The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods by Hank Haney Read Free Book Online

tournaments, including the Masters in which he finished in a disappointing tie for 18th, I noticed that Tiger had altered his club position more toward what I’d demonstrated. I have no doubt that this was something he and Butch worked on, and I’m also sure it was the key reason his swing came together in early May when he won in Dallas and started on a tear. Tiger won seven more official tournaments before the end of the year, and would get even hotter in 2000. What was interesting was that several other golf instructors came up to me during this period, and knowing that I was often around Tiger through Mark, asked, “Hey Hank, are you working with Tiger? Because at the top he’s starting to look like what you teach.” I always said no, that it was a position Tiger had worked on with Butch. But David Leadbetter, along with Butch the biggest-name instructor at the time, was telling people that Tiger didn’t get that swing from Butch Harmon, he got that from Mark O’Meara, who got it from Hank Haney.
    That was unfair to Butch. It’s hard to imagine that Tiger’s thinking about the swing wasn’t influenced by being around Mark, but Mark wasn’t Tiger’s teacher; Butch was. Talking about an idea like his position at the top, as Mark and I had, and actually working with a student to implement that position are two very different things. The other thing is that Butch and I didn’t see Tiger’s swing all that differently. Although everyone questioned why Tiger wanted to make swing changes after being so dominant at the 1997 Masters, those changes made good sense. From what I could tell, Butch was trying to get Tiger to the same place in his swing that I would have tried to take him, even though we might have used different drills and terminology. Those first big changes Tiger made with Butch were the most dramatic of his career up to that time. The transition was quite difficult because rather than taking some time away from competition to really ingrain the changes, Tiger decided to incorporate them while still playing a full schedule of tournaments. Most players don’t have the talent to pull that off, and even for Tiger, it might have been a slower way to go. But because the changes were right, they ultimately paid off.
    In 2000 and 2001, Tiger played better than he ever had. At the same time, he was showing signs of getting tired of Butch. Tiger particularly disliked Butch’s habit of holding court on the practice tee, drawing a lot of people into the area where he did serious work. Tiger hadn’t minded when he was young and the stories were new, but after he became the world’s most famous athlete, he craved quiet. During one of our practice rounds, at the 2000 British Open at St. Andrews, Mark told me that Tiger had gestured toward me and said, “I wish Butch would be a little more like Hank. Just kind of blend in, instead of bringing people around and being loud.”
    Butch was being himself, and he wasn’t about to change his approach, especially after he and Tiger had had so much success. I suppose that Tiger was willing to put his annoyance aside while he and Butch were winning five out of six major championships through the 2001 Masters, but after that came the beginning of a long good-bye. Even while Tiger was winning the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage, they seemed a little distant, and it was at the PGA at Hazeltine a couple of months later that Tiger told Butch he wanted to work alone on the practice tee.
    I think what really turned the tide was Butch’s belief that the best approach with Tiger after he solidified his swing changes was maintenance. This is definitely an old-school view that has a lot of merit. It holds that a person’s swing is basically that person’s swing and that once the big issues have been resolved, refinement rather than more reconstruction is the wisest policy. Golf history is littered with good players who got worse trying too hard to get better, and Butch didn’t want