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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Golf is what the ball does.”
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.
At first, my approach was simply “just make it to tomorrow.” I strung enough individual days together to make it to a year without a drink, and then two years, and then 20. Today when I’m with friends at a party, I’ll get the urge to have a beer. But now I have a streak of more than 25 years. I can’t break it.
the only thing that cures the yips is radically altering technique so that new pathways from the brain are created. This is why big changes—like the long and belly putter, the claw grip, or other variations on conventional putting—often work so well
the most important thing is to always have a plan.”
With the right plan, even if things didn’t go well, there is the confidence that improvement is taking place.
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 role is to provide ways to control them.
Underlying my instruction was a unifying principle: All good things in the golf swing flow from achieving the correct swing plane.
Keep
The importance of swing plane was especially true at the highest level, where players do so many things right and are trying to address the very few things—or even one thing—they do wrong. 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.
the constant tilt of that wheel followed the angle of the shaft at address. Hogan’s swing, and the shots it produced, were my proof that I was correct with my unifying principle.
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.
Tiger’s habits made him particularly prone to dropping the shaft “under the plane” on the downswing, creating an approach to the ball that was too much inside the target line—rather than along it—to be optimum.
It took me a while to convince Tiger that the percentages simply weren’t in favor of making many putts over 20 feet, and that the smart play was to make sure to leave an easy second putt, if not a tap-in, rather than having to constantly make energy-draining five-foot comebackers.
The power and speed to hit massive blocks and big hooks are possible only with certain swing characteristics: across the line at the top, powerful lower-body motion, inside-out swing path, and an overreliance on hand action to square the club in the hitting area. Such players also tend to grip the club with their left hands in a “stronger” position—turned more clockwise—as well as hold the club more in the fingers than in the palm.
swings are about more than how they look. They change in imperceptible ways over time, often internally more than externally, and what has always worked begins to fail and needs adjustment. My opinion is that the accumulated pressure Tiger played under began to make it difficult to use a swing that required the compensations he had relied on as a younger player.
I’d noticed that when I held the club out with just my left hand, if the grip was in the fingers, the club head would quiver and shake with any change in grip pressure. But when I held it in my palms, the club was much more stable and would barely twist. Grip changes
golf is a game of controlled misses,
While most players who throw a tantrum produce too much cortisol, the chemical that increases the heart rate, clouds the mind, and tenses the muscles, Tiger was like a yogi who could level his emotions seemingly at will.
I believe that a lot of the public obsession about Tiger versus Phil was about race.
Even when his mind wandered to places that led to swing experiments, in our first few years together, I never once saw him hit a careless shot in practice.
He’d pull out the range finder before hitting at a flag on a practice range. When he switched targets, he’d pull out the gun and figure out the new yardage. He never failed to do this.
He’d seldom hit more than 25 balls in a row before stepping away.
“deliberate practice.” It’s the most difficult and highest level of practice because it requires painstaking focus on weaknesses.
the right shot wasn’t just the one that gave him the best chance to get close to the pin. More important, it was the shot that let him most easily play away from trouble either on or around the green. If water guarded the left side of a green and the pin was cut on that side, Tiger could come in with a draw that started well to the right. If there was heavy wind, he could come in low. If the greens were particularly firm, as they were at majors, he could come in high with a lot of spin. He just wanted the fullest toolbox possible.
there are no easy shots. There are just shots.”
the lesson had taken, and his short game became tidier once it did.
Hogan’s path to eliminating the big miss was similar to Tiger’s.
Both men weakened their grips well into their professional careers.
every golf course presents a player with big shots:
a tight drive on a long par 4, a long second over water to a par 5, an eight-foot par save late in a round. The great ones raise themselves for the big points.
At the Nelson, Tiger battled his takeaway. He had a lifelong tendency to take it back too low and inside.
leave a practice session settled on what to leave in and what to leave out, and what he was going to go with the next day.
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feel that produces the right result will eventually, and sometimes very quickly, lead to overdoing the move.
Charging birdie putts is fine if you’re trying to win by five. But all you have to do is win by one.”
Better with the irons, with more distance control and more shots. More precise with his wedge play from 120 yards and in, and steadier around the green and out of sand. He was a smarter strategist and a superior manager of his mistakes. His weapons weren’t as gaudy, but he had more of them.
only Vardon, Jones, Nelson, Hogan, Nicklaus, and Woods had an edge based on varying degrees of power, precision, putting, and nerve. The fact that Jack and Tiger kept their edge for the longest time is why they’re the greatest ever to play.
all week he hit the ball superbly in his warm-ups. He hardly missed a shot, working quietly, calmly, and methodically through the bag, his concentration at its highest.
“Buddhism teaches that a craving of things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security,” Tiger said. “It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously, I lost track of what I was taught.”
Jack Nicklaus called the energy it takes to be a champion his juice. “You only have so much juice,” he once said. “You try to save what you’ve got so you can use it when it means the most.”
