Capelle On Golf

Tiger Woods’ instructors keep insisting that no one knows more about the swing than he does, that he is by far the most knowledgeable player in the game. If so, now is his time to prove it.

Right now Woods’ swing is a big mess. When he gets stuck on the downswing, which is happening more often these days, he either pushes the ball way right or speeds up his release and pulls it far to the left. Woods has a fondness for the military, but army golf just doesn’t cut it. It was bad enough when the problem was mostly confined to his driver, which forced him to use shorter clubs off the tee for accuracy. Now, however, his problem has infected his iron shots as well.

The trouble with his game, as 95% of the gurus will agree, is the overly flat swing he learned from Hank Haney. And how did the most knowledgeable golfer come to adopt a swing that is so blatantly flawed? By ditching Butch Harmon and hiring Haney.

The crux of the matter lies in their diverging philosophies. Harmon rebuilt Woods swing, in the late 1990s, then watched his student win 7 of 11 majors. “I wasn’t giving him anything new. I was just giving him maintenance,” said Harmon. A funny thing, that was Jack Nicklaus approach, After learning the fundamentals from Jack Grout, he remained in the maintenance mode for the first 17 years of his career, during which time he won 15 of his 18 majors.

Indeed, Harmon believes in leaving well enough alone. “Tiger likes to tinker. I don’t believe in changing things that work,” said Harmon.

But Woods decided that change was necessary, so he phased out Harmon and then made one of the worst decisions of his career by hiring Haney in March, 2004. Under Haney’s tutelage, the supposed Best Ever never could learn to drive the ball like a Nicklaus or a Ben Hogan. And it is no wonder after listening to some of Haney’s nonsense. Let’s consider some of his latest pearls of “wisdom.”

I don’t think people understand what a coach does. The scope of our input is far less than what people perceive it to be.

Really? He completely made over Woods’ swing, he brags endlessly about Tiger’s winning percentage and top ten percentage while he was at the reigns, and yet he has little influence? Right.

“A coach’s job is to get a player to buy what you’re telling him. All that’s more difficult when you’re working with a pro player,” adds Haney. In other words, he is a lousy communicator, which is normally a teacher’s main skill. No wonder Charles Barkley and Ray Romano have failed to improve.

Haney goes on to say that “The mind-set of a great player is that you’re either getting better or you are getting worse. There’s no such thing as staying the same.” If he means that Woods needed to attempt to improve a swing that made him a prodigious winner of majors, then he is dead wrong. Indeed, the real secret that remained for Woods to learn under Harmon was how to correct his swing while under the heat of battle, a skill that was at the heart of Jack Nicklaus’ game.

So, now we have Woods struggling while trying to go it alone - just him and his video camera. “That’s the great thing about technology. We can use video. That’s what I’ve been doing and been working on it that way,” says Woods.

I guess you could call this the modern day version of Ben Hogan’s dig-it-out-of-the-dirt approach. Trouble is, Hogan spent a dozen years searching for the secret. Woods does not the luxury of time - he’s 34, he’s injury prone, and the major’s clock is ticking.

If Woods is the most knowledgeable player on the swing, then now is his time to prove it. He’s got two ways to do so: (1) fix his swing himself, (2) choose the best instructor for his game.

Either method will show us the kind of golfing intelligence we should expect from the game’s smartest player.