Yea he is hard to understand. I mean a LOT of guys are driven. It’s just he’s driven AND successful… but I was trying to think of anyone that has changed his swing more than he has… I can’t think of a pro who is so utterly different in his swing. It’s a wholesale change.
I tend to think underneath the arrogance, he has no confidence. Just a hunch.
For the record, I’m not anti-Tiger.
Prot said:
That makes sense to me. Abandoning his natural rhythm might make him prone to coming unglued.
I think in a broad sense there are the types of players who learn to play with the different feels that come and go in the golf swing. Feel players who just try to feel something they can work with.
Then you have the players who can feel that at times something doesn’t feel right and they look toward technique to try to nail down what those good feelings actually are. If they are lucky enough to find them, they have a better chance of recreating those feelings through improving their technique.
I would fall into this category.
The key here is you need to understand what is going on.
I am sure Tiger at times feels terrible sensations within his body when he hits one of his off the planet drives. It only makes sense to take a look at technique. Personally I think he is looking in the wrong direction… he should be looking at his gear first, and then maybe a couple swing issues. If he can flush good long irons, which he does, there is no reason he can’t flush a driver straight as an arrow. It should be the same swing. But if you add 3 or 4 inches to the length of a club, and subtract 3 or 4 ounces from the weight, and then radically change the lie angle and also the material or composition of the shaft… well? You might not be able to use the same golf swing from both a mechanical aspect and a biomechanical aspect. The reason he can’t use his iron swing with his driver is because it’s not going to work. So he needs two different swings, and they are not in harmony with one another… so he lives in an internal battle and each time he works on one swing, it messes up the other. I would suspect he prefers to preserve his iron play swing more than his driver swing because he figured out a long time ago he can get away with a lot of errant tee shots on today’s PGA Tour layouts. It’s no surprise he passes on Riviera, Colonial and Harbor Town… the last of the stops requiring some degree or premium placed upon driving accuracy. His record in US Open’s has been strong, but I think a lot of that is because The US Open is not what it used to be. I think it would be better for him, his swing and his game if the US Open was still a laser contest.
I’m not convinced his problems are as big as people are making it out to be. In the last 8 majors over the last two years… he has finished in the top 6 five times. He didn’t fair nearly as well in 03 and 04 during his “slump?” if one could call it that… finishing top 6 only once in 8 majors.
It’s a lot easier for a player to return to the level they were once at “assuming no serious injuries” than for a player who had never been there to find their way to a new level.
I’d still put my money on Tiger.
Lag wrote
Kinda thinkin’ you nailed it on that one. In hockey they call it a “lower body injury”. Bet his hasn’t ever healed.
hawg1
with all his troubles & the hype that surrounds them, it is easy to forget that pre 2010 there was a lot of talk that he might win all 4 majors given the venues
the year ended up a write-off, but he’s 6/1 for the Masters against his usual odds of 9/4 - maybe no bargain, but it will be interesting to see what price he is next week at Doral, i would have to be thinking he will be gearing up an effort to re-establish his dominance & that he’ll win again somewhere fairly soon
it will be interesting to see if he can dominate again
Two, thoughts:
I got this two frame stop image of a long iron from Tiger during his peak of 2000. I see more level shoulders, which is good, but also a CF release with telltale signs of space between arms/body and the rapidly closing clubface (toe pointing up at P4). He also is off his right foot at impact.
img198.imageshack.us/i/89904188.png
Everywhere I keep reading continues to say how Tigers younger-Butch swing was his best and he should just go back to that, but wouldn’t what he is working on now with Foley more inline with ABS principles (never minding the left leaning weight emphasis) ?
Does anyone really know what Foley is working on with Tiger? Yea, he’s a S&T guy… kinda/sorta, but he’s not making Tiger swallow the whole pill, etc, etc. Anyone really believe Foley is going to show his entire hand in regards to what they’re working on? I doubt it.
So many people trying to do the exact thing that Lag/Two say you can’t do… use pure observation to determine what’s happening in someone’s swing. Heck, we have 26 pages now of Bradley describing what he was doing/feeling with his own swing with plenty of evidence that “observers” (instructors in most cases) didn’t have a clue.
