Peter Alliss

The lessons for Tiger to learn

By the time you read this, Tiger Woods will have shown his competitive face a further time or two and the golfing world will know whether or not he is still playing like the world No.1, is treading water or going backwards. At the Memorial Tournament, it certainly wasn’t the former.

The flurry of interest about him since the Masters has been most interesting. Pretty well all the golfing magazines have asked their teaching gurus as to their opinions of what Tiger needs to do to get back on the straight and narrow – golfing-wise, that is. Hundreds and hundreds, nay thousands, of word have been written about where Tiger has gone wrong and how he should get back to the methods he was using ten years ago.

I find this amusing, particularly when the vast majority of the world’s top teachers have hardly ever broken par when playing their own game, even if that doesn’t mean they can’t pass on some golfing knowledge. Those who have reached the top of the teaching profession have made great studies of the game, but very few, if any, have played at the top level, so they can’t really know the feeling of pressure, although that doesn’t stop them pontificating endlessly about it. 

 

“All right, clever dick,” I can hear you say. “What would you do to help Tiger?” Very simply, I believe it is impossible to ‘teach’ Tiger. All that ended round about his 18th birthday. He had his swing, rhythm, grip, stance, alignment – it was only that buzzing in his head that could be shaped, altered, tweaked. Oh, yes, hours could be and were spent learning how to play various chip and bunker shots, read greens, etc but that is no longer the point. Today, I think 90% of Tiger’s golfing woes are in his head. 

I would like to stand with him on the practice ground, watch him hit half-a-dozen shots with a medium iron, just to limber up, and then say, after checking his alignment and posture: “Grip the club as lightly as you possibly can, now make a full swing and hit the ball. Do not regrip but hold on to the club.” It sounds ridiculously simple but I’ve found out over the years, when speaking to people who can play but are going through the doldrums, that it’s one of the simplest ways of getting people back on track.  

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