Swing Doctors

Golf is a really hard game to play, we know that. Because if it were easy, why are there about the same number of instructional books and videos and magazine articles as grains of sand in a bunker.

Even for those who play the game at its highest level, golf can be pretty confusing. For example, for every stance, grip, swing plane, set-up, shoulder turn and follow through, there are probably more theories out there than you can find in a whole semester of quantum physics, which not only isn’t a sport but doesn’t have drink carts either. Loser.

Therefore, all the big-time pros, the best players in the world, know their job is not something they should tackle by themselves. That golf ball might be small, but it’s ornery. Many times it seems to have a mind of its own, choosing its own direction while whistling merrily through the air.

It’s an information age in golf too, which is sort of overwhelming if your primary concern is trying to keep the ball in the short grass.

The players need help. They need advice. They need counsel. They need someone to talk to.

They need a teacher.

Oh, yeah, there are a lot of those out there too. Every Tiger, Nick and Ernie has one. With so much prize money stacked up in large green bundles on the PGA Tour, $131 million in 1999, the stakes have never been higher, the pressure heavier, the risk-reward factor larger or the influence of teachers greater.

Players use teachers in different ways. A player might think his teacher is like a charge card. He doesn’t leave home without him. Another player might need his teacher only occasionally, maybe on the telephone, right after he calls for his courtesy car.

But make no mistake about it, a player needs his teacher just as much as he needs his sand wedge. The best players in the world have the best teachers in the world, basically because the results speak for themselves. How else should you decide? Best furrowed brow with crossed-arms on the driving range?

So as a public service, in an effort to simplify golf, here’s a short list of the five best pro tour golf teachers you can find anywhere.

* Butch Harmon teaches Tiger Woods, the No. 1 player in the world.

* Bob Duval teaches his son, David Duval, the No. 2 player in the world.

* Hank Haney teaches Mark O’Meara, the No. 3 player in the world.

* Paul Marchand teaches Fred Couples, a Masters champion and 14-time winner.

* Rick Smith teaches Lee Janzen, a two-time U.S. Open champion.

Why are these guys so good? Because their players win.

How did they get here? Let them tell you.

The bell just rang. Class is starting, so pay attention. You might learn something before recess.

BUTCH HARMON

Swing Knowledge, Inside and Out

We’re more of a security blanket so the players know they have someone they can trust to be their eyes.

As a player, you can’t see what you are doing even if you think you know. And you have to have someone you trust and believe in and step outside your body for you.

I think that’s the key to the whole situation. A player has to believe in the person he picks to be his coach or teacher. And that person has to understand that the player is the player and that’s his job.

Your job is to do the best you can to prepare that person. You can’t think there is more to it than that.

With Tiger, like all players, there is a certain trend you fall back into.

It doesn’t matter how good you are or how hard you work, we all have a little bit of a thing in our swing that we always tend to go back to on a negative side.

You could be the greatest player in the world, and you still have a fault.

As a coach or teacher, you have to know what that is and you have to know how to fix it. Tiger’s faults mainly come from set-up positions, the way he sets up to a ball.

After six years of working with Tiger, he and I have built his swing together, so I know his swing inside and out. When I look at Tiger or if he calls me on the telephone, all he has to do is tell me what direction the ball starts in and I can pretty much tell him what, mechanically, he is doing.

In Tiger’s case, a lot of it comes in his address position. He tends to hang it a little left.

He tends to take the club back a little too much on the inside, loses his width, which in turn causes him to get a little stuck or shallow on the downswing and he has to use his hands too much.

With his speed, which is unlike anybody’s speed that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, when he has to use his hands a lot, then you get a lot of surprises. So his tendencies tend to be very similar, so it’s not that hard to fix it.

I see Tiger, easily, two times a month . . . sometimes more than that. We talk on the telephone three or four times a week. So we’re constantly talking about his golf swing.