I now believe that there are so many variables with Tiger, including injuries, current body “type”, mental frame of mind, desire, divorce, ego, putting, etc, that we will never really know WHY he returns to form IF he ever does. But I have a feeling it won’t be because he hooked up with any particular instructor.
This is getting ugly for Tiger. It seems the more he “progresses” with this new Foley swing the worse he is looking in competition. At this point all he has in common with ABS is the swing left (which he always had with irons I think to some degree) and his footwork.
I actually can’t believe that Foley was some how able to convince Tiger to also change his putting stroke with a “one motion for all shots” they were saying on the broadcast today. I would think that hell would have frozen over sooner than to get tiger to mess with his putting. He was lights on on the green for so long and had to be easily his most confident area BY FAR in his game.
I can’t what it must feel like to be #1 for so long and then go through a year of this much embarrassment around his peers and fans. Just like Lag said, golf is a humbling game.
Saw this on the web:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b1EazwB8fY[/youtube]
those 2 awful tee shots from Tiger
the thing that strikes me is that the very fact he allowed himself to hit them in public says something about his commitment to what he is doing
Personal life aside and the things that come along with being divorced and juggling responsibilities more and the constant outside world glare that he feels on the bullseye on his back-- I think he has lost his mind listening to someone who is making things up as they go.
I really thought from listening to Tiger over the years that he knew his swing and understood it all-- but it becomes painfully obvious he like most doesn’t really know what makes the true swing function…otherwise he would never be listening to these coaches and doing the one plane up and down ideas and the staying centered over the ball more or worrying so much about his backswing and sticking gloves under his right armpit when swinging. These work all against the ideals of what his swing was and should feel like to him.
As much as he thinks he is on the right track-- there are so many things that have deteriorated mechanically in his swing I truly don’t know if he can comeback from here unless he does an about turn. He will win again because he is Tiger…but he is finding it tougher and tougher to win as he starts to hit more and more wayward drives and miss more greens…and he will get especially found out in the Majors unless he chips the ball around in play…which is sort of what his swing is now becoming when viewed
When Tiger has always said that only Hogan and Moe owned their swings-- I just don’t get why he would listen to people who were never good golfers themselves, who never had the feel for what transpires right throughout the body from the tips of their toes to the top of their head during the swing. Tiger knew how to play- he may have hit a few bad shots as time progressed and he felt the need to refine that but not by totally over hauling everyone based on observation from teachings of non golfers. Only he knew what his swing should have felt like- and he lost that.
At least Butch was some type of golfer having won on the PGA (albeit a smaller event back in 1974)…plus Butch had access to the greats growing up because of his father…he KNEW the greats and got to be around them and listened to these guys. The past two coaches are guessing from no self experience as to what is meant to happen in the swing-- just guesswork from observing.
When you are the number 1 golfer of the past dozen years what can these guys tell you?..nothing, they just become back slappers intent on trying to leave a mark, hoping something will work… Tiger has totally lost his own feel for the swing that was ingrained in him growing up and bulking up his body and swinging these ill designed drivers and such have only contributed to his loss of mechanics and inner sensations of his true swing
A lot of instruction appears to have gone towards S&T and Morad - I don’t know a great deal about these patterns but Tiger’s swing today looks very familiar - there’s a well-known instructor who posts videos on the Internet of his students’ progress and they all look like Tiger today, with the weight on the left leg, a very steep approach, and what appears to be a hold-off move and right-arm drive to P4. I keep hearing that Sean Foley and the instructors who teach similar stuff, all adapt their instruction to the requirements of the golfer - if that’s the case, why do so many of them look the same? I think Tiger is working on too many changes to his game so he’s completely out of his zone. He’s tinkering with his swing right up until the end of his warm-up sessions before going out to the 1st tee. If he comes through this and manages to dominate again, he truly will be a great of all time (if he isn’t already).
I’m sure I’m looking at this with ABS-rose-tainted glasses too, but the way he’s standing up through impact does not look like advanced ball striking to me. 
I don’t think Tiger is using more ABS… instead of being a right-sided pivot it is left or centred. He’s going steeper instead of flatter. His post impact has far too much clubhead rollover. Arched left wrist at the top. Here’s his impact position at impact with a driver. I really don’t see any ABS in that…
This pretty much says it all
Tiger looks really off balance in that address picture. A little shove from behind and he’ll hit face first onto the turf…if he doesn’t skewer himself on his own driver first!
