A Work in Progress: Examining Tiger's swing changes
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Except when it comes to Tiger Woods' ever-evolving golf swing.
By Dave Shedloski, PGATOUR.com Senior Correspondent
Given that Tiger Woods has won the last two major championships within a span of seven straight PGA TOUR victories, and that last year he captured eight titles in just 15 starts, there is no longer any merit in questioning the wisdom of his decision to undertake a radical overhaul of his golf swing in the prime of his career.
Nevertheless, it is still worth examining the evolution of this era's most dominant player as he prepares for the year's first major championship, the 72nd Masters Tournament, which provides the No. 1 player in the world an opportunity to further burnish a legacy already among golf's most distinguished.
Woods will be going for his 13th professional major title, which would pull him within five of Jack Nicklaus' all-time mark. It would also represent the third leg of his second attempt at the Tiger Slam (winning four majors in a row). He first accomplished that unthinkable feat with his '01 Masters victory. Though his seven-tournament winning streak came at an end in February at the World Golf Championships-Accenture Match Play Championship, it's hard to argue that Woods enters this Masters sporting a lethal elixir of skill sets.
This assertion hardly seems noteworthy, except in the light of Woods' continued development as a player the last few years.
When Woods won the 135th British Open last year at Royal Liverpool Golf Club, there was, naturally, an inclination to overlook the process given the emotional significance of his 11th major championship conquest. The intrinsic and most intriguing storyline had been percolating since May when Earl Woods succumbed to cancer and his famous son had to reaffirm his preeminence without the physical presence of his most ardent supporter, friend and mentor. As Woods, 30, forged ahead to that emotional flashpoint, and then followed up with a perfunctory and summarily solid triumph the following month at the PGA Championship at Medinah Country Club; it has become increasingly easy to overlook the fact that he has re-established his dominance with a swing that no longer invites scrutiny or curiosity.
Consider the scene at the 2005 British Open at St. Andrews, Scotland, where Woods finally put to rest the hard questions about the seemingly curious swing changes he initiated in '03 under the tutelage of methodologist Hank Haney. Even after winning the '05 Masters -- where he bogeyed the final two holes but then dispatched Chris DiMarco on the first sudden death playoff hole -- Tiger had not gotten out of the woods with critics, knowledgeable and otherwise, who detected flaws in a swing wholly different from the seemingly bulletproof motion constructed with the help of Butch Harmon.
The scene in the media center at St. Andrews was illustrative of the fervent interest in Woods' transformation. Haney stood surrounded by a global contingent of reporters, feeling vindicated by helping the era's most dominant player regain his mojo, not to mention his No. 1 ranking, which he still holds -- his 401st week at the top.
"Now, of course, I'm smart," Haney remarked with a grin.
The switch from Harmon to Haney didn't appear to be all that good of an idea in 2004 when Woods won only one PGA TOUR event and saw Vijay Singh overtake him in the world ranking. But Woods had his reasons for the overhaul.
Despite having won eight majors (including the unprecedented four in a row in 2000-01) and 39 TOUR titles with Harmon, Woods believed that he could get better. Harmon had assisted in making Woods plenty good, just as he had helped Greg Norman to be the No. 1 player in the world in the 1980s and '90s.
When Woods turned professional in 1996, his swing already was mature but undisciplined. His distance control was spotty, as was his accuracy, but he could generate otherworldly club-head speed with a wide arc and pure athleticism, most notably a rapid hip turn. His dominating '97 Masters victory, when he won by 12 shots and set the tournament scoring record of 270, was mostly the product, he admits, of a serendipitous week of tempo and timing.
Harmon's refinements, which were incorporated fully in 1998 even though the two had commiserated since '93, helped Woods achieve an efficiency that defied the difficulties inherent in the game. In 2000, Woods won nine times, including the final three majors, and he never shot over par in any of his 20 TOUR starts. He set or tied 27 TOUR records, including a 68.33 non-adjusted scoring average (67.79 adjusted) that broke Byron Nelson's 1945 mark.
