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Kiss of Crimson by Lara Adrian 4. Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult 4. Dark Descent by Christine Feehan 4. The first was his left knee, which had bothered him for years. Protecting Tiger's knee during the swing and still getting performance wasn't a simple thing. 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 control his irons with shots he knew had little chance of curving left.
Essentially, snapping his knee allowed Tiger to eliminate one side of the golf course, a hallmark of great players from Hogan and Locke to Nicklaus and Trevino. But now to preserve his knee, Tiger wanted some flex in his left leg at impact.
This meant not turning his hips as aggressively through the ball, making it easier for Tiger to turn his hands over in the hitting area and hit a hook. It was the shot he most dreaded, because with a clubhead speed of more than miles per hour, a hook for Tiger could easily turn out to be a big miss. The second issue was the movement of Tiger's head. Tiger was very attached to the idea of moving his head to the right on the backswing and leaving it there on the downswing.
It was a move that had served him well as a skinny junior golfer trying to keep up in distance with the bigger kids. By staying behind the ball, Tiger could produce a "slinging" action with the club that, though not consistently accurate, generated a lot of speed and gave him the distance he believed he needed to win. Even as he got older and longer off the tee, he felt he needed to keep his floating head position to continue to outdrive the majority of other pros.
He wasn't completely wrong. It's just that in his case, the head movement had developed into a contributing cause of getting "stuck. But with the longer clubs and especially the driver, he usually didn't. Instead it stayed to the right and lowered. There were periods in which I won this argument with Tiger, and in my opinion those were the times he produced his best golf.
But it was an ongoing battle. It was a shocker for 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 remind me that he had never considered himself a particularly good driver, at least in comparison with the rest of his game. I believed in what we were doing, and so did Tiger. Gradually the wild drives started to lessen, but the process was going to require steps through the different levels a touring pro faces.
First there would be fewer wild drives on the practice tee at Isleworth, then in practice rounds at Isleworth, then on the practice tee at tournaments, then in practice rounds at tournaments, then in practice sessions before competitive rounds, then in competitive rounds, and finally in competitive rounds at majors. That's a tour player's progression, one of the hardest things about the profession.
Related: The Evolution of Tiger's Swing. After the Masters, Tiger finished tied for third at Charlotte on the Quail Hollow course, which is demanding off the tee.
It was a good sign, but at his next tournament in Dallas, I decided to try to install one more significant change. The setting was right because I was at home and Tiger could work with me in private at Vaquero. Tiger had played well in the first two rounds, shooting 65—67 to take the lead. Normally, I wouldn't have tried to show him anything new at such a juncture, but I knew Tiger would be in a good mood, and I felt an inspiration, so after Friday's round I asked him if he'd put in some practice with me at Vaquero.
Tiger was staying at the Four Seasons at the golf course, so he followed me in his courtesy car the 10 miles to my place.
On the way I had to decide how to introduce the idea in a way that he wouldn't immediately dismiss. I'd heard his quote about throwing out 90 percent of what he heard from teachers and keeping maybe 5 percent, so when we got to Vaquero, I said, "Tiger, I want you to try something that I think might make that 5 percent you hear from teachers that you actually keep. Basically, I believed Tiger would be better off with one more safeguard against the big miss.
I'd found that pros who suffered from driver wildness invariably held the club more in the fingers. In my case, I'd altered my grip so the club was more in the palms.
I had gotten the idea from studying Moe Norman, a Canadian whose competitive career had been hampered by his autism but who was legendary for the repetitive accuracy of his shots. Norman's swing was notable for its relative lack of hand action. I'd noticed that when I held the club out with just my left hand, if the grip was in the fingers, the clubhead would quiver and shake with any change in grip pressure.
But when I held it in my palms, the club was much more stable and would barely twist. Grip changes are huge decisions for pros, because in the short term they're uncomfortable and greatly affect feel. So I told Tiger, "Look, I just want to show you something. Just keep an open mind and try it for me, OK? I demonstrated the grip I wanted him to try, then put his left hand on his 5-iron and showed him how I wanted him to hold the club more in his palm. He immediately said, "I can't do this.
