Tiger tell-all paints a complex picture

Tiger tell-all paints a complex picture

Andrew Redington/Getty Images

Tiger Woods’ former coach Hank Haney (r.) says he never suspected that Woods was having multiple affairs, saying that his phone buzzed a lot with text messages ‘but I never knew anything.’

Hank Haney stood at the front of the conference room in the Conde Naste building with a big blowup of Tiger Woods on the cover of Golf Digest behind him.

It may have been as close as Woods' former swing coach will ever get to him again.

Haney is persona non grata in the Team Tiger camp these days with the release of his tell-some-but-not-all book The Big Miss. He'd like Woods to read it, that it's really a tribute to his greatness. But for now, that's about as likely as Woods showing up at the local strip joint in downtown Augusta next week.

So Haney carries on with his book tour, which made a stop for a media breakfast on Times Square Thursday, explaining why he wrote it in the first place, begging everyone not to judge it by the excerpts that got out there a few weeks ago and, in some ways, defending himself against Woods' recent success with new coach Sean Foley.

"When it all came down to it, I thought, these just aren't Tiger's memories. T hese are my memories too," said Haney, Woods' coach for six years after Butch Harmon. "He doesn't have a patent on those memories. I had an incredible front row seat to greatness. There are many, many complexities that make up Tiger Woods and I wanted to be able to share them."

According to Haney, the reaction to his work, penned with well-respected golf writer Jaime Diaz, has turned around since people have been reading the book and not just the excerpts, from a 90 percent disapproval among his Twitter followers to a 99 percent approval .

He said he told his publisher he didn't want to do a "takedown" book and that everything in it pertains to golf.

"That was my litmus test," he said. "There are many things we did take out. There were things where I'd wake up the morning and say, 'I just can't go with this. That's just got to go.' If I wanted to write the book a different way, I certainly had every opportunity to do that."

And Woods' people, primarily agent Mark Steinberg, didn't agree.

"It's a little disappointing when someone says you're not truthful but I think once they read the book and it refreshes their memory, maybe they'll have a different opinion," Haney said.

Haney maintains, for instance, that Woods originally tore his ACL while training with the Navy SEALs, which he did regularly as a form of recreation and not while running, as Woods says. He said he was working with a woman at a clinic in Minnesota who told him that her husband was a Navy SEAL and that he was at the facility the same day Woods hurt his knee. He said he confirmed it with a mutual friend.