Chapter 12

Lochinvar Golf Club

Houston, Texas

Fall 1993

Lochinvar Golf Club, in Houston, is the first course Jack Nicklaus designed in Texas. It’s also the professional home of Butch Harmon, whose father, Claude Harmon, won the Masters in 1948. The last club pro to win a major divided his time, summering at Winged Foot Golf Club, in Mamaroneck, New York, and wintering at the Thunderbird Country Club, in Rancho Mirage, California.

In 1960, the then sixteen-year-old Harmon carried Arnold Palmer’s scorecard on the way to Palmer’s winning that year’s Palm Springs Desert Golf Classic (the same year Palmer also won his second Masters and his first U.S. Open). Butchie-Boy, as Palmer called him, grows up “getting a master’s degree in watching the greatest players in the world.”

Harmon builds those experiences into a distinguished career as a golf coach, earlier this summer supporting Greg Norman’s British Open victory.

Throughout 1993, a key member of Tiger’s team has been absent: swing coach John Anselmo, who’s being treated for colon cancer and isn’t well enough to continue working with his prize pupil.

Earl Woods arranges for Tiger to spend two days at Lochinvar, where Harmon will film Tiger and give him a full evaluation. Harmon is eleven years younger than Earl, though the two men share a strong competitive drive and are both army veterans who served in Vietnam.

The coach is familiar with Tiger’s history in the sport, including “problems he had as a Black kid trying to get on golf courses. He was sometimes wrongly accused of causing problems at golf clubs, but it was never him. Tiger knew how to behave at a golf club and he loved the game.”

When Tiger walks onto the Lochinvar range—in sneakers, not cleated golf shoes—Harmon gives him a bucket of balls, then starts asking questions.

“Everybody has a go-to shot on a tight driving hole, like a little fade. What is your go-to shot?”

“I dunno,” Tiger answers. “Just kinda aim over there and it just kinda goes over there.”

Tiger’s game plan is instantly clear to Harmon: “He just hit the ball and found it, hit it and found it and then made the putt.”

When he needs to drive the ball to the fairway, Tiger explains, “I just aim down the middle and swing as hard as I can. No matter where it goes, I know I’m not going to be too far from the green. Then I figure out how to get there.”

Tiger wants more time with this coach, who’s pushing him to examine things he’s never considered.

“Can I come back tomorrow?” Tiger asks.

“Sure,” Harmon answers.

Harmon agrees to waive his $300-an-hour instructional fee while Tiger’s still an amateur, but first the swing coach needs Earl to agree on an important point.

“If I work with your son,” Harmon says, “and then he goes home and you dispute what I am saying, it probably wouldn’t work.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Earl counters. “I won’t try to be his golf coach if you don’t try and be his dad.”

As teacher and student, Butch Harmon and Tiger click.

According to Tiger, Harmon would “sit for hours on end, analyzing, criticizing, trying to boil the smallest thing down even smaller. Just his hard work gives me confidence.”

“I can’t get him off the phone,” Butch Harmon jokes to Sports Illustrated of his new student. “He wants to work with me 24 hours a day.”

Time will be scarcer than ever during college recruiting season. Throughout Tiger’s years as a junior golfer, twenty-five to thirty coaches have routinely turned up to watch him play. The choice is Tiger’s—but it’s an agonizing one. He’s given himself a deadline of mid-October to make his campus visits.

“I want to get it over with,” Tiger told reporters covering the U.S. Amateur Championship back in August. “I don’t want to deal with the hassle anymore.”

University of Nevada–Las Vegas, with its young and up-and-coming golf program, is one of the top contenders. Coach Dwaine Knight books Tiger a room at the Mirage, owned by Steve Wynn, the mogul who created the Las Vegas Strip as well as Shadow Creek Golf Course, a spectacularly engineered course fifteen miles north into the Mojave Desert that opened in 1990 at a cost north of $40 million.

“The scenery is unbelievable,” Tiger says of Shadow Creek. “You think you are in North Carolina or something, or Colorado with the mountains and the trees and the waterfalls.”

It’s no desert mirage when a golf cart pulls up to the 17th tee carrying Elizabeth Taylor. But teenage Tiger doesn’t recognize the sixty-one-year-old movie star.

“He had no clue who she was,” Coach Knight says with a grin. “His mind was just focused on golf.”

“Well, you don’t meet people like that when you are a kid,” says Tiger in his own defense. He also later learns that the waterfall on the green at that same 17th hole is where Liz Taylor’s good friend Michael Jackson, the superstar singer, likes to come to relax.

The UNLV visit, which also includes a reception hosted by the university’s president, impresses Tiger.

Tida is worried. Stanford University is the only school she wants for her son. She takes action, calling Wally Goodwin, coach of the Cardinal team.

“Well, you better come down,” she tells him.

Goodwin has invested years in recruiting Tiger to Stanford—first spotting him in a 1989 Sports Illustrated Faces in the Crowd feature. “I looked at this kid and I thought ‘what a smile,’” Goodwin says of first spotting Tiger in the magazine. “There was something different there. So I wrote him a letter.” The then seventh grader’s reply impressed Goodwin with its “perfect grammar, capitals, spelling, punctuation, everything.”

Now, four and a half years later, it’s decision time. Goodwin, Earl, Tida, and Tiger sit around a card table in the Woodses’ living room in Cypress. There’s pizza for dinner, but to Goodwin it doesn’t feel much like a party.

“Hey coach, I’ve got something to show you,” Tiger says.

He reaches under his chair and pulls out a UNLV golf hat and puts it on.

“Hey, you little twerp,” Goodwin says. “You wouldn’t have asked me to come down here if you were going to go to Vegas.”

“Relax, coach,” Tiger says. He reaches under his chair again and out comes a second hat—Arizona State, Phil Mickelson’s alma mater.

Goodwin had also once recruited Mickelson for Stanford, though Mickelson had admitted, “I love it here, Wally. But I don’t know that I want to study that hard while I’m playing golf.”

The Stanford coach mentally prepares himself for a long trip back to Northern California without a commitment from his top recruit.

“Tiger, if that’s as close as you’ve come to making up your mind I’ve got to go,” Goodwin says.

That’s when Tiger stops him and pulls out a third hat—a Cardinal red Stanford cap. He puts it on, saying, “Coach, I’m with you.”

There’s no denying the pull of Las Vegas glamour (“It was heartbreaking to lose him right at the end,” UNLV’s Coach Knight says), but after Tiger’s campus visit to Palo Alto, he told his parents, “I knew I was home.”

On November 10, 1993, he makes it official. In the gymnasium at Western High—with Earl, Tida, and the press among his many witnesses—Tiger signs his letter of intent.

“I always tell Tiger that golf is not a priority,” Tida says. “Nobody can take an education away from you, especially a degree at Stanford.”