I repeated my urging, putting a ball in front of him to hit. He got over the ball and complained, "I can't even cock my wrists.
The sound of the impact was distinctive. Tiger's shots always made a great sound, but this was even more "flush. Tiger was visibly astounded that he'd hit such a perfect shot with such an uncomfortable feeling. He looked at me and said, "Show me that grip again. And just like that, he did. He used the grip the next two rounds at Dallas, and though he shot to finish in a tie for fourth, he never complained about it.
It was the fastest Tiger ever accepted any change I ever proposed to him, and the astounding thing is that it was probably the biggest change we ever made.
Even though it was a grip that cost him some distance because it slightly restricted his hand action, Tiger never complained about the sacrifice and continued to hold the club more in the palm the entire time I coached him. The whole weird way it happened remains improbable to me and is a good example of how Tiger was simply different.
I can't imagine another player adjusting to a grip change so quickly. Psychologically, Tiger was entering a difficult time in At the top of the bell curve of a career, expectation is greater than ever, but by definition decline overtakes improvement. Certainly Tiger wasn't going to concede reaching the top of the curve, but even he had to know he was very close, and it was going to take all he had to keep pushing against the forces of time.
And it didn't help that the standard he'd established meant criticism -- of his swing, of his putting, of his attitude -- whenever he didn't win. No player in history had ever faced such high expectations.
There were a few times when he was taking hits for not winning one of the first three majors of the year, and the weight of it all would show, and he'd say, "Nothing is ever good enough.
Related: Tiger's testy reaction to Haney's book. For me, the job got harder. There was more urgency and less fun. Tiger was more irritable and impatient. The process of improvement had been his emphasis when we first started our work, but he began to be much more concerned about results, or in his words, "getting the W. And Tiger's actions indicated he believed he had less time to do it than everyone else thought.
In retrospect, was when Tiger began to lose the joy of playing and began to look at his career as something he wanted to get over with sooner rather than later.
And the most obvious sign was his growing obsession with the military. His fixation really came out when he played a SEALs video game. Tiger would put on headphones, through which an animated commander would give him orders for the next mission to be carried out.
The objective was to keep overcoming increasingly difficult tests. Tiger would get totally immersed, sitting on the edge of the couch, as intense and focused as if he were playing in a major championship.
It had gone far beyond video games, into the real world. That its roots were in his connection to his father, Earl, who'd achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Army Special Forces and served in Vietnam, had been clear for a few years. Right after the Masters, only a month after we'd begun working together, Tiger went to Fort Bragg, N. With Earl in attendance, Tiger did two tandem parachute jumps, engaged in hand-to-hand combat exercises, went on four-mile runs wearing combat boots, and did drills in a wind tunnel.
Tiger loved it, but his physical therapist, Keith Kleven, went a little crazy worrying about the further damage Tiger might be doing to his left knee. Tiger's military activities began to take the form of two- or three-day sessions at naval and marine outposts involving exercises with Navy SEALs teams, and they would increase dramatically.
Less than two weeks after Earl's funeral and three weeks before the U. Open at Winged Foot, Tiger had gone to installations near San Diego for a three-day session in parachuting.
In my long email to Tiger after that tournament, here's what I said:. With the U. Man, are you crazy? You have history to make in golf and people to influence and help. Focus on your destiny, and that isn't flushing bad guys out of buildings in Iraq. Just play the video games some more. They use real bullets. I took a dismissive tone in that email because I really thought the military stuff was a phase that Tiger would soon realize was ridiculous.
I was trying to shake him back to his senses regarding this G. Joe fantasy. But a year later, I realized I'd underestimated. One morning I was in the kitchen when he came back from a long run around Isleworth, and I noticed he was wearing Army boots.
Tiger admitted that he'd worn the heavy shoes before on the same route. The military became central to his life, and in Tiger probably went on half a dozen SEALs trips. According to news reports, he told the assembled group at a facility in Coronado, outside San Diego, "If I hadn't been in golf, I would have been here with you guys. I was beginning to realize that his sentiment ran deep, and that as incredible as it seemed, Tiger was seriously considering becoming a Navy SEAL.
I didn't know how he'd go about it, but when he talked about it, it was clear that he had a plan.
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