By Jeff Shain, The Orlando Sentinel –
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Nick Faldo wonders if Tiger Woods has lost his self-confidence. Lee Trevino questions a lack of feel. The BBC’s Peter Alliss speculates about Woods’ brain — more particularly, its location.
As for Woods himself? He wonders where their superpowers come from.
“I always find it interesting since they’re not in my head,” Woods said Tuesday upon his arrival at The Players Championship. “They must have some kind of superpower I don’t know about.”
Maybe the person least perplexed about Woods’ tumble from Bay Hill winner to Masters also-ran to Quail Hollow’s early departure is Woods himself. That new set of swing changes still is anything but second nature, and he knows it better than anyone watching from outside.
“I’ve said this numerous times: You keep building,” he said. “There’s certain times when, yeah, you make great strides forward. And there’s other times where you’re going to take a stride or two backwards. It’s a process.”
Consider the past two outings a step backward. Or at least a huge reality check.
With optimism running high after Woods dusted the field by five shots at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the former world No. 1 snap-hooked his first two tee shots at Augusta National and never really recovered. A tie for 40th was his lowest at the Masters since turning pro.
Last week, nothing really came together as Woods missed the cut at the Wells Fargo Championship.
“He won at Bay Hill, and everybody, including myself, thought, ‘Wow, he’s back,’ “ NBC analyst Johnny Miller said. “Then, at the Masters, he hit nervous shots. His nerves just went off the red line, and he basically succumbed to the pressure.”
CBS’s Faldo said: “The bottom line for me is he just doesn’t have the self-belief, the self-confidence that he obviously had, the Tiger of old.”
And those were some of the milder comments. Trevino, making a rare appearance at last week’s Champions Tour stop, joined with Arnold Palmer in suggesting Woods has become too mechanical in his swing.
“He needs to get back to (playing by) feel,” Trevino said. “All of the old pros used to take it out of the ground. There was no instructor, there (were) no gurus and no sports psychologists and all this other stuff.”
Alliss may have been the most scathing. Before his induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame, the BBC mainstay likened Woods’ swing changes to legendary tenor Luciano Pavarotti choosing to sing baritone.
“I think his golfing brain, for some reason or other, is completely addled,” Alliss said, suggesting that for a time it moved from his cranium to points southward, a reference to the 2009 sex scandal that sent his personal life spiraling along with his game.
For his part, Woods acknowledges a certain amount of confusion — trying to get the body to once again break ingrained habits to set new ones. Even as he romped at Bay Hill, he was uncomfortable with his setup over the ball.
But, he added, it was no different when he began working with Butch Harmon; ditto the Hank Haney era.
“I went for almost two years without doing much with Butch before it kicked in, and about a year and a half with Hank,” he said. “It takes time, takes a lot of reps.
“The fruits have been pretty good on the back side of it. I think so far I’ve shown some nice consistency, and I’m still working.”
