Hank Haney believes everything Tiger Woods’ ex-caddie Steve Williams says

If Tiger Woods’ former caddie Steve Williams says his ex-boss treated him like a “slave,” then it must be so, according to the logic of another bygone intimate of the 14-time major champion, Hank Haney.

“Steve Williams is the last person in the world that would lie. He just doesn’t do it, so obviously that happened,” Haney said Monday on SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio.

Woods’ coach for six years until their acrimonious split in 2010, Haney was referring to a snippet from Williams’ newly released autobiography in which he took Tiger to task for some of his on-course behavior like spitting into a hole if he missed a putt. But if Stevie never tells a falsehood, then he must be right about how having to lift a club up off the ground after Woods tossed it is just like being owned by another person and forced to do menial chores for nothing.

“One thing that really pissed me off was how he would flippantly toss a club in the general direction of the bag, expecting me to go over and pick it up,” Williams wrote in Out of the Rough. “I felt uneasy about bending down to pick up his discarded club — it was like I was his slave.”

Or, wait. Isn’t tending to a golfer’s clubs just part of a caddie’s job description — along with raking sand traps after bunker shots, replacing divots in the fairway and other scut work? For which Williams earned many millions of dollars?

Haney, who beat Williams to the publisher with his own 2012 version of what it was like to work for Woods, tried to put the “slave” reference in context.

“I think you have to consider when you have these books, the excerpts are always going to be the most outlandish things,” Haney said. “You saw it with my book, The Big Miss. You saw it with Joe Torre’s book [The Yankee Years]. You see it with every book that comes out. Big books, they want to promote them and they pick out the most inflammatory statements they can.”

Haney contended that Williams, a native of New Zealand, published his book in his home country to get around a non-disclosure agreement he signed that prohibited him from writing or talking about Woods. While Monday’s release of his memoir marked the first time the veteran looper went to press with his views, that NDA must be full of loopholes considering how Williams has never shied away from opining about his former taskmaster.

Haney, who has been known to chat a bit about Woods — his ups and downs, swing changes since he fired Tiger, lack of preparation for majors and rabid workout routine, among other topics — also wondered if the erstwhile world No. 1 would ever return to competition following his most recent back surgery.

“He’s on bed rest and we don’t know when he’s going to come back,” Haney said about Woods, according to Golfweek. “Now I think the real question switches to ‘When will we ever see Tiger again? Will we ever see Tiger again? And what will his game be like?’”

Woods underwent an Oct. 28 procedure to relieve discomfort from his second microdiscectomy, which he had in September. Those three procedures, combined with many knee operations, the sex scandal that forced him off the PGA Tour for months, the looming big 4-0 and the crop of 20-somethings vying to fill the void left by his absence added up to a less-than-cheery forecast from Haney for his former student.

“You take a [40-year-old] superior athlete,” Haney said, “and you take them out of their sport for six out of nine years and … you are competing against a lot of great young players that just seemingly get better all the time, that aren’t scared of you because they’ve, frankly, a lot of them have never seen his greatness, at least they’ve never competed against it, and you think, ‘How can you get your game back?’ And especially when your game is in the state that Tiger’s was in last year, which was not good.”

About that spitting into a hole after an errant putt, well that’s really more Sergio Garcia’s M.O.

Tiger, Haney apparently does not recall, infamously discharged his sputum in Dubai before he ever took a swipe at the cup.

As for the rest of what Williams has to say, Haney conceded he had yet to read the entire narrative but he did not expect a page-turner from the content unrelated to Tiger.

“He’s telling about his whole career, too,” Haney said, “and most of that stuff, I think, people will probably find to be a little bit boring unless you’re the biggest golf nut in the world because people wanted to hear about Tiger Woods.”

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