A lot of people don’t realize that with Tiger Woods in college, I very seldom ever saw him. We did everything we ever did through him sending tapes to me every other week or every month, me analyzing the tapes, calling him on the phone and going back and forth.

So we’re used to doing that. Then the fact that I see him a couple times a month makes it that much easier.

I use videotape all the time. The benefit of videotape is more for the student than it is for the teacher. But it’s also a great library of where you’ve come from, where you are trying to go to and you keep adding on.

What I try to do is look for a model swing for Tiger Woods. Not what works for you or works for me, but what works the best for him. And we’re continually upgrading that swing sequence in my computer.

So I always have those references to go back to and that makes it a lot easier for both of us.

You have to adapt to the player’s game. I think you have to look at golf this way. . . . This is the way my dad taught me and he taught my three younger brothers: You can either teach golf to people or people to play golf. We choose to teach people to play golf, meaning that there is no one swing.

There is no system, there is no perfect swing. I like to think of myself as my dad thought of himself, as my three young brothers think of themselves: We try to look at everyone as an individual.

We try to make them the best they can be, whether it’s a club member or whether it’s a tour member. That’s the way you have to teach golf.

Learning when to say something and make a point or just back off, I think that’s up to an individual’s personality.

Where I have an advantage over a lot of people is that I played the tour. I played three full years on the tour (1969-71).

Did I play great? No. Have I been there? Yes. Have I played in major championships? Yes, I have.

So I have been on that side of the ropes and I understand what my players go through. I have been through the pitfalls. Was I as good as they are? No, I wasn’t. Did I have the emotional ups and downs that they had? Sure I did. I understand when I need to kick somebody in the butt and when I need to back off and stroke them.

That’s one of the strengths of those of us who teach great players, they have to have that confidence in you. They know that you have the ability of when to say what you say and they believe in you. You have to earn it. Your results, your track record speaks for itself.

In my circumstance, I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve had an opportunity to teach some of the greatest players in the world, whether it be a Steve Elkington, a Davis Love, a Greg Norman or a Mark Calcavecchia or a Tiger Woods. They were all really, really good players before they came to me. I think I made them better players, and I think that’s what it’s all about.

The whole thing you have to understand is that it’s all about the player. The player is the show. We are not the show. We don’t hit any shots, we are not the savior.

We just happen to be in the situation where a player believes in us and we try and do the best we can do. But the player goes and plays. I don’t care who they worked with.

Tiger gets better every year of his life. Last year, I thought he was phenomenal. I thought he played so well. He didn’t win a lot of tournaments. He’s such a better player right now in February of 1999 than he was in February of 1998. He knows that. I think that’s the key.

BOB DUVAL

In the Name of the Father

David doesn’t depend as much on me as he used to because our schedules don’t really meet too many times. When we get together, we golf together, he looks at my swing and I look at his and there are a few suggestions here and there. What I’ve seen over the years, I mean, I can pretty well figure out if he’s a little out of sync.

There’s not a whole lot of things that go wrong with his swing. Just one or two things, and they’re usually like the same thing, you get into a bad habit. Sometimes his grip pressure changes. I’ll ask him about that.

There’s not a lot that goes wrong anymore.

Rick Smith has looked at him. I’ve talked to Rick at Augusta and we have the same feeling: If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. There’s not a lot that’s been broke. I mean, it all comes down to your rhythm and maybe a couple of set-up positions. You can get a little screwed up if you’ve been playing in the wind or the cold where your body doesn’t move. But he’s in such superb physical condition right now, he really doesn’t have too many problems.

I’m his parent, but even if I were only his teacher, I would still have the same approach. It’s hands off until, really, he asks for it. When he thinks he needs some help. I know a lot of these instructors, they are getting paid to do it, but it seems like they’re getting paid to find something wrong when there might not be anything wrong. That keeps them in business.

I’ve seen some teachers that will change something, whether they think it’s right or wrong, because they think that’s what the guy is paying for.

