Comments on: Haney and Huggan at odds with the truth

By: Phil Capelle

Phil Capelle — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:24:55 +0000

BD,
You have touched on a subject that is almost totally ignored by today’s media - the matter of context - the difference in eras and its impact on their careers. And yet context is as important as mentioning, when comparing early vaulters to today’s stars, that the pole is no longer made of bamboo!

By: BD

BD — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:52:20 +0000

I agree that it would be pretty ludicrous for Haney to grab much credit for Tiger’s success over the last few years because, as your post highlights, Tiger was already arguably the best who ever played before ever starting to work with Haney. At most, Haney should be credited with keeping the wheels from falling off (which itself is no small achievement and I don’t mean to diminish it).

On a related note, I’m not sure how relevant Nicklaus’ association with Jack Grout is to Tiger’s situation with Butch and Hank. To hear Nicklaus talk about it, he not only stuck with the same coach throughout, he rarely if ever worked with him once the playing season started. I suspect Jack’s more attenuated relationship with Grout was fairly typical of players of his era. For one thing, there wasn’t as much money available to the average tour member, or at stake in tour events, to permit players to employ personal swing coaches as fulltime members of their traveling retinues. These days, golf really is more like a team sport, as you say, and it seems farfetched to imagine Tiger being able to fend off the competition he faces at every tournament with only the same level of access to his teacher that Jack had to Jack Grout.

In fact, this general observation applies to a lot more than just swing coaches. Tiger, it seems to me, has almost certainly surpassed Jack’s overall, objective skill level at golf, but a lot of that is due to the different eras in which they played. Some of Tiger’s superior ability is due to having grown up in an era where he was destined to have better support in terms of conditioning, coaching, technology, etc. If Tiger had been born in 1940 like Jack, who knows if he would have succeeded to the same extent that Jack did. By the same token, if Jack had been born in 1975, we don’t know how much competition he would have presented to Tiger.

By: Phil

Phil — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:27:24 +0000

BD
Some excellent observations. Back in Nicklaus’ day the focus was entirely on the player. Now golf is a team sport and is so closely watched that the credit is going to be shared, rightly or wrongly. My objections: Huggan continues to mislead or misinform his readers, and Haney is grabbing too much credit when Tiger hit the shots, and may have actually done better with a different coach. At any rate, the players and their entourages gives us more to think about, which is not all bad.

By: BD

BD — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:08:29 +0000

I don’t really understand why Butch v. Hank is all that important a subject of debate. By any reasonable standard, both of these guys were amazingly successful. It appears a strong argument can be made that Butch was marginally more successful than Hank, but that hardly makes Hank a failure. Moreover, Tiger himself is far and away the MOST deserving of the credit for his own success, as among the three of them (Tiger, Butch, and Hank).

It also seems to me there is some truth in the idea that Tiger was both a better ball-striker AND a better putter back in Harmon’s day.

It seems obvious that there’s no entirely satisfactory way to compare Butch’s success in working with Tiger to Hank’s success in working with him. They had Tiger at different times in his career and we don’t know how much Tiger’s own notions and biases as to what he should be doing swing-wise either aided or impaired the efforts of his coaches. For all I know, Hank could have been, in the abstract, the greatest teacher ever, yet Tiger never realized the full potential of that superior teaching acumen due to physical or psychological factors we don’t fully understand.

Normally, we as sports fans focus on the achievements of the athletes themselves, which are objectively measurable, and not on the performances of their individual coaches, which do not really lend themselves well to objective measurement.