The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods by Hank Haney Page B

situations, he took a lot of time helping individual kids with their games and talked with them freely. During the Q&A sessions, he answered 10-year-olds much more completely than he did the media. Being around youth seemed to relax him, which made me wonder if it was because he missed his.
    At Isleworth, he played a lot with Mark and John, veterans who’d helped him when he first turned pro and whom he trusted, but he was loosest with a group of much younger guys, several of them teenagers. They were all good players, but Tiger liked to work with them on their games, encourage them with needling and prods during their rounds, or just listen to their jargon and expressions. Sometimes he’d play the best ball of a couple of them and me; sometimes everyone would just play his own ball. Or Tiger would bet them that they couldn’t make a certain shot, and the payment would be push-ups, which might leave Tiger’s victim sore for days afterward. The push-up bet had started after Tiger admitted he couldn’t feel nervous playing for money. But the pain from hundreds of push-ups raised the stakes. Tiger’s most intense push-up matches came against Corey Carroll, the son of a member at Isleworth, who is 11 years younger than Tiger. Their matches would be stroke play, with Corey getting a few shots. The standard bet was 150 push-ups per stroke, with payment to be completed by midnight. Tiger loved to “collect,” usually laughing as he stood over the loser. But he sometimes lost, once having to pay Corey with 600 push-ups.
    Overall, Tiger wasn’t much of a bettor on the golf course. He had a habit, if he lost, of asking to play more holes, double or nothing. Mark would occasionally make jokes about it, even telling the media that Tiger was “kind of slow to go to the hip.” In his rare high-stakes games against non-pros, Tiger set bets that would be very hard for him to lose. Former baseball pitching great John Smoltz came to Isleworth once to play with Tiger and Mark. Smoltz is a good golfer, maybe scratch or plus-1, and Tiger said he’d give him three strokes a side at stroke play. Even though Isleworth is one of the hardest courses in Florida, especially at the maximum length of 7,700 yards that Tiger played it from, Tiger’s par was about 66. That meant Smoltz had to shoot around par to be competitive, a very tall order because according to the course rating, par for a scratch player from those tees is about 77. My recollection is that they were playing for $10,000. On the first hole, Smoltz pumped one out-of-bounds, and I heard Mark needle him with, “No big deal, Smoltzie. Normally a round with Tiger is worth at least six figures. You’re getting off cheap.”
    There has long been a lot of talk about Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley being close to Tiger, but I didn’t see those two guys that much. Each visited Tiger once at Isleworth that I know of, and Tiger met them in Las Vegas a few times. Tiger clearly admired Michael for what he’d accomplished as an athlete, and I think Michael gave him advice on how to handle fame. Charles cracked him up, but he also gave him some brotherly advice. But I got to know Charles well, and I know he was baffled by Tiger being closed off and keeping him at a distance. Someone else who’s been identified as a confidant, Notah Begay, I saw just a couple of times when he stayed at Tiger’s house when he was coming through Orlando. I know they’d been teammates at Stanford and that Tiger plays in Notah’s charity event, but Tiger never talked about Notah.
    I don’t mean to imply that Tiger didn’t consider these guys friends. Rather, I’m saying that Tiger didn’t let anybody very close.
    In my experience, the person Tiger shared the most with was Corey. They met on the practice range at Isleworth in 2004 after Tiger noticed how hard Corey worked on his game. Corey is an academically brilliant kid who did stuff like build computers and study quantum physics. He told me he