I try to adapt different people because of their physical strengths and weaknesses. David is a feel-type player. I don’t think he’s mechanical at all. He built is own swing, from the basics that we’ve worked on over the years. David’s golf swing is David’s.

His head movement, nobody ever worked on that--how his head follows the ball. It just happened. I’ve always preached that you don’t have to keep your head still. He and Annika [Sorenstam], the two best players in men’s and women’s golf, it’s almost identical. They don’t allow the head to get into the way. I don’t know where she learned it, and I don’t know where David learned it, except maybe my preaching that the head doesn’t have to stay still, or it doesn’t have to stay anchored.

He’s worked with Bob Rotella since his days in college. So I think a lot of the mental part of it was built way back, and believing in what he was doing. You have to have a pretty good mind to shoot 59. I mean, most people would probably get scared. David is a very intelligent person, and I think he figured it out.

Somebody asked me the other day if I taught David how to play golf. I said, yes, I did teach David how to play golf, but I didn’t teach him how to play the golf he’s playing right now. That’s the truth, because nobody can teach that. The best gurus in the game can’t teach a guy to shoot 59 or win [the Mercedes Championships] by nine shots. Or, like Tiger Woods won the Masters by 12 shots. You can’t teach that. That’s instinct and confidence.

I don’t believe that the way to be good in this game is to have someone hovering over you all the time. There are some people out there who have to have their swing coach with them every ball they hit. What is he saying for every shot? You’re going to miss one.

So, you break down every golf shot a person hits in the course of a round?

I mean, like David, when he finishes playing or if he’s practicing and he doesn’t feel like he’s swinging good at it, he quits. He just stops hitting balls and says, ‘Not feeling good today.’ That’s a great attitude, in my opinion, because you don’t feel the same way every morning when you wake up.

I don’t put any negatives in his head when we’re talking on the phone. One tournament last year, he said he thought he was slicing the ball, so he started aiming left. I told him that’s what he was supposed to do. If he’s not hitting it like the way he wants to, then he adapts to get the ball back in play. There are a lot of people who are so mechanical, when they start hitting it bad, they don’t have anything to adapt to. David, as we know, is different.

HANK HANEY

His Week is Full of Tweaks

I don’t know any players who don’t have someone to turn to for help, but I’m sure there are some out there. The main reason for a teacher is simple: You can’t see yourself. It certainly helps to have a good pair of eyes and hopefully somebody who really knows your game.

I think that’s probably the main reason . . . the confidence that players get from working with somebody they know, who knows their golf swing and their golf game. I also work with Emilee Klein and Kelli Kuehne, but you know, I’ve taught more than 120 pros over the years. They come and go and my list looks like everybody else’s list.

People ask if what I do is to take what the player has and adapt to that or whether I try to, well, impose a method on the player. I suppose it just depends. I mean, it depends on what they have. When I first started working with Mark O’Meara, that was 17 years ago and he was 124th on the money list, so I guess we worked with what he had. But most everything over the years is what he’s learned, you know. And then with Kelli and Emilee, for instance, those are the students I’m the most proud of because I’ve taught them for so long.

I mean, you can have an impressive resume of people you teach, but how long have you worked with these people? Kelli and Emilee, I’m the only teacher they’ve ever had, and Mark, I’ve helped him for 17 years. With them, it’s pretty much a building process, but sometimes you just tweak them a little bit. It depends where the player is when they first come to a teacher for a lesson.

I see Mark quite a lot. We’re such good friends, we buddy around a lot. I go to all the major tournaments, probably four or five other tournaments and he’ll come to Dallas a couple of times and I’ll go to Orlando a couple of times. So I’ll probably see him 12 times a year. Not all that’s totally necessary. Some of it is we’re just such good friends.

When I work with him, it’s usually fine-tuning because I’ve just helped him for so long. But we’ll talk on the phone so I’ll know where he is with his game and then he’ll just tell me what he’s been feeling, whatever part of his game we’re working on.

