Tiger Woods & Sean Foley To Spend Way Less Time Together
/In one of the more succinct reports ever issued from the TigerWoods.com newsroom, the lede is, well, very tight!
Tiger Woods said today he will no longer be working with Sean Foley.
He said this via telegram? To...?
Anyway, now the awkward quotes.
"I'd like to thank Sean for his help as my coach and for his friendship," Woods said. "Sean is one of the outstanding coaches in golf today, and I know he will continue to be successful with the players working with him. With my next tournament not until my World Challenge event at Isleworth in Orlando, this is the right time to end our professional relationship."
Not sure why it's the right time, except that now Foley doesn't have to answer a million "hows he doing?" questions, so in that sense Tiger was doing him a favor. And now Foley...
"My time spent with Tiger is one of the highlights of my career so far, and I am appreciative of the many experiences we shared together," Foley said. "It was a lifelong ambition of mine to teach the best player of all time in our sport. I am both grateful for the things we had the opportunity to learn from one another, as well as the enduring friendship we have built. I have nothing but respect and admiration for him."
"Presently, I do not have a coach, and there is no timetable for hiring one," added Woods.
...as if this was a joint news conference, added Woods.
Personally, I think it's a shame this duo is finished only because I think Foley will be blamed for Tiger's awful 2014 and maybe even his back issues, which is terribly unfair. Foley is a fine coach and even finer person who loves seeing people get better. Unfortunately in this case, he was working with a less motivated, less physically sound and certainly less focused Woods than his predecessors had the pleasure of dealing with.
**Bob Harig reviews the Woods instructor history and talks to Sean Foley and unlike the quotes above given to the TigerWoods.com transcription department.
"It's not frustrating," Foley said of the back issues that kept Woods from finding form or being able to practice. "It's unfortunate. Tiger has been going at it for a long time. He's been playing golf at a high level since he was a kid. There's probably 50 or 60 golfers out there now who have a bulging disk or back problems. We weren't supposed to twist and turn like that for all these years. This is not an acute injury, like the leg injury that happened to Joe Theismann. This has happened over years."
"We showed what we could do together when he was healthy," added Foley, "but it's all credit to Tiger. He is the one who did it, not me. I didn't do anything. It's like Hunter Mahan [winning] yesterday. I've been saying the same thing to him [Foley is Mahan's coach] for five months. He put it together recently and won. If he hadn't won, that doesn't mean I'd say something different to him this week."
**John Strege on Brandel Chamblee's comments from Morning Drive.
“And I’ve said this before, if Tiger Woods were a football team and Sean Foley were the coach, he’d have been fired a long time ago. That’s not to disparage Sean Foley. He could go win the Super Bowl with Hunter Mahan or Justin Rose. It’s just not a good fit for Tiger Woods.”
**Jaime Diaz on Golf Central talking about the split.
