DO YOU NEED TO REMEMBER OR FORGET!

Selective Amnesia: Tiger Needs to Remember to Forget.

Great players such as Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and Hale Irwin have learned the secret to golf: Golf is not played the way it’s learned. Once you’ve learned golf swing you’ve got to forget it and go play a target game called ‘golf’.  One of the major reasons golf is so hard is that golfers are thinking about their right elbow, their weight shift or what their hands are doing, trying to remember everything in the half a second it takes to make a downswing. To insure this doesn’t happen great players have what I call selective amnesia – they are great at forgetting.

But now Tiger is making the same mistake as any weekend hacker -- he blames his collapse in the PGA Championship on thinking too little about swing mechanics – yes too little. “I went ahead and played by feel," Tiger said. "It cost me the whole round."

Here is how eye-witness golf writer Bill Pennington describes Tiger: “On the range warming up, he [Tiger] was hitting balls with his swing coach, Sean Foley, standing behind him. Every one or two swings, Foley would step forward and the two would discuss some portion of Woods’s technique, with Foley sometimes mimicking a position and Woods trying to recreate it as he nodded his head. It might all be part of the process of changing his swing, which is what Woods likes to say, but an animated discussion about hand and body positions 20 minutes before he was about to tee off in a major championship hardly seemed reassuring, or commonplace.”

Tiger doesn’t need to remember all of the swing stuff -- he needs to forget it.

Self Confidence is Needed!

The Excalibur Effect

Tiger has fired his long time caddy Steve Williams who many see as a major contributor to Tiger’s success – and that is exactly the reason why Tiger fired him. Tiger is smart enough to realize that power and self-confidence must come from within. External power can be cut off and this means you are under someone else’s control. This is dangerous in a sport like golf where even small flutters on your internal power grid can mean the difference between dominating and being just a good player.

I call this the Excalibur Effect named for the magical powers of King Arthur’s famous sword. If your ability comes from a magical putter and you lose that putter, then you lose your ability. In my opinion too many tour players use external props to shore up their weaknesses - remove the prop, [a valued caddy, a favorite driver, a swing guru] and their golfing world spins out of control. If their shrink's phone is busy after a bad round, panic sets in. It's a fragile world when your power comes from without.

This is not to say that Tiger doesn't learn from experts but he uses them as a resource not a crutch. Their knowledge is nourishment that, once digested, becomes part of the inner power grid.   Of course it is true that Tiger wears red the last day, but this is more to influence his opponents than to shore up his self-confidence.    

A case-in-point is Tiger-2000. The power in Tigers world came from only one source - himself and while no one is perfect, Tiger Woods was about as close as anyone can come. His strength was that there were no Excalibur’s in his arsenal—everything was expendable and if he lost them it would not render him vulnerable. His father trained him for toughness using techniques from military interrogation which is just the ticket for a game like golf that has a way of kicking all the props out from under you at just the wrong time. His mother guided him in a philosophy that counseled not to become attached to the things you acquire or to the process of acquiring. Tiger sacking Williams was SOP when it comes to protecting his self-generated power grid.

And there was another more simplistic reason – Tiger was mad that Stevie caddied for Adam Scott.

The Takeaway

What can you learn from the Excalibur effect?  Buy that new driver and hold on to your favorite putter ‘Lucky Loretta” but remember that standing over your ball on the 18th tee come Sunday, sans your instructor, your caddy and your mental coach – it’s you and you alone that has to pull the trigger so you better have a fully stocked larder of internal power to carry you though.