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

Tiger to fall prey to the same syndrome. But such an approach went against Tiger’s grain. He wanted to always be consciously doing something to get better. It was as if he needed the stimulation and the challenge to stay motivated. It was a compulsion. Certainly in some ways it was a strength but perhaps also a weakness. Tiger didn’t grow tired of Butch the person as much as he grew tired of what Butch was teaching him.
    Late 2002 is when Tiger entered a shadowy period. He basically started working on his own, in part with Mark as his eyes. There was speculation that I was working with him, but that’s simply not true. I wasn’t even seeing him as often. Mark himself had stopped playing and practicing with as much intensity, and my trips to Isleworth were becoming fewer. Sometimes I’d ask Mark how Tiger was doing, and Mark would give me a summary of what he was working on. I knew that Tiger had a lot of knowledge about the golf swing, and so did Mark, but neither had ever demonstrated much success working on his own. Very simply, they were players, not teachers. That’s usually not a problem when a player is “maintaining,” but making real swing changes is another matter.
    Tiger won a couple more times in 2002, but he’d dropped off slightly from his high level. His left knee started to really bother him, requiring painkillers, and that undoubtedly led to a worsening of certain bad swing habits, such as dropping his head to the right on the downswing. In December, he had arthroscopic surgery on his left knee to remove some benign cysts and drain fluid. During the procedure, it was determined that his anterior cruciate ligament was fraying. The surgery took place in Park City, Utah, where Mark and I both owned condos that we’d try to get to every year for a ski trip. Tiger’s surgery coincided with our trip, and Mark was present when Tiger was taken into surgery and when he came out. I met them later, and Tiger told me that because of the condition of the ACL, which he estimated was only about 20 percent intact, “I’m going to have to change my swing.”
    The recovery required Tiger to miss the first five tournaments of 2003. Then he won three of the first four he played, including an 11-stroke victory at Bay Hill. But Tiger would later say he did it mostly with superb putting, and that year he didn’t win a major for the first time since 1998. Worse, he didn’t really come close, his tie for fourth at the British Open being his only top ten. It would later come out that the last time Tiger worked with Butch was during a visit to Las Vegas a week before the 2003 U.S. Open at Olympia Fields, where he finished tied for 20th.
    I’d occasionally hear rumors that I’d be Tiger’s next coach, or that in fact I was already secretly working with Tiger, but I never paid much attention to them. I honestly believed that Tiger was determined to work things out on his own, that he liked the notion of not having a coach, and felt that he was at a point in his career where he could essentially fix himself. Even if he was looking for a new coach, there were several bigger names than mine. My approach was to keep working hard on the tasks at hand, which included coaching Mark and running my golf schools. I didn’t drop any hints to Mark, and he never talked about what he thought Tiger might do in the future. I’m sure Mark would have liked me to become Tiger’s coach, but the subject was such a touchy one with Tiger that Mark never even talked about it to me away from Tiger. I definitely didn’t make any comments about Tiger in the press or respond to any of the rumors, because that would have only been perceived, by everyone from Tiger on down, as angling for the job. As 2003 ended, I had no more reason to think I’d ever work with Tiger than I had when the year began.
    But things changed when Tiger accepted that, despite his best efforts, he wasn’t getting better on his own. He won the WGC Match Play in early