Butch: Haney's Memory Suspiciously Good; Tiger's Swing Is "Very Robotic"

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Jeff Neuman with several fun insights from a silent-until-now Butch Harmon, talking about Hank Haney's book on Tiger, which drops to the fifth spot on this week's NY Times combined bestseller list.

Highlights...

"I'm very surprised that he would write it," Harmon said this week. "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."

He went on: "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."

Doesn't every great swing instructor keep a diary?

As for Tiger, Butch offers his advice from afar, which probably won't be appreciated by Tiger's current instructor Sean Foley.

"For me, and I think we saw this at the Masters, he looks like he's playing 'golf- swing' and not golf," Harmon said. "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."

Foley: Lay Off My Man Tiger!

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Sean Foley is fed up, mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore. At least, as much as a super nice Canadian can get angry. Asked at the end of a Sirius/XM Fairways of Life interview with Matt Adams about Woods after 20 minutes of general golf talk, the instructor came to his pupil's defense. Randall Mell reports:

“I know everyone has a job to do, and I get it,” Foley said. “But if it is about the game of golf, Tiger Woods is an extremely important part of the game, and I think everyone understands that. It has just gotten to the point where the tearing down of Tiger as a person and a golfer has become just too much. I think it is just out of hand.

“I realize it is 2012, and we have dotcoms, and you have to write five articles a day, and you run out of things to write about, but we should be in a position where we are trying to help and lift up and support a player like Tiger Woods, instead of tearing him down, because everyone in the golf industry is better off because of his existence.

“That is basically one thing I want to get out. Tiger is a wonderful person, and he is a good dude, and he lives a complex life. I think things have got to slow down, it has got to stop, the daily referendums and the criticism.”

Duly noted. And that won't happen as long as he's kicking clubs.