The Surly Pro on Tiger and The Presidents Cup

    In his first competition in 2003 announcer Dan Hicks described the Presidents Cup sudden death playoff as “Two heavy weights of golf fighting it out to win the competition,” and he was right about one thing – the two players chosen to clash heads to decide the outcome of the event were heavyweights: Tiger Woods, The #1 player in the world for the USA vs. Ernie Els the homeland hero battling before 23,000 partisan fans watching live and millions on TV — just the kind of ending the fledgling Presidents Cup needed to establish its own identity.

   But it was not to be because the golf world was robbed – it was the Showdown at the OK Corral only it wasn’t ok because there wasn’t really a showdown. Captains Conciliatory, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player decided to change the rules after the combatants matched pars for three play-off holes. They said it was getting dark and there was too much pressure for any two people to shoulder, so they declared a tie. “Both Gary and I feel that both teams have won”, said Nicklaus. “What do you think this competition is all about? It’s about goodwill in international golf. It’s not about who wins and losses.”

    Comments from the Surly Pro

     Goodwill??? Golf is boring enough without throwing in goodwill. Who wants to watch Gandhi giving Mother Theresa  a 20 footer to half the match while we all hum Kumbaya. In the game Paper/Rock/Goodwill, Everything tops Goodwill.

     How do I know these things? Simple deduction: Who did Captain Fred Couples choose with a captain’s pick? Remember he could have chosen wholesome Keagan Bradley who [as we are told after every swing by TV announcers] is related to Pat Bradley a former ladies champion [much female goodwill here]; or an amateur like Patrick Cantlay who shot 60 at the Travelers Championship [much amateur goodwill here.] But Couples didn’t-- he chose Tiger Woods proving that Tiger tops Goodwill -- unless of course you count the goodwill of TV executives, advertisers and golf fans everywhere. 

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.

More on losing your game!

Stress, Geometry, Chaos Theory

I proposed last week that there is a scientific explanation for the mysterious disappearance that you experience when – for no apparent reason – you lose your game.

Golf Geometry

The disintegration process involves tiny micro-changes that at some point sum up to ruin your swing. This process centers around the original conditions that exist before each swing such as the aim of the clubface and alignment of your body. Based on the laws of motion when the clubface is perpendicular to the path of the club at impact [given center contact] the ball will leave the face with only backspin i.e. a straight shot. And of course if you are going to hit it straight you must aim it straight. But if there is a small difference between face and path the ball will curve off line, too often finding an unhappy resting place. It doesn’t feel any different but at 200 meters a ball with a titled axis of a mere 10 degrees ends up 14m [15.3 yards] off line.

Golf Chaos

Thus mistakes at impact arise from small mistakes at the top of the swing which in turn come from even smaller mistakes at address. As in chaos theory where a butterfly flapping its wings causes a hurricane, tiny flutters at address lead to a game that slowly slips away. Golf whatever else it is, is a game of precise geometry where the initial conditions although small in increment, are very large when you total up your score for the hole - the round – the year – and in the long run, over your golf career

Golf Stress

But there are other tiny flutters that can ruin your swing and strangely enough, they come from your stomach. Research by Professor Mark Lyte and associates at Texas Tech University support the notion that controlling your body’s response to stress is influenced by the correct mix of bacteria in your stomach and intestines – bugs in your stomach cause bugs in your swing. Of course it is no big news that many of the mistakes you make in golf are stress-related and it is these mistakes that throw your ‘first brain’ out of sync. But did you know that you have a ‘second brain’ composed of 100 million neurons embedded in the walls of the long digestion tube known as the gut? These two brains are connected by a direct pathway --a crowded highway crammed with messages. Thus what is happening in your digestive track affects your perception of your world and vice versa.

Byron Nelson threw up before every round and it drove him from the game at the early age of 34. NBA great Bill Russell threw up before games as did NHL goalie Glenn Hall. Stress rules us all and its not always throwing up -- Tiger Woods even when he was in top form often hit terrible shots of the first tee due to ‘nerves’ – and he was the best player in the world.

Conclusion

In golf, small can be very big. When you are playing poorly you may be only one tip away from getting it back again and when you’re playing well it can slip away due to micro changes that you are not even aware of. Stress, geometry, chaos theory – no wonder golf is a mysterious game of a lifetime.

WHERE DID YOUR GAME GO?????

A Mysterious Disappearance

I contend there is a scientific explanation for the mysterious disappearance of performance that golfers experience when – for no apparent reason – they lose their game. The disintegration process involves tiny micro-changes that at some point sum up to ruin your swing.

