In August of 2010 Tiger Woods officially started working with Sean Foley. Any golf fan can remember that Tiger was a complete mess at that time. He was missing shots and missing cuts. He needed some direction. At the time, Sean Foley was coaching Hunter Mahan and Sean O’Hair. Many believe Tiger started to work with him well before August but did not make the official announcement until the closing of the season. After working with Foley for four years, Tiger Woods has decided to call it quits with Sean Foley.
When looking at Tiger’s golf game with Foley most fans will admit that it was not nearly as good as with Butch Harmon or Hank Haney. Tiger did not win a single major and was consistently out of sorts on the course. While Tiger played it off that it takes time and he just needed more reps most fans realized this was not the same Tiger Woods that won 14 major championships and dominated the game of golf. One of the biggest problems with the Sean Foley Tiger Woods golf swing with the inability to hit a driver straight. Here is why Tiger couldn’t hit his driver straight.
Sean Foley and the Stack and Tilt
The first thing Sean Foley tried to do with Tiger was to keep him more centered over the ball even when going back. In his backswing, Tiger was known to sway back ever so slightly. As he started the downswing he would dip his head and fall back. In the video below, you will clearly see that Foley was trying to keep Tiger stacked over the ball rather than falling back.
While being stacked over the ball is great for short iron shots it can make it extremely difficult to hit a driver. When hitting a driver, you want to be coming up into the ball with the head of the driver. There is a reason Phil and other PGA Tour golfers drop their back shoulder when starting their driver swing. Coming into the ball with one’s body in front of the ball is fantastic to compress and spin the ball with wedges and irons. This is not what you will want to do with a driver. Here is an example of a friend of mine hitting a driver about 280 right down the middle:
Notice how low his back shoulder is even before he starts his driver swing. This is something that would help Tiger tremendously as he is hitting his driver with way too much spin. When Tiger hits that pull right or the snap hook it is because he is coming in with a closed face and likely hitting down on the ball way too much.
Golf fans have seen Tiger hit some terrible drivers over the last four years and much of this is due to the fact that Sean Foley is trying to “stack” him over the ball way too much. That said, Tiger has never been a straight, long ball driver, but he has been better than the debacle we saw with Foley from 2010 to 2014.
Tiger Woods’ Coach in 2015
There have been rumors that Notah Begay III is currently working with Tiger to help him clean up his swing. Notah and Tiger went to college together at Stanford and were on the same golf team. Notah and Tiger have been very good friends for years as Tiger confides in Notah when he needs help with parts of his swing. Even through the entire debacle Notah felt as if Tiger was making progress and would return to the dominate player he once was.
No matter who is coaching Tiger Woods in 2015 it is going to be a tough transition. Golf fans want Tiger to win a major and I just don’t think it can happen. He is coming off another injury and he will likely have to make some adjustments to his swing. It has also been stated that Tiger has never been the same since coming back from the sex addiction rehab clinic in Mississippi.
Even Hank Haney claimed that Tiger no longer had the killer instinct he once had before going through the mental grind of rehab. As a golf fan, I would love to see Tiger back at the top of his game. As a person that fully understands psychology, I know it will never happen again. It is unfortunate, but true.