To some extent, I’ll have an agenda, too, because in my mind, no matter where he is, I want to work on this and this and this because I know he needs to improve on it. These are things that maybe I feel like he’ll need for a specific tournament that’s coming up.

For instance, like last year, we practiced before the U.S. Open to try to get the ball in the air more so that he could drive the ball on the fairway a little better. That’s always been something that’s given him a little trouble. At the same time, at the end of the practice session, we practiced on hitting the low shots because I knew that the British Open was going to be a good tournament for him. [O’Meara was 32nd in the U.S. Open and won the British Open.] He’ll set the agenda or I will. We’ve worked together so long, he kind of knows what I’m going to say and I’ll kind of know where he needs to go.

His swing has changed considerably, but it’s been 17 years. He used to be a real upright swinger, that was when he was an amateur. I mean, since he’s been on the tour, it hasn’t changed that much, but you still go through good times and bad times. That’s the thing that people don’t realize when they watch golf on TV.

I mean, you’re watching the best 10 players that week. Very rarely is it the same 10 players week after week after week. Certain players might get on a hot streak, but they’re inconsistent just like amateurs are. Their games are obviously at a different level, but everyone is inconsistent in golf. So you are always trying to recapture the feeling you had when you were going so good. . . .

When people come to me and say, “Hank, I think I’ve got it,” I say, “Make sure you enjoy it because it’s only temporary.” To a teacher, that’s not frustrating because you know that’s just the way it is. The players know that too. They know they need to capitalize when they are having a good stretch. You hope that the weeks you’re hitting it good you can put at least one good week of putting with it and then come out near the top or on top. There’re not many weeks when you have everything going.

As far as how much of what I do is mental or mechanical, it depends on how well you know the player. With Mark, a lot of it is mental. When he gets done with a round of golf, we’ll talk about everything that he did out there. Every shot, every decision. I’ll talk to him about the way I thought that he acted out there. All of that goes into play with him, and a lot of that is mental.

I’ve been not just a teacher, but a coach too. Coaching, you’re talking about course management and the mental game and all those things. Teaching, to me, you’re almost just telling them what’s wrong with their swing. So you have to know a player a lot better to tell them about the mental game. That’s something I’ve always worked on with Mark.

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Continued from Previous Page

When you teach, you really have to understand people and the way they think and the way their mind works. I think that if I wasn’t teaching golf, I’d just be teaching something else. I’m a teacher and golf just happens to be something that I love to do.

PAUL MARCHAND

Cue Fred, Stand Back,

Watch It Flow

For what I do, I probably would use a different term than teacher. More like consultant. You try to get someone who can give you good feedback, and it’s a lot more common now on the tour than it ever was for whatever reason.

The general idea is if someone has secret things and then they’re teaching it to somebody. Really, I find that a little funny because these guys are all great. The real question is “How do I play the best?”

First, you have to trust your advisor, to trust him to tell you what you need to hear. Guys that shoot 67, they know what they’re doing, but how do they play their best?

A player’s motor skills must be acute. In the heat of the battle, they know what they can rely on. To rely on your feelings you have to rely on your swing. Every golfer has a certain tendency on the way he swings. Great teachers know the tendencies of their players. It’s very important that there be a trust. It’s a fragile thing . . . to think trust under pressure.

I usually see Fred five times a year. In the early 1990s, we practiced a lot, but that’s been in decline the last few years because of his back. But he’s such a great player. I feel like his ability to be prepared to play, that’s the big issue right now. He’d like to win some more majors and be ready when he has the chance.

I’d probably put him on a short list of the most talented to play, but to win a major, he must be playing well and be prepared for the event. The Masters in 1998, to see how he handled losing a tournament, which was his to win all week but just didn’t go his way, it was almost on par with how great it was when he won. He was just terrific. It proved to him he still had it. It was such a positive week. It could very well carry over for him.

