The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods (19 page)

To me, Tiger’s performance stands as the best iron play ever. No one had ever hit such good approaches so consistently from so far away. Particularly memorable was a holed 4-iron from 212 yards on the par-4 fourteenth hole on Friday. Hoylake was the perfect place to display the Nine Shots, and Tiger put on a clinic.

Still, it was a grind. When Tiger three-putted three times in eight holes on the back nine on Saturday, once from four feet, I was afraid he might lose it mentally. But he stayed composed and birdied the eighteenth hole to take a one-stroke lead into the last round. He was paired with Sergio, who he knew would be nervous and uncomfortable, and Tiger started out well. Chris DiMarco again turned out to be his main challenger. But when Chris birdied the thirteenth to get within one, Tiger ran off three birdies to take command and finish strong.

When he broke down in tears after holing his final putt, I was surprised. I hadn’t seen that kind of emotion coming, and probably nobody did. But a few hours later, in his jet on the way home, Tiger was the most excited I ever saw him after winning a major. He poured champagne in the trophy and passed it around for everyone to drink. He was so happy that for the first and only time I asked him to sign something for me. I handed him one of the Hoylake yardage books and a championship program. He signed both “Tiger Woods.” I thanked him, but I’d been kind of hoping he’d write something personal and include my name. When I got home, I donated the signed items to a charity auction.

The British Open victory really put Tiger in a great frame of mind competitively. Two weeks later he went to Firestone and won. Then at the PGA Championship at Medinah outside Chicago, he played three solid rounds to get himself in the last group on Sunday, tied with Luke Donald. With a birdie on the first hole, Tiger got a magical feeling with his putter, and he holed three more long ones on the front nine to take command. He shot a closing 68 to win by five.

The victory made Tiger the first player in history to win multiple professional majors in consecutive years. It was also the third of what would be seven consecutive wins in official tournaments.

His next event, the Deutsche Bank in Boston in early September, was the one tournament Tiger played in 2006 that, because of some family matters, I didn’t attend. After he shot 67 in the third round to trail Vijay Singh by three shots, Tiger called me in Dallas. He said, “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.

I hadn’t watched any of his play on television for that day, which was also a first for me when I was home. I told him I’d call him back and watched the recorded telecasts of the first three rounds, studying all the shots by Tiger that were shown.

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,” I said.

Tiger called me back the next morning, a few hours before his starting time. He said he’d worked two hours in front of the mirror before going to bed. Then, when he awoke at two a.m. 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 four and a half 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. He called me back and said, “That was a nice win.”

Tiger’s last official victory of the year came at the American Express World Golf Championship, at a course called The Grove outside London. It was the best I ever saw Tiger play. A week before, Tiger had played just OK in the Ryder Cup as the U.S. team lost in Ireland, but he was on in every phase of the game at The Grove. Tiger used a driver regularly all week, and missed only 11 fairways. He eagled the par-5 eighteenth in each of the first three rounds, and birdied it the last day. He shot 23-under 63-64-67-67-261 to win by eight. As for his shot-making quality, it was the closest I ever saw Tiger come to the level he’d attain on the practice range at Isleworth. He was even hitting the stinger with the driver, a shot he’d never before put into play, but the shot I most wanted him to master. After the tournament, Steve said, “Finally, we saw how he can play.”

For good measure, Tiger ended the year by winning the Target World Challenge, which he hosted at Sherwood Country Club. It was unofficial, but it put a ribbon on the year. He went skiing again, in the off-season, then came back and won his first official tournament of 2007, at Torrey Pines. It would give him seven consecutive official victories, the closest any player has come to Byron Nelson’s epic record of 11 straight set in 1945.

As I studied Tiger’s greatness, I realized he’d morphed into a slightly different player than he’d been in 1999 and 2000. With a younger body, he’d been a longer hitter relative to the field and a better driver. Based on the way he completely ran the table in the majors, I’d say he was also a better putter. Those are two of the most important areas in the game, and the key to Tiger’s most dominating performances from that period.

But I would argue that in every other area of the game, he was better in 2005 and 2006. Better with the irons, with more distance control and more shots. More precise with his wedge play from 120 yards and in, and steadier around the green and out of sand. He was a smarter strategist and a superior manager of his mistakes. His weapons weren’t as gaudy, but he had more of them.

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,” he said. “Yes, I feel that things are pretty darn good right now.”

