Years ago, I walked a few holes at a PGA Championship with Sean Foley, at the time a little-known Canadian golf instructor whose star pupil was Stephen Ames.
As we followed Ames, Foley expounded on his theories of the golf swing. After three holes, I invented an excuse and made a beeline for the beer tent. I had had enough.
“This guy is either a genius or a lunatic,” I recall thinking.
My brain hurt from trying to distill all his theories into something I could translate into a column for Sportsnet readers. I couldn’t. I’m still not sure if that was my fault or Foley’s.
Maybe that’s what happened with Tiger Woods, whose split from Foley was made public Monday. Maybe it was his brain and his back that were hurting, and maybe—or maybe not—Foley was responsible for both, as some have suggested.
For a limited time get Sportsnet Magazine’s digital edition free for 60 days. Visit Appstore/RogersMagazines to see what you’re missing out on.
Foley has both raving supporters and raging critics. Among the former are his current stable, including Hunter Mahan, who won The Barclays on Sunday, and world No. 5 Justin Rose. Among the latter are some pretty knowledgeable golf observers, like Paul Azinger and Brandel Chamblee.
“If Tiger Woods were a football team and Sean Foley were the coach, he’d have been fired a long time ago,” Chamblee said on Golf Channel’s Morning Drive. “That’s not to disparage Sean Foley. He could go win the Super Bowl with Hunter Mahan or Justin Rose. It’s just not a good fit for Tiger Woods.”
Azinger, like many others, has questioned why Foley hasn’t been able to correct Woods’s multi-directional shot pattern. Pro golfers want their misses to be predictable. Recently, Woods has been spraying shots both left and right.
“If a player can eliminate one side of the golf course, and generally right-handed players want to eliminate left, it’s easy to eliminate left if you have proper instruction, if someone is giving you good advice,” Azinger told a San Diego radio station.
“It’s as simple as this: if you know you can’t hit it left, why would you ever miss it to the right? If you know you can’t hook it, if you know you can’t pull it, why would you ever miss it to the right? Tiger has to get back to that, but he’s playing ‘golf swing,’ he’s playing mechanics. The only way Tiger can suffer a two-way miss for this length of time is he is not being fed good information.”
Or maybe, like me, he couldn’t process Foley’s information, no matter how good it was.
Tiger made the divorce announcement Monday on his web site, which still carried a photo of him walking alongside Foley. Both the photo and the words indicate the split was amicable.
“I’d like to thank Sean for his help as my coach and for his friendship,” Woods said. “Sean is one of the outstanding coaches in golf today, and I know he will continue to be successful with the players working with him. With my next tournament not until my World Challenge event at Isleworth in Orlando [due to recuperation from back surgery], this is the right time to end our professional relationship.”
“My time spent with Tiger is one of the highlights of my career so far, and I am appreciative of the many experiences we shared together,” Foley said. “It was a lifelong ambition of mine to teach the best player of all time in our sport. I am both grateful for the things we had the opportunity to learn from one another, as well as the enduring friendship we have built.”
Although Tiger said Monday that there is no timetable for finding a new coach, much speculation has centred on his return to Butch Harmon under whose tutelage he won eight majors. Woods moved to Hank Haney after the 2003 Open Championship, winning six more majors. With Foley, he won three times in 2012 and five times in 2013, but no majors.
However, as Harmon pointed out Monday, he had Tiger at his physical peak. His body could do just about anything he asked of it back then.
As of today, Woods is a 38-year-old fading superstar whose body is paying the price for playing what amounts to a full schedule since he was a child. His multiple surgeries (knee, elbow, Achilles, back, Escalade) are well documented, as are his stubbornness and unflagging confidence in himself, sometimes ignoring clear-cut evidence to the contrary. Chances are more than good that he will never win another PGA Tour event, much less a 15th major.
I had a brief interaction with Tiger in New York City last week as Nike launched their new Vapor line of irons. He sat with a small group of Canadian golf writers for 40 minutes or so, discussing his input into Nike club design. He was relaxed, engaging, friendly. As he said good-bye, he shook our hands with a smile.
Apparently, we weren’t the only Canadians he was saying good-bye to last week.