The most controversial book yet on Tiger Woods appears on shelves today. While a compelling read, it won't heighten your opinion of the golfer or his former coach, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

ALONG WITH jeans in the clubhouse and lady members at Augusta, golf doesn’t really do hatchet jobs. It’s all a little unseemly, all a little footbally.

If we know one thing about the golf world, it’s that it can and will knot its knickers over the tiniest of slights so by and large golf books tend to be barren ground for the kind of gossip and wink-and-elbow stuff that sustains a good page-turner. If nothing else then, Hank Haney’s The Big Miss – My Years Coaching Tiger Woods stands apart purely because there’s enough scuttlebutt in here to keep a bingo bus buzzing all the way home.

Tiger Woods is cheap, to the point where he wouldn’t offer up so much as a popsicle unless you asked him and in fact he delights in his reputation as a mean tipper. Tiger Woods regularly overplays the extent of his injuries to make himself look like more of an athlete. Tiger Woods is a selfish, obsessive, stubborn, cold, ruthless and petty human being who didn’t change one bit after The Scandal even though he promised he would. Oh, and Tiger Woods thinks Ian Poulter is a dick.

Although there’s plenty in that haystack to needle Woods were he ever to cast a glance over the book, there isn’t an awful lot that anyone who’s been paying reasonable attention wouldn’t already know or suspect. It isn’t a surprise, for instance, to find that Woods one night raked in chips worth hundreds of thousands of dollars playing blackjack in Las Vegas yet still only threw his dealer and waitress a couple of hundred apiece as he left.

Stories like that have been doing the rounds about Woods for most of his adult life, to the point where even friends of his like Mark O’Meara have always dragged him over the coals about it. But, as Haney says in the book: “He seemed to think it was funny to be cheap.” Thing is, although these stories have long been in the ether they’ve always been second-hand, Chinese-whispered to the point where half are probably true and half are just about true enough to be probable. Haney doesn’t come across as the most trusted confidante in the world through the course of his book but at no point in it do you have any reason to call him a liar.

It’s probably worth saying as well that for all the names the Woods camp have called him over the past month, they’ve yet to reach for that one.

So we can take it that the portrait of Woods presented by Haney here is reasonably faithful. Haney was his coach for six years, spent about 110 days each year in his company and estimates that he was in phone and text contact for about the same amount again. He had proximity without ever getting close, which is as much as anyone can ever really hope for. So unless Elin Nordgren ever takes the time to commit her life to print, this is about as rounded a picture of the most world’s most famous sportsman as we’re likely to see.

Haney’s admiration for Woods the golfer is never in doubt. The occasional frustration he found in trying to coach him doesn’t compare to the praise he has for the student and player he is. If much of the book is taken up with the sort of mind-shredding analysis of swing planes and wrist-cocks that will leave even the most earnest golf nerd spinning, it’s only because both teacher and pupil were immersed in the minutiae of it all throughout their time together. Not for nothing did a friend of Haney’s call Woods’s eventual downfall a “geek tragedy”.

Even the behind-the-curtain personal stuff isn’t all damning. When Haney’s first wife was ill throughout the summer of 2007, Woods showed empathy and support to give him all the space he needed and the pair did a lot of their work together on the phone even as Woods picked up his 13th Major – the US PGA at Southern Hills. He has a sense of humour too, as evidenced by the now-famous porn-in-the-hotel-room prank pulled on Zach Johnson and the fact that he was delighted to have a South Park episode based on his travails in late 2009.

You can’t help feeling a little sorry for Woods at times here. Haney paints a life lived in perpetual competition – with other golfers, with friends, with history, with himself. One particularly glum vignette concerns the hours after Woods has won the 2005 Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines, his first win in 16 months, his first since asking Haney to become his coach and also his first since he and Elin got married.

His new wife had walked 31 holes with him on the rain-stretched final day and was now dying to celebrate the victory, casually mentioning that when she had worked as Jesper Parnevik’s nanny, they always threw a big party whenever he won a tournament. Woods looked at her and set her straight. “E, that’s not what we do. I’m not Jesper. We’re supposed to win.”

