Some highlights:
On Hank Haney's current best-selling book, "The Big Miss”:
– “I'm very surprised that he would write it. I'd never do that to Tiger or Greg [Norman] or any of the guys I've been with. We get to spend a lot of time with these people, sometimes even more time than their own families. Things are said, or you see different things, and it's just—it is what it is, you just leave it where it belongs. I was really shocked to see him talk about Elin and Tiger's kids and stuff like that, I don't think that had any place in it.
- “It almost seems the way he has everything documented in there—too many times and dates and places that you wouldn't come up with from memory—it's like he kept precise notes all along with writing a book in mind."
On Tiger Woods :
- "For me, and I think we saw this at the Masters, he looks like he's playing 'golf- swing' and not golf. In my opinion, he's very robotic. And you could see that at Augusta with all his practice swings and the double-cross shots when he's trying to fade it and he hooks it. I think everyone thought because he won at Bay Hill that he was back; well, he didn't hit it great at Bay Hill, he hit it OK. And Bay Hill's not a major."
- "When I had him, I'm more of a natural-type teacher, I like to keep what you do naturally and just try to improve on it. I like to let you be creative, which he was good at."
- (On his swing changes) "Under pressure, which swing am I using? What am I thinking? What are my eyes seeing? There's too much more that goes into it than just the actual swing. He's changed so many times he may have confused himself.”
- “For me, I think he's lost his nerve putting. I think his nerves are bad, and he's lost his confidence."
- "If he ever asked me what I thought he needed to do, I'd tell him, look, go on the practice tee without anybody—without me, without Sean [Foley, his current coach], without Haney, without a camera, and start hitting golf shots. Hit some high draws, some low draws, high fades, low fades, move the ball up and down, move it around; don't worry about how you do it and go back to feeling it again. Quit playing golf-swing and just hit shots; just say to himself, I'm gonna hit a low fade, and I don't need anybody to tell me how to do it, I'm just gonna feel it. He's Tiger Woods, for God's sake. He doesn't know how to hit a shot?"
On Phil Mickelson at the Masters:
- "It was a bad shot—I'm not making excuses, but he did get very unlucky with how the ball bounced. And after that, I thought he played everything so quickly; I said on the commentary [for Sky Sports], 'Oh my gosh, he's not taking any time at all.' Afterwards, when I talked to him about going back to the tee, he said, 'S—, I'd've probably ended up in the same place.' Well, that's one way to look at it."
On teaching and coaching:
- "Teaching is creating a mechanical motion, within the framework of who they are and what their body can do. Coaching is getting through their head. Coaching is relaxing them when they're nervous.… At major championships, if you watch me work the range with my players, especially once the tournament starts, most of the time I have 'em laughing. I'm telling them jokes. Because we're not gonna fix anything 10 minutes before they tee off."
And finally, Mickelson on Butch:
- "What's fun about working with Butch is that it might only take two or three minutes to fix a problem, but hanging around with him for 30 or 45 minutes is so entertaining...I'm always surprised at some of the things that come out of his mouth."