The Year of Living Dangerously

Completing the healing was the circle of life. When he won the PGA Championship at Southern Hills, it was his 13th major victory in 44 professional starts. But most important to Woods was the fact that his wife and 2-month-old daughter -- dressed in victory red -- were waiting for him on the 72nd green.

"It's a feeling I've never had before," he says. "It used to be my mom and dad. The British Open last year was different, but this one was certainly so special and so right to have Elin and Sam there." It gave further resonance to the generational echo in his daughter's name: Sam was Earl's code name for Tiger when he wanted to get his son's attention without alerting a crowd.

As Woods' life was enlightened, so was his golf. And unlike previous years when he experienced swing epiphanies by pounding balls, this breakthrough came more through quiet contemplation.

"I'll tell you 100 percent what happened," says Williams. "Tiger came back from Carnoustie, and instead of spending hours on the practice field, he just tried to picture how he wanted to swing the club. He used what Hank was telling him to do -- which he had been having quite a bit of difficulty putting into practice -- and went about getting swing thoughts organized and the right mental picture. He came to Firestone having done little actual practice, but from that point on, he had a mental image of himself that he was able to relate to the movement of his body.

"And each week he played, he got a little bit better right up to the Tour Championship. His rhythm and balance with every club were exceptional, and never changed. In the 10 years I've been with him, it was the best stretch I've ever seen Tiger play." That process was how Woods came closer than he has ever been to "owning" his swing, to borrow the phrase that has been his goal since he began working with Haney in early 2004.

"Hank has been invaluable to Tiger, no question," Williams says. "In the last three years he's picked Hank's brain and totally trusted him with his golf swing. But in the maturity process that a golfer goes through, he doesn't want to get too reliant on a coach, because it can cause a loss of feel, and golf is a game of feel. Hank remained his guide, but ultimately it was important for Tiger to find his own way."

It's instructive that after Carnoustie, Woods never visited the range for a post-round practice session the rest of the year. In those final five tournaments, he won four and was second in the other. For his part, Woods said he began to find a groove after discovering that playing in the Scottish wind had led him into an old bad habit: leaning back and squatting too much at address. When he started standing taller and more on the balls of his feet, he stopped fighting his release, and his swing began to flow, helping him lose the high-right-shoulder follow-through that sent the ball wide right. Arron Oberholser labeled the onslaught -- which reached its climax when Woods shot 28 on East Lake's front nine during the second round of the Tour Championship -- "horrifying precision."

Asked for an accounting, Woods described a suddenly unencumbered access to an intuitive genius.

"Just understanding how to play the game," he says. "It's not so much the physical part. It's about playing the golf ball. I was lucky that my dad always stressed to me that golf is not about how far you hit it, but where you want the ball to go. How are you going to get it there? If you don't get it there, what went wrong, so you can apply it to the next one? That's how I play the game of golf. I pick apart a golf course from the green back, factoring pin location, trouble, iron play, then ultimately the drive, and chart my way back from the green.

"It's weird that it happens so quickly now. If we went through the whole process on one hole, it would sound really complicated. But now, I just understand how to deal with it."

OVERCOMING FEAR OF CHANGE
To reach such a pure state, Woods had to transcend the difficulty of taking extensive swing changes into competition, the painstaking process he committed to under Haney even more ambitiously than he once did with Butch Harmon. Perhaps the greatest tribute to Woods' talent is that he has won five majors the past three seasons with a swing that remained a work in progress.

"Tiger is so good that he can find a way to win even when he's uncomfortable with his swing," says Haney. "But he kept getting more and more comfortable with each new move we added and gained more command, which led to the confidence to trust without worrying about the bad shot. He's been at that point in practice rounds for a while now, but it's a whole other mental challenge under the gun."

According to Haney, the biggest hurdle that Woods has had to overcome is "the fear of left." Here's why. The biggest technical change that Woods has made under Haney is altering his takeaway and his downswing so that the club goes back and comes down more in front, rather than more behind his body.

When Woods swung the club more from the inside, he squared the club through the impact area with a last-second rotation of his hands, a "flip" that Woods abhorred for its relative inconsistency. But from the more down-the-line delivery position that Haney taught him, Woods could feel that the flip he was so accustomed to executing would produce a huge pull hook, the last shot he wants to hit. In reaction to this "fear of left," Woods resisted squaring the club, especially the driver, through a combination of leaving the clubface open and lowering his upper body into the hitting area to keep from rotating toward the target. The result was often the block to the right off the tee that has become so familiar in the last few years, along with an angry Woods spitting variations of "Tiger Woods! Trust your swing!"