When last seen on the PGA Tour at Jack Nicklaus' Memorial Tournament, Woods said felt he had made some progress with his swing despite finishing tied for 19th and 12 shots back of Justin Rose, the winner. Even so, the July issue of Golf Magazine has an article that breaks down "Tiger's broken swing." After reading it, Oldgolfdawg began to wonder how Woods can even pull the trigger on his swing with so many things to fix.
The article goes on to suggests that Woods' takeaway is too outside and too flat, he's laid-off at the top, he's too steep on his downswing and he's not exiting on plane. All of these errors in combination explain why he doesn't really know where his shots are going to end up, not a place were someone in pursuit of his 15th major championship wants to be.
Woods himself might be in denial about how bad things have gotten from how good they once were, but the article backs up its assumptions with statistical proof:
In 2010, Tiger is driving the ball 10.5% shorter (32 yards) than his peak distance average of 316.1 yards set in 2005. More troubling is the fact that the gap between Tiger and the 10 longest drivers on tour is increasing while the gap between Tiger and the average tour player is shrinking. So far this season, Tiger is a middle-of-the-pack bomber.
While Tiger has always struggled with hitting fairways, he's missing them more frequently, and not in the traditional Tiger way. In past seasons, his bad miss was a block to the right. In 2010, the left rough is getting equal billing. (The numbers don't lie. In 2000, Woods found the fairway with 71% of his drives. So far this year, he's found the fairway just 52% of the time.)
Not only is Tiger missing fairways at a personal-record pace, he's missing them by greater distances than ever. The PGA Tour Shotlink system tracks how far into the rough a player's ball lands when it misses the short stuff (measured from the fairway edge). In 2010, Tiger's misses are landing 24.7% deeper in the junk that the tour average.
So the big question now is how long will it take for Tiger to "find his game."
Senior writer Randal Mell of GolfChannel.com wrote Thursday about Steve Stricker's thoughts on the matter. Stricker, who played with Woods at the Memorial and who re-made his swing on his own a few years ago in staging a career comeback, doesn't think Tiger needs a swing coach. Sticker said what he needs is a set of eyes to be his mirror. Mell wrote:
"It sounds like he's going to do it on his own," Stricker said at the John Deere Classic media day this week. "We were talking swing last week. If he listens or not is one thing, but he's got the capabilities or the abilities, I would say, to handle it better than anybody on his own.
“I don't think there's a teacher in this world that could probably teach the guy what he probably already knows. What you need is probably some good set of eyes to watch to see what he's doing, but it looks like he's going to do it on his own. He's got his camera, his iPhone out, he knows the positions he wants to be in. He knows he has some problems that he wants to fix. He's working at it.”
Stricker also made this observation about his time with Woods: “I haven't seen a happier Tiger Woods than I had this last week. He seems like he's in a good place as far as what I saw last week.”
Woods acknowledged after the Memorial Tournament that he will be working on his game alone after swing coach Hank Haney decided to move on and that he would "retrace'' steps with his swing as he tries to get ready for next week.
"Just like what I've always done when I was working with Hank and Butch [Harmon],'' he said.
Nicklaus, watching the Memorial unfold from the TV booth, said Woods working on his own is not a bad thing.
"I pretty much did that most of my career, but I think you've got to have somebody every once in a while to go back to have an eye,'' Nicklaus said. "I was always a better player when I was making my own decisions as far as what I had to do with my golf swing. Even if it was wrong, I learned how to play with it, and if I learned how to play with it then I knew what I could do.
"Sometimes someone will ask you to do something and even though it may be dead correct, you have a horrible time doing it and you don't have confidence doing it under pressure.
"I think he'll still need somebody every once in a while to look at him, but from the standpoint of controlling your own game and managing your own game. Going into Pebble Beach he'll know how he wants to hit the ball, he won't have somebody telling him how to hit the ball and I think it's ultimately for the better.''
Information from Golf Magazine, GolfChannel.com and ESPN.com contributed to this post.
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