You have to have mutual respect with a player, especially a player of Fred’s caliber. We were good friends before he was a superstar. There are plenty of times when I want to say something, but it’s not the right time. Other times, even when he doesn’t want to hear it, I say it anyway.

What I do isn’t like coaching in other sports. The player is really the CEO of the operation. The teacher has got to be able to weigh where the guy is going. That’s the fun part. No rehearsal, no Xs and O’s. With Fred, just talking is sometimes helpful. Casual conversation. That support is so important. You can communicate.

He’s a lot smarter guy than he lets on. He picks up vibrations. He’s street-smart. All I know is that it’s a pleasure to watch him, he’s so talented. I watch him on videotape a lot because it’s a great way to catalog where you are at certain points of time.

Fred can copy a picture on a screen. We’ve had some fun with it. Before, he was so natural, he didn’t want to know any of that mechanical stuff, but we’ve moved on and used videotape and benefited from it. We have sort of a checklist on his normal swing. He overdoes some good things sometimes. Like he can overturn, his swing can be too long, he can turn too slowly, he can hit the ball two much from the inside. The majority of players are on the other side. I like to see his swing fairly compact and fairly quick. The more he keeps his swing compact, the [swing] path tends to be closer together, back and down. His mistakes tend to go right.

As for all the coaches, well, I look at this way. With all the current players, it’s going to be very competitive. There are going to be more 59s. There are going to be more coaches out there.

And Fred, well he’s in a very small group of very talented people. He’s pretty much done it his way.

RICK SMITH

Come to Me, You

Compatible Variations

Sometimes in golf at any level, when you make a swing, your swing will lie to you. Your feel will lie to you, meaning that you hit a shot and you think you did something, but maybe you did something different.

My objective as a teacher, no matter who you work with, you give them enough knowledge where they can really help themselves. That, to me, is the ultimate of teaching correctly. So when you do that, you’re on your way. But I think that all the top players in the world can use some help. You’re there to give them feedback--positive and negative.

The fact is, you know what makes a player tick. Emotionally and physically. There’s no question that you try to work with a guy, no matter what, you know what works with him, so when he goes off on a tangent, you’re there to remind him and to help him find his own swing, basically.

If something is off with Lee, I can spot it right away. You check the setup, which relates to ball position and posturing and alignment. And then you look at other things that when they start hitting shots sometimes logically they need to do something to fix it, and it’s usually the wrong thing.

For example, when a player starts swinging from in to out too much, which a lot of good tour players do, you’ll start to sense that their ball position starts to get too far back in the stance or you’ll start to see that their swing path and accuracy is getting worse. They’ll get sensations that their hands will “flash” through the hitting area and that’s telling me something. Even in telephone conversations you start to get a feel for what they’re doing.

When Lee is having a problem, it’s usually geared around the same thing. A good player will always have a tendency to go back to what is natural, or what his inclinations are. New things can develop when they’re out there working by themselves. So when they make one change, sometimes you have to make another to complement that.

What usually goes wrong in Lee’s golf swing, he has a tendency to lift the club a little vertically and his swing doesn’t get round enough. What that does, too much lateral motion, so his body becomes a little bit more lateral, his sequencing gets thrown off because it’s a little loose and his swing path gets off. He doesn’t hit it as straight as he should. His divots may get a little deeper than they should. When he’s known to play his best, obviously his swing path is perfect, as it was on the back nine of the U.S. Open at the Olympic Club. It was phenomenal. He hit every ball just perfect.

I use video and I like to watch him on the practice tee. I’ve seen him really good on the range and then go out on the golf course and see things change. I flew a red-eye to Hawaii because he said he wasn’t hitting it good. We worked for a day and a half. It was interesting. He was good on the range and then when we went to the course, I saw some alignment inconsistencies, some things he thought he was doing actually he wasn’t doing. So I believe in both video and in-person, at the right times.

