It's Not You, It's Me

I do hope that Tiger took personal responsibility for the break-up and that the two can remain friends...

By now you've no doubt heard the news that the fraternity of former Tiger swing coaches has gained a new member, one Sean Foley.  I'm both surprised and not surprised, as we here at Unplayable Lies always stake out a clearly demarcated stance on the issues of the day.  But enough about me...

The announcement was made by Tiger in a brief note on his website:

Tiger Woods is leaving swing coach Sean Foley after four years and no majors. 

The couple in happier times.

Woods said on his website Monday he will no longer work with Foley, the Canadian whom he hired when his game was at its low point following the upheaval with his marriage.

And he added these gratuitous sentiments:

''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.''

 From the dumpee's perspective, at least it happened the week after another of his prized pupils, Hunter Mahan, won.  

Jaimie Diaz has a typically thoughtful piece on the pair in which he highlights the importance of timing:

As science based as his teaching is, Foley soon enough learned that his biggest challenge would 

be fixing not the physical, but the mental. Which was actually a challenge and opportunity he welcomed. Naturally open and gregarious, a self-described searcher who enjoys sharing his own life lessons, Foley had openly looked forward to getting to know Woods well as a person and helping him through what he knew was a difficult period. He saw that dynamic as part and parcel of a successful coach/student partnership. 

"I want to be a teacher who teaches his guys more about life and themselves than just about the game," Foley said. "By helping them become better people, they're going to become better at their sport by having less conflict." 

But based on reliable observers, what Foley had hoped for didn't happen. Though their working relationship never showed any public strain, it remained more clinical than close. It follows that as a result, Woods never dealt with the root of his problems, which are not about technique or injuries, but rather about his wounded psyche and how it has changed his once supreme gift for competition.

Sean comes off well in the affair, making these comments about his now former pupil:

"We both sensed it," Foley said. "I know the world won't want to believe that two people can go in different directions without being upset with each other. It was a wonderful opportunity. I'm very grateful. This is not a sad day."

C'mon Sean, we all saw that Seinfeld episode.  Nobody will believe that the break-up was mutual....  No reason not to be gracious, but I also liked this bit of perspective on their relative importance:

"It's not frustrating," Foley said of the back issues that kept Woods from finding form or being

able to practice. "It's unfortunate. Tiger has been going at it for a long time. He's been playing golf at a high level since he was a kid. There's probably 50 or 60 golfers out there now who have a bulging disk or back problems. We weren't supposed to twist and turn like that for all these years. This is not an acute injury, like the leg injury that happened to Joe Theismann. This has happened over years."

"We showed what we could do together when he was healthy," added Foley, "but it's all credit to Tiger. He is the one who did it, not me. I didn't do anything. It's like Hunter Mahan [winning] yesterday. I've been saying the same thing to him [Foley is Mahan's coach] for five months. He put it together recently and won. If he hadn't won, that doesn't mean I'd say something different to him this week."

Sean will be just fine, he seems to get that it's not all about him and the limits of his ability to control events.  The evaluation of the "Foley Era" leaves us with an insoluble conundrum.... Tiger didn't win a major, so on that all-important metric the era was a failure.  But he also took Tiger from the emotional wreckage of Thanksgiving 2009 to his five-win, Player-of-the-Year season in 2013.  And the fact that Tiger stunk up the joint on the weekends at majors, is that on the teacher or the student?

Even harder to evaluate is Foley in the context of the 2014 train wreck.  From my vantage point, I'd be content to attribute his travails to the back, both pre and post-surgery.  There seems little doubt that he came back too soon after the surgery, and it's awfully hard to practice hard and play well with a bone shard pressed against a nerve.  Of course there are folks such as Brandel Chamblee that believe that the Foley swing caused the back injury, so we'll have that to argue about for the foreseeable future.

Paul Azinger, in blustery buffoon mode, tells us he can cure Tiger in ten minutes:

“There are only three things great players have done the same with their swing, the three

fundamentals,” Azinger said. “That’s physically. There’s a mental side. Of the three physical things, Tiger has lost track of one, and he’s got to fix it. It’s a very easy fix.”

What is it? 

Azinger says he isn't sharing that publicly, but he would tell Tiger Woods.

Yeah, thanks Paul... I'm not holding my breath on Tiger dropping that dime anytime soon.

Zinger does make the point that Tiger has always seemed overly-reliant on swing coaches, with which I agree.  There's also a sense that he's become too mechanical, playing swing instead of golf as they say....

Enough of this funeral dirge, how about we have a little fun with the melodrama... first, Butch Harmon shows us how to be a mensch:

In the moments following the announcement on Monday that Tiger Woods and swing coach Sean Foley had parted ways, Harmon reached out to the Canadian with a simple message.

“Sean’s had great success. He has nothing to hang his head about. I called him and told him that. I told him he worked his tail for this guy,” Harmon said. “Nothing lasts forever.”

And that bit of graciousness reminds of this story from the Diaz piece above:

But two years later they met a messy end, and early in 2004 Harmon approached Woods' new teacher, Hank Haney, to wish him well. 

"Hank, good luck," Harmon said, according to Haney's account in "The Big Miss." "It's a tough team to be on. And it's harder than it looks."

 Butch seems like the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with.

For those of a more analytical bent, Luke Kerr-Dineen posts this gif of Tiger's swing from three different eras:

I'd take any of those swings in a New York minute.

And lastly, thank God as always for the U.K. bookies.    Want some action on where Tiger will turn now?

Here's your racing form from our friends at Paddy Power:

What, no Rachel Uchitel?  That's the best I got, but here's Shackelford's reaction:

Nice to see David Feherty rewarded for his loyalty...

Ouch!  That's gonna leave a mark....

The Butch things is quite curious since I suspect that Butch doesn't need the aggravation.  In fact, as we found out when Butch took on Snedeker, he asks his stable ob players to approve his new students.  So Phil, are you OK if I also work with Tiger?  Wouldn't you love to have the NSA recording of that conversation?