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My Years Coaching Tiger Woods
Crown Archetype
April 2012
On Sale: March 27, 2012
272 pages ISBN: 0307985989 EAN: 9780307985989 Kindle: B006V3E2PE Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
The Big Miss is Hank Haney’s candid and surprisingly
insightful account of his tumultuous six-year journey with
Tiger Woods, during which the supremely gifted golfer
collected six major championships and rewrote golf history.
Hank was one of the very few people allowed behind the
curtain. He was with Tiger 110 days a year, spoke to him
over 200 days a year, and stayed at his home up to 30 days a
year, observing him in nearly every circumstance: at
tournaments, on the practice range, over meals, with his
wife, Elin, and relaxing with friends.
The relationship between the two men began in March 2004
when Hank received a call from Tiger in which the golf
champion asked him to be his coach. It was a call that would
change both men’s lives.
Tiger—only 28 at the time—was by then already an icon,
judged by the sporting press as not only one of the best
golfers ever, but possibly the best athlete ever. Already he
was among the world’s highest paid celebrities. There was an
air of mystery surrounding him, an aura of invincibility.
Unique among athletes, Tiger seemed to be able to shrug off
any level of pressure and find a way to win.
But Tiger was always looking to improve, and he wanted
Hank’s help.
What Hank soon came to appreciate was that Tiger was one of
the most complicated individuals he’d ever met, let alone
coached. Although Hank had worked with hundreds of elite
golfers and was not easily impressed, there were days
watching Tiger on the range when Hank couldn’t believe what
he was witnessing. On those days, it was impossible to
imagine another human playing golf so perfectly.
And yet Tiger is human—and Hank’s expert eye was adept at
spotting where Tiger’s perfection ended and an opportunity
for improvement existed. Always haunting Tiger was his fear
of “the big miss”—the wildly inaccurate golf shot that can
ruin an otherwise solid round—and it was because that type
of blunder was sometimes part of Tiger’s game that Hank
carefully redesigned his swing mechanics.
Hank’s most formidable coaching challenge, though, would be
solving the riddle of Tiger’s personality. Wary of the
emotional distractions that might diminish his game and put
him further from his goals, Tiger had developed a variety of
tactics to keep people from getting too close, and not even
Hank—or Tiger’s family and friends, for that matter—was
spared “the treatment.”
Toward the end of Tiger and Hank’s time together, the
champion’s laser-like focus began to blur and he became less
willing to put in punishing hours practicing—a
disappointment to Hank, who saw in Tiger’s behavior signs
that his pupil had developed a conflicted relationship with
the game. Hints that Tiger hungered to reinvent himself were
present in his bizarre infatuation with elite military
training, and—in a development Hank didn’t see coming—in the
scandal that would make headlines in late 2009. It all added
up to a big miss that Hank, try as he might, couldn’t save
Tiger from.
There’s never been a book about Tiger Woods that is as
intimate and revealing—or one so wise about what it takes to
coach a superstar athlete.
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