That Woods would depart the Harmon camp in favor of Haney made little sense, except when one takes into account the physical toll the swing was taking on arguably the game's most fit athlete, manifested in a ailing left knee that required surgery in late 2002. Childhood skateboard and bicycling accidents had already compromised the health of the knee, but Woods put inordinate strain on it when he went for an extra 10-20 yards by snapping the knee into hyperextension. By '02, the compensations he was making for an increasingly achy joint initiated a laundry list of bad habits deleterious to his consistency. Such circumstances also threatened his longevity, a necessity if he is to reach his goal of passing Nicklaus's record 18 professional major titles.
Enter Haney and his one-plane swing theory. Longtime teacher of Mark O'Meara, Woods' closest friend on TOUR, Haney believes that the best swingers of the golf club maintain symmetry from start to finish on one plane angle. The application of this theory to Woods' swing made it more rounded and flat, and as Woods tried to incorporate this new method while fighting old habits, his accuracy and confidence waned, although he still continued to extend his record cuts streak through the alterations, a testament to his overall golf abilities and strength of will.
While the questions piled up in '04, Woods maintained that he was satisfied with his decision. "Have I ever second-guessed it? No," he said in early '05. "I took some steps backward to go forward, to make some giant leaps forward."
Under Haney, Woods has alleviated stress on his knee and works primarily on putting his backswing and downswing on the same place, which should produce a tighter and more connected swing that fires in sequence rather than requiring an extra move by the golfer. It also is designed to create a longer "flat spot" in the bottom of his swing, a key to accuracy espoused by classic rotational ball-strikers like Lee Trevino.
Five wins and two majors in 2005 vindicated the decision, and Woods had another PGA TOUR Player of the Year season in '06 -- a season marked by another milestone: his first missed cut in a major, at the U.S. Open, which can be attributed almost entirely to the emotional trauma still tugging at him after his father's death.
"I had plenty of time to get ready," Woods said of the U.S. Open at Winged Foot Golf Club. "I just didn't execute."
He sure executed at Hoylake, hitting 85.7 percent of his fairways, best in the field and the highest percentage in his career, and 80.6 percent of his greens in regulation. Like his 2000 victory at St. Andrews, his steady ball striking and his adherence to a game plan that left his driver virtually unused resulted in Woods avoiding Royal Liverpool's bunkers all week. He didn't drive it quite as well at Medinah's No. 3 Course, near Chicago, but he led the field in greens in regulation at 78 percent in another exhibition of strategic and shot-making inosculation.
"I knew that my game was pretty close to where I needed to have it for a major championship," Woods said after humbling Hoylake. "It's just one of those things where you develop a game plan and stick with it. This golf course, you had to really control your ball in order to have a chance."
It's control, not his famed power game, which makes Woods so indomitable and which most interests him as he goes forward in his pursuit of Nicklaus and, perhaps, still undefined standards. "It's understanding how to manage a round of golf," he said when asked how his strategy to golf has changed since he first turned professional in 1996. "I didn't really understand it (then) and 10 years from now I'll probably say I didn't understand it today. But back then I did a lot of different things with raw power. ... But that's not important to me now."
Indeed. It is all about control -- and not just where he hits it but the process by which it gets there. It's control that compels Woods to continue his tinkering, with Haney facilitating the process. Wins are the truest measure of a player, and Woods has 55 PGA TOUR wins, 65 worldwide titles and 12 professional majors, second only to the Golden Bear. But there is more to the Woods plan, a grand scheme that transcends mere performance.
"Only two players have ever truly owned their swings: Moe Norman and Ben Hogan," Woods not long ago told Jaime Diaz of Golf Digest. "I want to own mine. That's where the satisfaction comes from."
In other words, Tiger Woods is still a work in progress.