would occur after he hadn’t converted a few good iron shots, leading to impatience that would result in a missed 6ft comebacker and a bogey. When he was just trying to 2-putt from a greater distance, he was one of the best lag putters ever. It was one of the big reasons he was so good at holding leads. When all Tiger needed was solid pars, he knew he didn’t have to try to hit the ball close to the flag. He was confident he could 2-putt from distance, not a given for many players under pressure. I believe one of the reasons Phil Mickelson has been prone to making mistakes with a lead is that he doesn’t trust himself to make 4- and 5-foot part putts, so he takes chances from the fairway to get his approaches into an easier 2-putt range.
It might be dark, but we’d be the last team there, no matter what. It increased our mental toughness, became a point of pride, and eventually led to more victories.
That was the time I was envious of Butch Harmon as a teacher. Not just because Tiger was so talented, but because Butch had a student with that much talent who was willing to put in so much effort.
Those moments were for me the pinnacle of golf skill. He would literally not miss a shot, lob wedge through the driver. People really have no idea how good professional athletes in any sport can be when they are in a groove without the pressure and irregularities of competition.
When I first tried to convince Tiger to stop trying to blow fields away because he’d win more often if he was satisfied with winning by one or two, he didn’t really listen. But when he read that Nicklaus said the same thing, it got his attention and changed him into a more strategic golfer.
By now I realized that he loved the stage of the biggest events, that he considered them his showcase as a champion.
I was miffed that Tiger suddenly decided he was going to emulate Ben Hogan and not employ practice swings during competition. I felt strongly that, particularly because he was still mastering the techniques we’d worked on, practice swings were an important tool in his preshot preparation.
This is all for now, but I never stop thinking about this shit. I wake up every day thinking about it and I go to sleep every night thinking about it. I have a lot to share but one thing I’ve learned is that to really teach someone the student needs to ask for help. I always have ideas that I think will help you but I am not fond of talking just for the sake of talking. Talking doesn’t teach anyone anything, listening does and someone will only listen when they want to.
Tiger called me in Dallas, “I hit it so bad. As good as Vijay is playing, I can’t beat him if I hit it that way tomorrow.” He described the flight of his shots and asked me what he should work on before the final round, in which he’d be paired with Vijay.
When I called Tiger back, I told him to get in front of the mirror in his hotel room and practice his backswing for 30 minutes, working on starting his takeaway straighter back and keeping his eyes level. Then to practice his downswing for 30 minutes, getting the club more in front of him and feeling like he was adding loft as he came down. “Do that, bud, and you’ll be good to go tomorrow.”
Tiger called me back the next morning, a few hours before his starting time. He said he’d worked 2 hours in front of the mirror before going to bed. Then, when he awoke at 2am to go to the bathroom, he looked in the mirror and started working on his swing again. He said he spent another 90 minutes working on the same stuff before going back to bed. Then after rising in the morning, he did another hour of mirror work, a total of 4.5 hours of studying positions and movements since I’d passed along my suggestions. In the final round, Tiger went out and shot 29 on the front nine and passed Vijay. He ended up shooting 63 to win by three.
It wasn’t a comparison Tiger liked to make, but in the flush of victory at the PGA at Medinah he answered “Yes” when asked if he thought he was a better player than he’d been in 2000 — and he explained why. “Understanding how to get myself around the golf course, how to control things, all the different shots I’ve learned since then. Yes, I feel that things are pretty darn good right now.”
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’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 pro 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.
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.
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.
The stakes were high, because depending on when it occurred, a bad shot on the range could ruin a whole practice session and be a confidence killer. And when Tiger left a session, he had to feel sure that he knew the cause of a swing issue, and more important, what he was going to do to address it in his next session or round.
To me the best golf body is lean and flexible. The only place big upper-body muscles arguably help is in the rough, but even that is marginal. I’ve never seen anyone get appreciably longer off the tee by developing bigger muscles in the weight room.
