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In the spring of 2010, Hank Haney didn't believe Woods' travails on the course had very much to do with golf. "I don't know how anybody can look at him," Hank said, "and say the problem is his swing or his swing thoughts or his mechanics. What's changed? ... I'll tell you what's changed: Tiger."

At least for the moment, Hank reckoned, Woods had lost himself, not his game. "Maybe he'll never be the same," he said. "Who knows? But what he's done already puts him on everybody's short list of the greatest athletes in history, doesn't it? The phase of the game in which Tiger really excelled was the mental part. 'Putting to the picture' is pretty cool stuff." When Michael Jordan's father pulled over to the side of a highway to sleep and was murdered for his car, Michael turned momentarily to baseball, James Jordan's favorite sport. Michael was mourning.

"That's a very real phenomenon," Haney said, "and I don't think there's any doubt at all that Tiger had a notion to do something along the same lines. Ken Hitchcock's a friend of mine [the hockey coach who led the Dallas Stars to a Stanley Cup in the '90s]. Ken said they see it in hockey all the time. Guys are making $3 million a year, their father dies and they want to go to work in a coal mine. When Earl died, I thought there was a strong possibility Tiger was going to give it all up to go in the service."

As early as 2004, Tiger started jumping out of airplanes at Fort Bragg, where Lt. Col. Woods took his Green Beret training. Earl told Doug Ferguson of the Associated Press, "He probably wants in the recesses of his mind to walk the steps I walked."

That year, the day after finishing in a tie for 22nd at the Masters, Tiger flew to North Carolina in his private jet for four days of special-operations training. In a 400-man formation, he ran four miles, singing cadence, as he said, "at the top of my lungs." Tiger participated in close-quarters combat drills and trained in a vertical wind tunnel with paratroopers. Then he made two tandem jumps with the Golden Knights. Two because, after the first one, he asked jubilantly, "Can I go again?"

To Ferguson, Earl said, "Tiger is an independent individual who plays an independent sport, and he's quite frankly not in the business of people telling him what to do. This will be a new experience for him. Somebody is going to be telling him when to eat, when to sleep, when to go to the bathroom. He'll learn about dedication, service, being a member of an organization and a team. Teamwork. Self hardships. Individual hardships. He'll learn an awful lot about himself. And he better watch out. Because it's going to change him."

"Not all the time, just from time to time, Tiger kept up this training," Haney said. "People don't realize how seriously he took it. He wasn't going to some recreational sky-diving schools. He was hanging out with Navy Seals. He took martial-arts training, self-defense, firearms training, the whole deal. I don't think he could ever quite work it out in his mind how to make it all come together. How he was still going to be Tiger Woods, how he was still going to be a father, how he was still going to be a husband, and yet go out and be a soldier like his dad. But I know that's what Tiger wanted deep down. He wanted to be a Navy Seal. For sure that was on his list. I don't know how close he came. How close is close? But I thought at the time there was a good chance it was going to happen."