I try to see Lee, well, I see him in streaks. Every four to six weeks. There will be times when I say “Hey, you look great” and then I’ll get on a plane and leave. That’s part of being a teacher--you become a coach. You say “Hey, by the way, your swing mechanics are great, you’re thinking good, it’s just a matter of you making a few more putts.” There are times when they will be puzzled, they’ll hit a bad shot and they kind of expect you to say something. And you do. That’s part of it.

Nothing lasts forever. It’s a game, you know. The game is so fickle and it’s sensitive to change and your body. We’re not machines. You hold the club in your hands a little differently, your speeds can change, your sequency can get off. It’s a dynamic thing, and that’s why it’s nice to see the guys.

You look in the Hall of Fame and everybody’s different. You need to capture what their strengths are and always work away from a player’s weakness.

In my mind, any great teacher basically has to understand, well, Jim Furyk’s got his backswing and it may be different, but on the way down he’s awesome.

But they all have their own character traits and swing traits and some of those things are brilliant. That was part of my point to David Duval--”Don’t change your top of swing position, don’t change your grip, those are foolish things to do because your whole swing is based around that.”

The key is how many variables do you need to change to get the same result?

You know, it’s like if David had a neutral grip and a square club face and released a little differently or whatever, how much better would he hit it than he already does now?

Those are the things you have to evaluate. If he doesn’t, it’s not worth it.

Then you work in the framework of compatible variations. As long as everything is compatible--face and path and body motion and grip--everything is matching up, that’s the secret to playing good golf.

There are certain traits that have to add up. And when that happens, the player finds himself.

When they play good, I just feel good that they’re happy. When they play bad, I feel awful.

The reason you teach is you want to make something better in somebody’s life. That’s the root of it all.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Coaching Philosophy

BUTCH HARMON

Rio Seco Golf Club

Residence: Las Vegas

Top client: Tiger Woods

BOB DUVAL

Senior PGA Tour player

Residence:Jacksonville, Fla.

Client: David Duval

HANK HANEY

Hank Haney Golf Ranch

Residence:McKinney, Texas

Top client: Mark O’Meara

RICK SMITH

Rick Smith Golf Academy

Residence:Naples, Fla.

Top client: Lee Janzen

PAUL MARCHAND

Houston Country Club

Residence:Houston

Top client: Fred Couples

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Working the Swing Shift

Here are the top 12 players in the official world ranking and their teachers.

Player / Coach: 1. Tiger Woods / Coach Butch Harmon

Comment: o far (so good), it’s been sweet Harmon-y.

Player / Coach: 2. David Duval / Bob Duval

Comment: ather knows best, even if he never shot a 59 like the kid did.

Player / Coach: 3. Mark O’Meara / Hank Haney

Comment: He also skis with client, but it’s hardly been tough sledding.

Player / Coach: 4. Davis Love III / Jack Lumpkin

Comment: A friend of Davis Love Jr., a world-renowned teacher himself.

Player / Coach: 5. Lee Westwood / Pete Cowen

Comment: ormer European PGA Tour player now on larger stage.

Player / Coach: 6. Colin Montgomerie / Bill Ferguson

Comment: ired and rehired more times than Billy Martin.

Player / Coach: 7. Ernie Els / Robert Baker

Comment: On board for two U.S. Opens and victories each year since 1994.

Player / Coach: 8. Vijay Singh / None

Comment: No one can stay awake while client bangs balls on range ad nauseam.

Player / Coach: 9. Nick Price / David Leadbetter

Comment: One of golf’s most gifted minds working under that big hat.

Player / Coach: 10. Justin Leonard / Randy Smith

Comment: Two Dallas guys (it’s a Texas thing).

Player / Coach: 11. Jim Furyk / Mike Furyk

Comment: Dad is responsible for that goofy (but effective) swing.

Player / Coach: 12. Phil Mickelson / Jackie Burke

Comment: Makes sense--Burke won Masters and Mickelson wants to.