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 mind has called what happened to Tiger a “geek tragedy.”
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.
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.
For the 2nd major in a row, his sand play was shoddy, as he got up and down only twice in 8 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 answered with a phrase that he’d repeat several times in the next month: “It’s just pain. C’mon Hank, let’s go practice.”
I could tell the next morning how well he’d been listening by the way he’d very deliberately execute what we’d talked about. And all week he hit the ball superbly in his warm-ups. He hardly missed a shot, working quietly, calmly, and methodically through the bag, his concentration at its highest. At Torrey Pines, more than anywhere else, Tiger was the model student.
There will always be mystery as to what makes Tiger Woods so amazing under pressure. I still don’t exactly know, and I wonder if he does. But what was revealed in his thought process before that putt was not a hard “this ball can only go in” mindset, but rather a healthy, almost Zen, fatalism. I found it amazing that for a person who was so bent on having control, Tiger instinctively knew when he had a better chance of success by surrendering. “You can’t control the bounces. All you can control is making a pure stroke. Go ahead and release the blade, and just make a pure stroke. If it bounces off line, so be it, you lose the US Open. If it goes in, that’s even better.”
The biggest cost may have been psychological. Tiger knew he was climbing the biggest mountain of his career at Torrey Pines, and it inspired him to an incredible achievement. Afterward, Tiger had finally congratulated himself. But what if the satisfaction he’d gained took the edge off his hunger? What if it meant he wouldn’t be able to find a higher mountain that he wanted to climb?
Tiger didn’t know Armstrong well and didn’t cycle, but he was impressed by the way Lance had come back from cancer and how mentally tough he had to be to keep winning the Tour de France. In the case of both Federer and Armstrong, what Tiger most related to was their dominance in an individual sport.
But from what I saw, Tiger still didn’t let any of these figures close, even when they reached out. My sense was that Tiger would be more likely to engage someone he admired if he thought he could learn something from him or her. Once at Isleworth another tour player, Grant Waite, approached Tiger on the range and introduced him to motocross champion James Stewart. Tiger didn’t know who he was, but after Grant gave him a rundown on how James was one of the best in the world at his sport, Tiger showed some interest and started asking James how he trained. Tiger listened and then asked what he ate before competition. James said, “Oh, nothing special. A Coke and a Snickers.” That answer told Tiger that James wasn’t in his league as a serious athlete, and he quickly ended the conversation and went back to hitting balls.
What I know is that having a positive attitude and patience is a big key to making any bad situation better. You didn’t make any friends or fans with the way you acted at the Masters. You just looked stressed and pissed the whole time you were there.
But your Isleworth and practice tee game is better by a long shot than your tournament game. It is obvious that you have an issue with taking your game from the driving range to the course.
He was well aware of how many close calls Jack Nicklaus had suffered in major championships, and with only 6 second-place finishes in majors compared to Jack’s 19, Tiger knew he was due for at least a few frustrating runner-up placings.
For me the ultimate challenge was Tiger’s driving, which for the myriad reasons I’ve discuss had been his biggest weakness since I’d become his coach. What Tiger had long been missing — and perhaps never really had — was the kind of automatic go-to shot with the driver that could be relied on no matter how he was playing. The great drivers of the ball all had such a shot and it lent an ease to their games.
As I reflected back, I realized that I’d never thought of Tiger as happy. Whether with friends, business associates, other players, his mother, or his wife, he seemed to keep the atmosphere around him emotionally arid. Part of it was the insane drive that was vital to his greatness. It seemed the longer he was the best, the more isolated and lonely he became.
No golfer had ever played in a bubble of fame like Tiger’s. I began to think of Tiger as belonging to a group that included such figures as Michael Jackson and Britney Spears — public superstars whose ways of escaping pressure became self-destructive.
Short road or long road you handle it the same way, one step at a time.
