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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Golf is what the ball does.” In other words, the flight of the ball tells the teacher where the student’s club was at impact.
I remember one discussion in which John was talking about how, contrary to conventional wisdom, so many of the most consistent and enduring ball strikers had a slight “over the top” move, rather than the more classic “inside-out” path, in which the shaft flattens out on the downswing.
“Hitting too late from the inside with an open face not only misses the fairway, it can miss the golf course,” he said. “A little over the top never misses by too much. In competitive golf, it’s not so much where the good ones go. It’s where the bad ones go. You’ve got to build a swing that will eliminate the big miss.”
I know that children of alcoholics are vulnerable to certain syndromes like approval-seeking, perfectionism, overwork, sensitivity to criticism, a desire to rescue others, inability to enjoy success, and, most fundamentally, repeating alcoholism. They tend to have trust and self-esteem issues. I know that to varying degrees all those patterns have been part of my life.
“I don’t want to feel this way anymore. And I’m never going to have another drink the rest of my life.”
Having dealt with a lot of high-achievers, I’ve learned that anybody who is really successful at anything has an incredible passion that is basically an obsession.
What I subsequently learned from this experience and further trial and error is that the only thing that cures the yips is radically altering technique so that new pathways from the brain are created.
Eventually I would see that getting stuck was simply one of Tiger’s individual tendencies, so ingrained that he’d always have to fight to keep it suppressed. His goal was to get rid of getting stuck forever, but though I thought that was worth trying for, I knew the probability was that the tendency would always lurk, ready to come back when he didn’t take specific measures against it, especially under pressure. That’s golf, even at the highest level. Every player has his or her set of chronic mistakes that are as personal as a fingerprint. Teachers don’t give players these mistakes. Their
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Underlying my instruction was a unifying principle: All good things in the golf swing flow from achieving the correct swing plane. I’d studied all the ways to correct ball flight, and it was that revelation that enabled me to make a giant leap as a teacher.
I found that getting a tour pro’s club on the correct plane got them hitting more good shots, but more important, made their bad ones better. There are very few perfect shots hit in golf, even by experts. It’s above all a game of managing misses.
Briefly, my concept is this: The plane of the swing is established by the angle of the clubshaft in the address position. When the shaft retains the angle of that plane as it moves through the swing, a player has the best chance to hit good shots.
When the proper swing plane is achieved, the shaft of the club is always swinging on, or parallel to, the angle the club established at address. At the top of the backswing, the club should point straight down the target line when it is parallel to the ground. A small but important distinction is that it should point not at the target itself, but parallel to the target line that goes through the ball to the target. When the club points at the target, especially if it has not yet reached parallel to the ground, it is actually “across the line.”
Simply put, Tiger played the driver with a lot of fear.
One of the adjectives most often used to describe Tiger Woods was fearless. But the more I observed him close up, the more it became clear: He wasn’t.
I can now admit I never felt totally comfortable when Tiger was standing over a drive in competition. When he hit a good one, I felt relieved. I was always worried about the big miss. And I know that most of the time, he was too.
He was good enough to afford half a miss, but even he couldn’t afford a big miss.
I also implemented an opposite fix for his head movement. I suggested that he let his head turn toward the target on the downswing so he was not even looking at the ball as he hit it.
He told me that in his mind, he’d made a breakthrough with the takeaway, in which we were trying to get the wrists cocking up while the forearms rotated.
Tiger never allowed himself to be satisfied, because in his mind satisfaction is the enemy of success. His whole approach was to delay gratification and somehow stay hungry. It’s the way of the superachiever: the more celebrations, the less there’ll be to celebrate.
His knack for shutting down emotion was a big reason he closed out victories better than anyone else in history, and why he was so incredibly good at making the last putt.
The converse of this was Tiger’s ability to flash intense anger after a bad shot. He did this a lot and was always criticized, but he was expert at getting rid of all negative emotion by the time he’d arrived at his next shot.
The main thing we were working on was getting Tiger to stand tall on the downswing and allow his head to turn toward the target in the manner of Annika Sörenstam and David Duval. It was a classic “opposite” correction for his habit of lowering his body and tilting his head back through impact.
The recklessness of Tiger’s military adventures made me wonder whether he had self-destructive urges when it came to his golf.
“When you live a life where you’re lying all the time, life is not fun.”
I also tried to ease into another delicate issue. “Your greatness is undeniable. The records you will set will never be broken. You are probably the greatest athlete in the history of the world. But your Isleworth and practice tee game is better by a long shot than your tournament game. It is obvious that you have an issue with taking your game from the driving range to the course.”
As I reflected back, I realized that I’d never thought of Tiger as happy.
he seemed to keep the atmosphere around him emotionally arid.
As much as Tiger has gained in wealth and glory, is it possible that he feels used?