It’s this sort of insider, eye-witness anecdote that has got Haney into trouble in the US with the release of his book. Even other coaches have filleted him for putting into print what nobody would have doubted at the time were private conversations and Haney has admitted his career as a top-level coach is probably over now on the back of that kind of scene-setting. “But these are my memories too,” he offers, by way of justification.

As an author, he comes across as slightly needy and not particularly likeable. As soon as he hangs up the phone after Woods asks him to be his coach, his first thoughts are more in keeping with an X-Factor hopeful than a serious golf instructor. “I feel as though I’ve won the lottery,” he writes. “I’m going to gain in stature. I’m going to be famous.” On the plane home after Woods wins the 2006 British Open at Hoylake, Haney takes advantage of his good mood to ask him to sign a yardage book and a programme. When Woods does so, Haney takes quiet umbrage over the fact all he got was a signature and not a personalised message – umbrage he keeps for the book and never reveals to Woods himself. It’s all very childish and makes you wonder at Haney’s motives, all the more so when he tries later in the book to break down some of Woods’s innermost thoughts.

“Giving himself over to golf instead of a more normal life had many advantages,” Haney writes, “but being a well-adjusted, fulfilled person wasn’t one of them. I admired tremendously the way he held up his end of the bargain to produce excellence. But I’d seen close up the cost of so much single-mindedness, and I wondered, ‘As much as Tiger has gained in wealth and glory, is it possible that he feels used?’ ”

You think, Hank? You reckon he might feel a little used, possibly by someone who now has his own TV show on ESPN on the back of the highest-profile coaching gig in the game?

Haney compares Woods’s fame to that of Britney Spears and Michael Jackson on the one hand and then wonders at his unwillingness to let many people get close to him on the other. It’s difficult to come away from the book with your opinion of either coach or pupil heightened.

For all that, it makes compelling reading. The account of Woods’ brush with the US Navy Seals is at times astonishing, if only for the fact the world never knew how apparently close he came to giving it all up. And the chaos behind the week he won the 2008 US Open with a broken leg is pretty mind-boggling too, a tribute to the force of will that made him what he was.

That was his last Major win and you can be sure as he tries to dig out his next at Augusta this coming week, Woods will give short shrift to any questions concerning Haney’s book. And so he should – Haney is old news to him and the pair haven’t worked together since this week two years ago. They were never friends, even though Haney makes it clear he longed to be thought of as such. But that doesn’t mean the book is insignificant. Far from it. You might not want to invite Haney into your life afterwards but you’ll keep reading to the end.

The Big Miss – My Years Coaching Tiger Woods by Hank Haney (Crown Publishing, €19.99)

Haney On....

Post-victory Tiger

“To be around Tiger in the immediate aftermath of one of his victories was a little eerie. He’d smile and shake hands but his eyes would stay blank, never quite fixing on anything. I know it was only golf but that detached quality brought to mind the term stone-cold killer.”

Tiger’s Navy Seal obsession

“Tiger told me he actually got shot with a rubber bullet in a Kill House exercise. ‘I screwed up,’ he said. ‘In a real mission I probably would have gotten some of my squad killed.’ . . .

“There were times I couldn’t contain my exasperation. ‘Tiger,’ I’d say. ‘Man, what are you doing? Are you out of your mind? What about Nicklaus’s record? Don’t you care about that?’ He looked at me and said, ‘No, I’m satisfied with what I’ve done in my career.’ “

The Package

“The Package was the sum of all of Tiger’s qualities and characteristics, the good and the bad . . . Those qualities, foremost among them an extraordinary ability to focus and stay calm under stress, also included selfishness, obsessiveness, stubbornness, coldness, ruthlessness, pettiness and cheapness. Winning gave him permission to remain a flawed and in some ways immature person.”

On how bad it was between them at the end (final round 2010 Masters)

“He pulled his drive a good 80 yards, a shot far more crooked than anything he’d hit on the range, the ball nearly going through the adjoining ninth fairway. Because I knew he still had a shot from over there, and because of all my conflicted feelings about Tiger, I wondered if he was conspiring against me. Did he want to establish that his Hank Haney swing was so bad that his only chance to win would be to rescue himself with an improvised fix?”