This Jaime Diaz Golf Digest article is the flat out best analysis of Tiger Woods’ recent swing change that I have read and a must read for any student of the golf swing.

Roland Thatcher, the professional golfer who plays out of the Carlton Woods Golf Club here in The Woodlands, survived the PGA Tour’s Q School over the past weekend and was awarded a 2005 PGA Tour card.
Although 35 players are awarded Tour cards out of the Q School Tournament each year, there are many more excrutiating stories of failure, such as this one involving Tour veteran Joel Edwards:

Joel Edwards, another past PGA Tour champion, was on the cut line until hitting his tee shot into the water and taking double-bogey. He took a long walk to the parking lot, letting out guttural screams and pounding his bag along the way, paying his caddie and slamming his car door as he drove off.

From the complaining contained in this London Telegraph op-ed, it sounds as if the PGA of America may have finally chosen the right captain in Tom Lehman to revive America’s flagging Ryder Cup fortunes:

Lehman’s record in the Ryder Cup is statistically good – won five, lost three, halved two – but behaviourally bad.
In 1995, at Oak Hill, Lehman was a rookie and he was first out in the singles against Seve Ballesteros. On the 12th hole Seve asked Lehman to mark his ball, but instead the American tapped in his short putt. This, of course, was pounced on by Ballesteros, who said: “What are you doing? You play out of turn. Where is the referee?” The crowd then began booing and Lehman became unjustifiably angry. He was in the wrong. . .
[F]our years later at Brookline, Lehman was involved in a series of inexcusable incidents. On the second afternoon he holed a putt and indulged in all manner of vertical fist-pumping while Darren Clarke still had to hole out. Later on in the match, he looked on while his playing partner drove off before Clarke and Lee Westwood had arrived on the tee.
But Lehman saved the worst for the final afternoon. Before his singles against Westwood he began conducting the crowd in a reprise of God Bless America. He literally ran off the 13th green after holing a putt and began high-fiving the spectators. And then he led the infamous charge across the 17th green when Jose Maria Olazabal still had his putt to keep the match alive.
Perhaps most unforgiveable of all, Lehman has never properly apologised for any of this. It only required a letter saying he had become caught up in the exuberance of the moment, but that was no excuse and he apologised unreservedly for his conduct. Lehman couldn’t bring himself to write such a letter and so he will always be haunted by Sam Torrance’s charge of, “calls himself a man of God. That was the most disgraceful thing I have ever seen”. . .
. . . Lehman should never have been appointed captain. His behaviour at Brookline and subsequent unwillingness to apologise should have disqualified him for eternity. The PGA’s refusal to recognise these facts shows either they are out of touch with the rest of the world or too desperate and arrogant to care.

Come on, Brits. No American Ryder Cup captain has ever come close to the absurdly bad behavior of European captain Ballesteros during the 1997 Ryder Cup competition. Lighten up.

Not only do they kick the American team’s rear in the Ryder Cup, the European Tour is much more interesting than the usually staid American Tour.
First, this article reports on Seve Ballesteros going nuclear on a European Tour official, apparently over some rules controversy that occurred years ago. Are you taking your medication, Seve?
And this piece reports on the efforts of the first transsexual to attempt to obtain a card on the women’s European Tour. Does this portend a call for hormone analysis on competitors on the women’s tours?

The best competition of the year.

Chuck Cook is one of Texas’ many fine golf teachers, and he runs the Chuck Cook Golf Academy at the Barton Creek Resort in Austin. Mr. Cook has trained under several notable teaching professionals, including Bob Toski, Jim Flick, Peter Kostis, Davis Love Jr., Paul Runyan and Jack Lumpkin, has authored two books, “Perfectly Balanced Golf” and “Tips from the Tour“, as well as the video “How to Stop your Slice and your Hook.” Mr. Cook’s students have included three U.S. Open champions, the late Payne Stewart, Tom Kite and Corey Pavin.
In this NY Sunday Times article, Mr. Cook provides an insightful account of how the golf swing needs to be adapted to each player’s attributes, and how this process sometimes breaks down based on the respective natures of the teacher and the student. First, Mr. Cook notes the two different types of golf instructors:

In golf, as in all sports, there are two styles of teachers, method and matchup.
A method instructor teaches a particular style of swing or play and tries to mold all of his players into that style. A matchup teacher takes his players’ natural tendencies and matches up a set of compatible fundamentals to best use those tendencies.
Two basketball coaches illustrate this difference. Bob Knight, the controversial but competent coach who won three N.C.A.A. championships at Indiana, is a method coach. He made every team play the same style of tenacious man-to-man defense and motion offense. Consequently, Knight would recruit players who fit that style of play.
Dean Smith, Knight’s counterpart at North Carolina, was more of a matchup coach. He would recruit the best players available and adjust his style to suit them. He used a formula based on points scored per possession. If he had a good offensive team, he would play a more up-tempo style, and if he had a good defensive team, he would use a more deliberate style of play.