Small increments that destroy us are well known. Before it was outlawed in England there was a penalty called "pressing" that was carried out by piling small stones, one at a time, on the victim’s chest until s/he was crushed to death. Brutal yes but had you stumbled on a ‘pressing’ you could have figured out quickly the ultimate result. But  stumble on the beginnings of a hurricane and you would not know it because the causes of a hurricane in no way resemble the final effect i.e. small, micro flutters in the atmosphere in South America producing 100 mph winds in Miami. And here-in lays the reason why it is so difficult to predict a hurricane more than two weeks out -- because the cause [the initial system condition] doesn’t look much like the end result.  

And as difficult as it is to predict hurricanes it is even more difficult to predict when your golf game is going south. Suppose your game was like a hurricane where the destructive force began with small flutters. You pay no real attention to these harbingers even though some are things you have been told many times. Still you ignore them because they are not directly related to ‘the Big Dog’ -- your golf swing. Proper breathing, slowing everything you do under pressure, focusing on the target, and things like a correct pre-game practice session are mere pre-swing flutters that most golfers give only lip service. And what of aim? Another lip service item -- 95% of golfers screw up aim -- the same with ball position, weight distribution, and shoulder alignment.  If you are like most golfers The Swing is the Thing – just get up there any old way and hit it – but you’d better hurry just a bit more than usual because there is a hurricane coming.

More next week on the flutters that precede the storm including one you probably don’t know about because it comes directly from your gut rather than your brain.

IS IT TOO MUCH

Hogan Rolls Over in His Grave

“All I did is get on each tee and wait until (Edmondson – his caddy) told me what to do,” said PGA TOUR player Ryan Palmer. “He told me what side of the tee box to get on, and what side he wanted me to be on, what target he wanted me to hit, and it was my job to hit the shot.”

Palmer played well at the Byron Nelson Championship using this approach losing in a playoff but in my opinion being so other-directed is not good in golf.

Takeaway: Self-reliance is a mindset and under pressure you gather information rather than ask for advice.

Jack Burke Jr. –

“A lot of the kids on the tour nowadays hire instructors, so they aren't really thinking for themselves about their technique and how to improve.  They don't trust themselves and when things start going badly, they have nowhere to turn.  In the middle of a round, they can't call their coach to come over and give them a tip.

But they can ask their caddy

Fitness and It's Effects

On the Other Side of Fitness

It seems puzzling that Johnny Miller who won the US Open in 1973 beat everyone including Jack Nicklaus for three years and then disappeared. David Duvall rose to number one then poof, he was gone. Sergio Garcia was a wonder kin but now shows only flashes of his former brilliance. Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson fought for second best for years but now are random performers given their prodigious talent. And of course Tiger dominated for nine years and now he’s abdicated his place at the top.

What is the connecting thread here? Each of these players changed their body drastically – some through injury, and some through intent in the mistaken view that they were providing themselves with an upgrade.

 Changed Body = Changed Game

Els injured his knee, put on weight and lost his touch; Mickelson contracted psoriatic arthritis which can affect your sense of how your body is arranged in space while Garcia, Duval and Miller worked out hard and changed their body distribution of balance – Duval went from schmoo to svelte and lost his feel. And Woods of course changed his body with an intense body building routine that made him look buff at the beach but buff is only good at an ‘after-majors-win’ party. In a counter-intuitive slam life often tosses out, Tigers new upper body strength tore up his knee. And in this ‘muscle is good’ world the Kenny Perry story is not unique. He dropped forty pounds and put on some muscle looking for an upgrade to first class -- instead he lost his game – and he admits it!

"I hired a personal trainer. I actually did last year go from 235 to 199 in weight.  I was working out diligently six days week.  Went to a nutritionist and really watched my diet.  I actually played worse…I was lifting heavy bulk weight and getter heavy.  I should have been working on lengthening my muscles, getting longer, looser, more flexible."

This first-class-to-coach downgrade Perry suffered seems to defy a common sense that says working out is good and all things being equal ‘strongest machine wins” until you revisit the old, but very true adage, ‘if it aint’ broke don’t fix it.” You design your work out/diet to keep what you have once you have it.

Gary Player, the father of the fitness in golf revolution, stayed in shape to keep what he already had. His goal was longevity. Most have to work to keep it while some like Sam Snead were naturally fit for golf. Snead’s famous comment on working out was “I never lifted anything heavier than a petticoat” but he could still kick the top of a door frame with his foot at 70 years old. Tom Weiskopf at 6’3” 190 pounds admitted he couldn’t bench 100 lbs. yet he was one of golf’s longest hitters in the day of mega-long Jack Nicklaus. And the longevity of ‘paunchy’ Ray Floyd as the press called him [even in his 20ties] is the gold standard – from 1961 to 1992 [31 years.] Paunchy Ray won 22 tournaments with his final win in 1992 at the age of 49. He also won on the Senior Tour later that season to become the first player to win on both tours in the same year.

The Takeaway: There are three things your work out should provide 1] you feel better 2] you look better 3] you play better and if you’re a golfer don’t leave out #3.

Next: what actually happens when you change your body.