Captain Chaos
They had a Masters marathon on that I caught the 1997 one. It was enjoyable (yet man made me feel old) to get to watch again that memorable win by a just turned Pro Tiger Woods. I could completely see a free-flowing Tiger woods just athletically making that golf ball do what he wanted. He looked almost across-the-line at times at the top, had a slight “sway” to his right to start backswing and looked like a pure swinger letting that clubhead WHIP through impact. He just seemed so enthusiastic.
So Early Thursday morning before the 1st round of the masters, The Golf Channel had Greg Norman on and they asked him if Tiger could win and get back to being the dominant player he was. Greg said hesitantly a sort of “i don’t think so”. He went on to explain how himself being a former player he can look at Tiger and not like what he is doing with this club position stuff he is working on and the dramatic weight feelings he trying to achieve, etc. When Tiger was dominating the tour, Greg said he just looked so FREE as he was just so focused on the shot at hand and then executed a swing to perform that shot without all these thoughts in his head of trying to fit a look. He said Tiger was always sort of erratic with his driver but “my gosh he was one of best mid-iron players of all time”. He was out there enjoying the game and executing shots now he looks constrained and a bit artifical. He did say though that one very important thing is that Tiger truly 100% believes he is correct in pursuing these changes and that can mean a lot to someone as talented and as driven as he is so time will tell.
Currently Tiger sits 3rd after a 66 in todays 2nd round. He got hot in back nine despite a few times really blowing some tee shots badly into woods. Stuck some good approach shots close and finally sank some birdie putts. He looks sharp on a course he is probably happy to be at. Should be an interesting weekend I am looking forward to seeing if Rory can hold on or Tiger can get his long due win in a big way.
But this goes to show really there is no one best way to swing a club?? Tiger will have had FOUR different “patterns” now in his career.
Lag/Two Master
How would you help Tiger? What would be the first fix?
Thanks!
The first step would be to take him out to Mare or Pasa Tiempo, hand him a set of persimmon and blades, not allow him to use any exact yardages and do my best to beat him… so he might listen to me out of just a sliver of respect. I think he’s been listening to enough coaches that are not players… and of course guys he has been competing against regularly are not interested in re awakening the tiger.
And technique wise? thank you for taking your time!
I like Tiger’s swing a lot… you can’t win all those events with a bad golf swing.
The only weakness I see is with his driver… which is pretty obvious. If he can pure a long iron then there is no
reason he can’t drive the ball well. So I would want to see him hit persimmon before I would say anything.
I really believe the modern driver itself is causing his problems. It’s too long… too light, and his swing changes dramatically
when he swings it. If he practices with it too much … then that could negatively effect his iron swing… so he lives in a space wallowing between two completely different feels… something I personally had to deal with until fairly recently… because although I was a hitter, I was still swinging around the greens so there was a line of demarcation that existed that I finally had to come to terms with. I believe Tiger faces the same thing… as do other players.
So if my theory were to be correct, being that I suspect Tiger would be a very straight driver with persimmon, then I would start from there and look for some kind of logical compromise regarding equipment. I also think it would be to his benefit to flatten out his lie angles which would not be too much of a problem for him once he understood how to do that properly.
I don’t know what he has been working on lately, but his results with the new instructor… don’t seem to be helping.
It wouldn’t take long to whip him back into shape… but of course there is the knee issue… so I don’t know how severe that is… but there are some things I could show him that might help alleviate that situation by adjusting his horizontal ground pressures slightly.
I for some reason see this as an ideal model of efficiency in a swing. I completely understand (and fully support) ABS and everything Lag stands for, but the flat/heavy/hogan model is a lot to strive for. This here just looks like an effortless Grand Slam winning, beating fields by 15 swing. Of course he putted like from another planet back then too.
Discuss:[YouTube] www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTOOdtBsvrM[/YouTube]
I would love to see Tiger using Persimmons all the time. If the 2006 Open at Hoylake is anything to go by then he would win every week. That Open he only used his driver only once all week (and knocked it onto another fairway i think), and hit his 2 iron the rest of the time, controlling the ball as well as I can ever remember.
