(Crown Archetype, $26)
No wonder Tiger Woods doesn’t want you to read this book, said Bradley S. Klein in Golfweek. Hank Haney, Woods’s swing coach for six years, has produced a book about working with golf’s greatest star that doubles as “an alarming look” at a man whose public triumphs “masked a day-to-day existence of profound superficiality.” Forget the sex scandals—which Haney says took him by surprise. The Woods we meet here is an “emotional blank wall,” so shut down around Elin Nordegren, then his wife, that he prohibited her from smiling on the golf course. Haney’s Woods is also incapable of empathy, once agreeing to share a hotel room with a player who is a devout Christian and then commandeering the TV to watch porn. Mostly, he’s just shallow. Though they spent 100 days a year together, Haney says he and Tiger never had a substantive conversation.
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Actually, “Tiger should be grateful Haney wrote The Big Miss,” said Geoff Shackelford in GolfDigest.com. While Woods has condemned Haney’s project as a betrayal, readers may discover that it’s mostly a book about golf, and a good one at that. The salacious stuff gets top billing, but Haney’s criticisms amount to “little jabs” in an otherwise “reverential assessment” of his formal pupil. Woods’s “purposefulness, eccentricity, and drive” have never been better showcased. Haney has written a first in the history of golf literature—a true behind-the-scenes look at “how an all-time great” goes about maintaining mastery.
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