Tiger Woods cut adrift as swing coach Hank Haney quits

With open speculation that he was about to be sacked as Tiger Woods’s swing coach, Hank Haney got his retaliation in first by resigning from the role. The question now being asked is: who will replace him?
After Woods had hung his coach of six years out to dry last week at The Players Championship at Sawgrass, Florida, it came as little surprise that the two had finally split. But few expected Haney to be the one to end the relationship — announcing it, as is often the way these days, on his website.
“Tiger Woods and I will always be friends, but I believe that there is a time and place for everything, and I feel at this time in my life I want to move forward in other areas,” Haney, 54, said.
“As we all know, Tiger has been through a lot in the last six months and I really believe that given the chance, mind-free and injury-free, we will all see [him] play once again like we all know he can.”
With Woods struggling to find any semblance of a working swing since returning after five months in exile, Haney’s role was openly questioned. He was nowhere to be seen at Sawgrass and Woods made no attempt to quell the inevitable speculation surrounding his absence. A curt “I’m still working with him” was all he would say.
It must also have hurt Haney that before Woods pulled out with a neck injury in his final round, his swing was taken apart frame by frame by television analysts.
Not only that, but Haney became the butt of a locker-room joke. On the back of his association with Woods, he has been working on the swing of Ray Romano, the comedian, for a television series. At The Players, it was being suggested that if Woods stayed with him much longer, then he would end up with a swing like Romano’s.
Haney, who had worked with Woods since 2004, had much to prove in the early days when the world No 1 attempted to change his swing away from the one honed by Butch Harmon — who had worked with him for nine years until 2002 and had been his coach when, after the Masters in 2001, he held all four majors.
Inevitably comparisons were made between Harmon and Haney, and at first it looked as if Woods had made a mistake in switching coaches. But from 2005, he turned his game around and Haney can make note that his star pupil won six major championships in the time they were together.
Some have suggested that Woods would do well to go back to Harmon, but it is hard to imagine that the world No 1 would surrender that particular moral high ground after initiating the split.
More significantly, Harmon now works closely with Phil Mickelson, the world No 2, who would not countenance such an arrangement.
It could leave the way clear for Sean Foley, a coach with a growing reputation, who works with, among others, Hunter Mahan, Sean O’Hair and Justin Rose. You could argue that such a role would be a poisoned chalice. But with Woods’s game at its lowest point, there is only one way that it can go. And who would turn down such an opportunity to take the credit?