What Butch Harmon privately said after his first ever golf lesson with Tiger Woods in 1993

31 Oct 2001: Tiger Woods walks with his coach Butch Harmon as he prepares for the Tour Championship with a practice round at Champions GC in Houston, Texas. DIGITAL IMAGE. Mandatory Credit: Scott Halleran/ALLSPORT

Butch Harmon believed that he could potentially turn Tiger Woods into the greatest golfer of all time after just one lesson with the boy wonder more than 30 years ago.

Harmon was by Woods’ side for the early stages of his professional career. Of course, their partnership had started several years earlier.

And it proved to be an incredibly fruitful working relationship.

What Butch Harmon thought after his first lesson with Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods won eight of his 15 majors with Harmon as his coach. And it was during that time that Woods completed the Tiger Slam as he held all four major titles at the same time following the 2001 Masters.

Few could have imagined just how great Woods would become, even with all of the hype around him. But it seems that Butch Harmon had a very good idea of how special the youngster could be.

Speaking on the Talk Birdie To Me podcast, Claude Harmon III revealed that his father needed just one lesson to be convinced that the potential was limitless.

Mandatory Credit: Harry How /Allsport via Getty Images

“That first golf lesson my dad had with Tiger in ’93, in August, he was working with Greg Norman. Greg had just won The Open Championship at St George’s and gone back to number one in the world. And then this kid shows up, who we’d heard a lot about. Tiger had got beat, I think, in the quarters of the US Junior at Champions. He had running shoes on, didn’t have a glove,” he said.

“I was driving home with my dad that night and I said, ‘what do you think about Tiger?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever get the opportunity, but if Earl would give me total control, I think I could make him the greatest player the game’s ever seen’.

“I said, ‘why?’ And he said, ‘well, he has everything you can’t teach’, which is speed – I mean, he made Davis Love look short in 1993 – and he said, ‘and I can teach him everything else he needs to know’.

“When Tiger showed up to work with my dad, it was a perfect storm. Everything he had learnt up to that point, here was this kid that had all of the stuff you couldn’t teach. I think my dad had learnt so much over the years of working with all these other players that he was able to have this one kid that had all of this talent, and he was just able to kind of see everything really, really clearly.”

One of the most contentious decisions of Tiger Woods’ professional career

It is arguably one of the biggest what ifs in sport when it comes to Tiger Woods and his decision to change his swing on a couple of occasions during his career.

He went more than two years without winning a major after announcing himself as a superstar at The Masters in 1997. In truth, it is difficult to make a case that he was wrong to change things on that occasion when you consider what happened in the 2000 season.

But Woods also failed to win a major across 2003 and 2004 as he made further changes to his swing. It was also around that time he went on to begin working with Hank Haney.

Again, Woods was vindicated as he won another six majors during his time with Haney. However, it is frustrating to think that the golfing world will never know what would have happened had Woods and Harmon continued to work together.

There is a chance that he would have tailed off sooner. But it does somehow feel as though Woods left majors on the table by never quite being satisfied when he was at his peak.