All I knew for sure was that Tiger was better at the end of 2006 than he was at the beginning of 2004, when I began coaching him. He’d restored his edge over the competition. It’s an incredibly hard thing to establish in pro golf. Everyone really is so close and, with more good players from all over the world and advances in equipment technology, constantly getting closer. Having an edge is the definition of a dominant player, and when you really look at history, there have been only a handful who sustained one. In my book, only Vardon, Jones, Nelson, Hogan, Nicklaus, and Woods had an edge based on varying degrees of power, precision, putting, and nerve. The fact that Jack and Tiger kept their edge for the longest time is why they’re the greatest ever to play.

The more I was exposed to Tiger, the more I began to think he was an incredible mixture of extremes, all of which added up to an ability that was so remarkable he was probably better at his sport than any other athlete was or had been at theirs. Which led me to what I began to think of as the Package.

The Package was the sum of all of Tiger’s qualities and characteristics, the good and the bad. Working from the starting point that Tiger was better and different from any other player, it followed that those differences were things that made him better. It meant that tampering with the Package was perilous. To put it another way: Messing with Tiger was like fiddling with a solved Rubik’s Cube.

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 was one of Tiger’s many enablers. As a person who grew up with sports and loved sports and was always trying to figure out how to succeed in sports, there was part of me that was in awe of Tiger. Better than anyone else who ever lived, he could do that thing that other great athletes from Michael Jordan on down thought was harder than anything else in sports—close out a golf tournament. And my admiration for what that took kept me from ever really challenging Tiger to be a better human being—though, honestly, I never saw anyone else step up to the challenge, either.

Maybe Earl had, and maybe that was the thing Tiger would miss most. It was telling that when Tiger was asked to assess 2006, he called it his worst year, because of his father’s death. That comment might have been a bit calculated, the thing he knew other people would be impressed to hear. But even as he was playing better than ever, perhaps he could sense something essential beginning to wear down.

As Tiger stands over his short putt in the bright Tucson sunlight at the 2007 WGC-Accenture Match Play to end his third-round match against Nick O’Hern, everyone watching is thinking the same thing:
He never misses these
.

The three variables—a simple four-footer, a big moment, and Tiger Woods—add up to a guaranteed result. Tiger will simply access his superpowers under pressure, pop in what for him is a gimme, and move on to the quarterfinals.

Except that the ball misses the hole on the right, not even lipping out. Time seems to stop as the collective thought becomes,
Did that just happen?

On the next hole, Tiger fails to get up and down from a bunker, and watches as O’Hern, a journeyman from Australia, makes a 12-footer for par to win the match. Tiger takes off his hat and shakes O’Hern’s hand. He is out of the tournament. There will be no eighth consecutive victory.

No one could remember Tiger ever missing a short putt on the final hole to win a tournament or a match. Some recalled a missed five-footer for par on the 71st hole at the 1999 U.S. Open at Pinehurst, but even if he’d made that one, he still would have finished a stroke behind Payne Stewart. 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 poor 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.

So Tiger, in going for something a little more elaborate, both didn’t and
did
surprise me. He said his ball had hit the remnants of a ball mark and been thrown off line.

This meant that Tiger had somehow neglected to repair the indentation—which he was allowed to fix—before hitting the putt. His explanation was that, somehow, he’d forgotten to do so. “I was so enthralled with the line, I didn’t see the ball mark,” he told the media. “I knew if I hit it left-center, the match would be over. It’s my fault for not paying attention to detail.” He also made it sound as if Byron Nelson’s record of 11 straight victories—one of the greatest records in all of professional sports—hadn’t mattered that much, saying, “It’s not the streak. I’m disappointed I didn’t pay attention to detail, something so simple.”

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. Other than a loose impediment like a pebble or a leaf, the remnant of a ball mark big enough to misdirect a putt would be the most noticeable of fixable obstructions. It was hard to fathom Tiger’s not attending to it.

Also, replays of the putt didn’t indicate it had bounced or veered off. It looked as if Tiger had simply started the putt too far to the right. Certainly Tiger had the record to get the benefit of the doubt, but most insiders came away from the miss believing Tiger had been less than straight.

I took it as a humanizing moment. Part of me had expected Tiger to slough it off. After all, he’d made so many, one miss wasn’t going to ruin his reputation, and even mechanical putting machines sometimes miss from relatively short range. Then again, a golfer can never be casual in seeking perfection. To approach it, Tiger had to have zero tolerance.