If you want dirt on Tiger, give this a Big Miss

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THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTO Hank Haney and Tiger Woods at the 2009 Masters in Augusta, Ga. (CP)

Book review

The Big Miss

My Years Coaching Tiger Woods

• By Hank Haney
• Crown Archetype, 262 pages, $31

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When Hank Haney announced he was going to write a book about the six years he coached Tiger Woods, the rumour-mongers around the world frothed in anticipation.

Imagine what the golf teacher/whisperer/confidant/friend/opportunist would know about Tiger's tumultuous affairs. Imagine what insight he would have about the events that knocked Woods off the top of golf's mountaintop and into the depths of tabloid hell.

Imagine what kind of book that would be.

The Big Miss is not that book.

What Haney knows about Woods's life off the links -- or what he says he knows -- doesn't even fill a chapter of this self-serving look back at six of the most famous years in golf.

Here it is:

"During that time, on the road or in Orlando, I never saw Tiger flirting or acting inappropriately with another woman, or even heard rumours that he was seeing others," Haney writes in the chapter called Quitting," 194 pages into a 262-page book.

Good to see Haney got top marks at the Bill Clinton school of denial.

Haney may have known as much as Sergeant Schultz back then, but he knew enough after splitting with Tiger that the public imagined he would know enough to sell a swing-and-tell book.

That prospect, "What did Hank know?" permeates almost every sentence of The Big Miss. It's as inescapable as grass on a golf course.

Like a dry memoir from a presidential adviser, though, The Big Miss gently scrapes the surface of all the juicy bits of Tiger's travails. Instead, it focuses on the topics that Haney knows all about.

That means the golf swing.

When Tiger is "getting stuck" or swinging "over the line," Haney describes faults in Woods's game, not yet another awkward text or the evil eye from his ex-wife, Elin.

Haney preaches to play strategically and avoid the place on each hole that "the big miss" will lead to a triple bogey. The title also refers to the big chance both Tiger and Haney had to achieve something really magical, as opposed to plain awesome.

Tiger is portrayed as an insular, unresponsive, suspicious daredevil whose life is a pressure cooker, yet appears unstirred after meeting the likes of Barack Obama or Nelson Mandela.

Tiger gets a bigger charge taking part in numerous gruelling Navy SEAL training camps that jeopardize his golf career. He dreams about trading in his driver for an M-16.

Haney's take is only what he got to see. His views of Tiger's inner workings are hardly any more accurate than your typical TV golf expert because so few people are allowed to peer behind the thick curtain that separates the golf-course Tiger from the mysterious, real Tiger.

The results of Haney's teachings bring out the teacher's vanity. He feels betrayed that golf analysts and Tiger himself blame him when Woods plays poorly. And when Tiger is at his best, like at the 2006 British Open or his famous limp to victory at the 2008 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, Tiger receives all the credit and Haney's input is forgotten.

In print, these few years later, Haney gets to set his record straight, saying Tiger would have won far more tournaments if he'd only listen to him more closely and worked more on his putting like he advised.

He complains that Tiger often refused to listen to him, and it's the repeated ignorance of his teachings that led to their 2010 breakup, not Tiger's infidelities.

Haney writes that he still pulls for Tiger. Tiger's response? He let his agent do the talking, and he wasn't impressed.

The Big Miss might help your golf game, but it tells little about Tiger Woods and nothing about why he so brazenly cheated on his wife.

In that sense, it really is a Big Miss.

Alan Small is an assistant city editor at the Winnipeg Free Press.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 14, 2012 J9