Criticism Won’t Mean a Thing if He Has That Augusta Swing

Poor Tiger Woods. Here he is with the Masters ready to be heaped on his plate next week and you wonder how he will stand up to all the pressure without cracking.

After all, he’s going on five weeks now without winning, and you could fill to overflowing the pond next to the 11th green at Augusta National with all the experts who know how to straighten Tiger out.

The consensus is that he needs his coach back. He needs Butch Harmon. Tiger’s problem is that he no longer has Butch on the payroll and that his swing is as undependable as a dog guarding a platter of pork chops.

The great Tiger ship that is taking on water would no doubt be righted if only he took Butch back.

Of course, this is completely wrong.

Nothing against Harmon, who has made a name for himself, not to mention a great career, out of his work with Woods that included reshaping Tiger’s swing in 1998. But in reality, there is no one out there who knows more about Tiger’s swing than Tiger. And Woods is surely smart enough to know that if Harmon really were the guy he needed, he would get him back quicker than you can pot an azalea.

The great players have always had another set of eyes to check out their swings, but the emergence of professional swing teachers is a relatively new development.

Jack Nicklaus didn’t have one. Neither did Arnold Palmer nor Gary Player.

Nicklaus relied on Jack Grout, the pro back home in Columbus, Ohio. Palmer’s extra set of eyes belonged to his father, Deacon, at Latrobe Country Club, the only coach Palmer ever had. Player turned to his father-in-law, Jock Verwey, a two-time South African PGA Tour winner.

From time to time, Palmer would turn to the legendary George Low for a putting tip, and that’s really no different from what Woods does when he asks Mark O’Meara or even John Cook to look at his swing.

Besides, Woods sponges information from other players and swing teachers and incorporates what he can use into his own swing.

He has talked with David Leadbetter, Peter Kostis, Rick Smith and Hank Haney, among others.

And it’s not as if every single bit of information he hears he uses. Woods has said he probably filters out 95% of the data.

Although it’s true that Harmon supervised Woods’ swing changes that transformed Tiger into the most feared player on the PGA Tour, it’s also true that Woods has been and continues to be a work in progress.

If Woods hasn’t won enough to satisfy his critics and thus hand ammunition to the bring-back-Butch bunch, he has plenty of reasons for swing inconsistencies, if he wanted to lay them out, and none of them involve being Butch-less. He’s still getting used to his equipment, his body has become more muscular, he had knee surgery and that altered his swing, and he became engaged.

It has been more than a year since Woods and Harmon officially parted ways, and unless there was a mistake somewhere along the way, didn’t Tiger win five times last year, more than any other player, wasn’t he the PGA Tour player of the year and didn’t he have the lowest scoring average for the fifth consecutive year?

Woods has been winning without Harmon, just as he was winning with him. And once he wins another major, which should happen sooner rather than later, this coach-less criticism is going to disappear in a hurry.

It was no accident, just good timing, that the Harmon situation arose with the Masters right around the corner, Woods’ first opportunity to end his six-major winless streak.

Privately, Woods will say that he is still friendly with Harmon and that their parting of the ways had more to do with Harmon’s personality than anything swing-related. It was simply a matter of style at this stage of Woods’ career. Harmon is by nature a louder ally, and Woods prefers to work on the range in semiprivate, quiet surroundings.

Harmon continues to do well, with an upcoming star in Adam Scott and a rejuvenated one in Darren Clarke as his star pupils. The fact that Harmon has picked neither Scott, nor Clarke nor Woods to win the Masters, but chose Phil Mickelson instead, means

he’s being either totally honest or completely misguided in trying to send some sort of message.

Meanwhile, Woods continues to do well too. Maybe not well enough to please everybody, but that has always been the case with Tiger, hasn’t it?