His swing was bad but not terrible. His ball control was poor, with a lot of curve to his shots. He’d told me on the phone that he was hitting the ball farther, and that was always a red flag to me. It meant his club was flattening out too much on the downswing, creating a slinging motion with his hand that is not a reliable way for him to hit straight, controlled shots.
Hank, he needs us really badly right now. Be as positive as you can be.
The club rules mandated that we had to play with a member, and our host was a former Augusta National club champion.
The missed 5-footer on the 18th was concerning because Tiger was always conscious of the importance of ending rounds on a positive note and was usually deadly with short putts on the last hole. Especially worrisome was the way he missed — hitting the ball too hard and pulling it to the left with a clearly anxious stroke.
Tiger, in every instance when I am asked about Tiger Woods, I always answer in the best interests of Tiger Woods. Every time you are asked about Hank Haney, you never answer in the best interests of Hank Haney. It bothers me. It hurts me. If anybody should understand the value of friends at this point in their life, it should be you. I feel like I’ve been a great friend to you. I don’t feel I’ve gotten that in return.
Like Tiger, I was avoiding self-congratulation. Just as any sports psychologist would advise, I wanted to stay in the moment, take one tournament at a time, and just keeping working hard.
Probably the most valuable gift I took away from that experience was the insight I gained into the phenomenon of greatness. Studying Tiger was like take a survey course on all the best players who ever lived, because he epitomizes every essential quality of a champion.
More than any other player, Tiger has expanded the idea of what is possible. Before Tiger, there was a presumption that no golfer could have it all — be long and straight with the driver, creative and accurate with the irons, masterful with the short game, and a deadly putter. Well, when Tiger was perceived as a good driver of the ball and won 4 straight majors, he created the impression of having it all, or at least being more capable of it than anyone ever. Even when driving deficiencies cropped up later, Tiger’s mental gifts of focus and toughness under pressure still brought him closer to the ideal than anyone else.
He seemed to regain his work ethic in later 2011, but it’s yet to be seen whether he can sustain the effort. If he does, it will again make him different. I’ve never known a player who lost his hunger for practice to retain that same level of hunger. Usually he or she will show spurts of intensity, but if those aren’t rewarded with good play, older players will tend to go back to struggling with their motivation. Nick Faldo, who in his prime was one of the most diligent and intense workers the game has ever seen, said that after he won the 1996 Masters, he lost the drive to practice. He tried to regain it but it never came back, and that drop-off marked the end of his career as a champion.
Jack Nicklaus called the energy it takes to be a champion his juice. “You only have so much juice,” he once said. “You try to save what you’ve got so you can use it when it means the most.” Tiger had a tremendous amount, and no doubt he had an inner sense of how he was going to allocate it long-term. But the scandal forced him to use emergency reserves, and it’s natural now to wonder whether he has enough left.
The part of me that believes in his genius still thinks he can do it. A study of geniuses through history shows their most distinguishing characteristic was a willingness to pay any price until the goal was achieved. Tiger had that. The question is whether he still does.
Unlike the tiger who in his 20s and early 30s was virtually indomitable, today’s Tiger has discovered that in life real disaster lurks. Plans don’t come true. Things can go wrong. That realization creates doubt, and in competitive golf doubt is a killer. I’m sure what Tiger went through will mature him as a person, but there’s no guarantee that it will help him as a golfer. The big miss found its way into his life. If it’s ingrained, primed to emerge at moments of crisis, his march toward golf history is over.
Arnold has always been a big supporter of Tiger’s, but he didn’t sugarcoat the verdict.
“Not sure about that. Once you vary, and you lose that thing — what is it? Sometimes it’s hard to put in place. What is it? I’m not sure I know. I’m not sure Jack knows. When you have a disturbance in your life that’s major, you can get it back, can you get that thing you can’t put your finger on and get hold of it and choke it and keep it? Boy, that’s a tough deal. It could be a psychological thing. You say, ‘Well, I’ve done it.’ Then you say, ‘I want to do ti again.’ But it isn’t there. You can’t find it. You can’t grasp it. You can’t hold on to it.”