Then, Mr. Cook points out the peculiar nature of golf–the students pick the coaches rather than the process in most sports in which the coaches pick the students:

In golf, however, teachers don’t recruit players; players recruit teachers. This is where it gets dicey. No method fits all players. Swing styles must fit a player physically and psychologically. To name two of many examples, tall players must swing differently than short players, and aggressive players have different needs than conservative players.

Thus, Mr. Cook points out that not all golfers pick the right teacher for them:

Certain types of players succeed with teachers whose method is compatible. The problem is that most method teachers think their approach is superior for all players. To compound the problem, most top players think they can adapt to any method.
Bad things happen when a headstrong player tries to adapt to an incompatible style.

And, in Mr. Cook’s view, that is precisely what has happened to Tiger Woods, who last week lost the No. 1 World Golf ranking for the first time in more than five years:

The style of swing [Woods] had when he came on tour was good for producing distance but not accuracy. The adjustments he made working with Butch Harmon – to his great benefit – were meant to improve accuracy and enhance control of distance rather than producing distance.
Woods is without question the most talented person to play the game, and at his peak no one has played at a higher level. Once a golfer reaches this level, there is little room to improve. One or two things may help, but hundreds of things can hurt.
Woods is the most aggressive player in pursuit of perfection. He continually tinkers with his game. But he has adopted a style of swing that is not compatible to his tendencies. His new teachers are convinced that this style is superior, and Woods is convinced he can adapt to it. It is a conundrum of considerable proportions.
With his new swing, Woods rotates his arms so much on the backswing that it requires a corresponding “rerolling” on the downswing. But his strength is the speed of his body. To accommodate this rolling and rerolling of the arms, the body must be very quiet, which is not instinctive for Woods.
In addition, golf requires that you swing on a plane that is a blend of uprightness and flatness. Most top players (including Woods when he was coached by Harmon) swing their arms up and turn their body, creating this blend. Woods, though, has gone the other way. The rolling of his arms go around; consequently, his shoulders have to tilt to get the needed “up” in his swing. This tilting, instead of turning, requires Woods to pull up through impact, causing his arms to swing to the right of the target and creating wild shots to the right.

Mr. Cook concludes by observing that sometimes swing adjustments help a player and sometimes they hurt:

There are many players who improved thanks to compatible instruction. Nick Faldo, Curtis Strange, Nick Price, Mark O’Meara, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Kite, Payne Stewart, David Toms, Mickelson, Woods and others won major championships after making fundamental adjustments.
On the other hand, Chip Beck, Bill Rogers, Seve Ballesteros, Ian Baker-Finch, David Duval and Woods have struggled in trying to adapt to swing techniques that don’t fit.

Mr. Cook has hit the nail on the head with regard to Mr. Woods’ swing problems. Mr. Woods should not be faulted for firing Mr. Harmon, who was teaching Mr. Woods’ competitors without Mr. Woods’ approval. But he has replaced Mr. Harmon with method instructors (such as his neighborhood buddy Mark O’Meara) who have prompted Mr. Woods to adopt a flatter swing that is a poor fit for Tiger’s lanky physique. Whereas Mr. Woods was hitting a controlled, long fade when he was under Mr. Harmon’s tutelage, Tiger is now hitting an even longer draw, but he has not been able to control it consistently. My sense is that, unless he returns to hitting a fade, Mr. Woods will continue to struggle in comparison to his brilliance over the first five years of his pro career.
As Lee Trevino observed some years ago:

“I can talk to a fade, but a hook doesn’t listen.”

A few notable developments from the wonderful world of golf:
Vijay Singh finished his long climb to overtake Tiger Woods as the world’s top golfer as he beat Woods in a head-to-head matchup on Monday to win the Deutsche Bank Championship by three strokes and become the new the top-ranked player in the world. The victory was Singh’s sixth victory of the year and was enough finally to vault Singh over Woods as the number one golfer in the World Golf computer ratings.
Woods had been No. 1 for more than five years — a record 264 consecutive weeks — in the rankings that consider performance over the past two years and factor in the strength of the field in each tournament. The new numbers released later Monday had Singh at 12.72 points to Woods’ 12.27, making Singh the first player other than Woods to hold the No. 1 ranking since Aug. 8, 1999, when David Duval was number one.
And what of Mr. Duval? Well, after a slide from the top of professional golf the likes of which had not been seen since the demise of Ian Baker Finch, Duval made the cut for the first time in 15 months in the Deutsche Bank Championship and finished tied for 13th for a payday of $93,750 — more than he has made in 24 events that he has entered in the past two years.
Duval is an interesting man. He lost his only brother to leukemia in his early teens after a bone marrow transplant with Duval as the donor failed, and the loss affected Duval and his family dramatically. Duval’s parents seperated and divorced, and Duval went into a shell in which he found his only outlet in the isolation of golf. He developed an idiosyncratic swing in which he offset a strong grip and a closed club face at the top of the backswing with an incredibly well timed blocking action through his downswing that allowed him to hit a long and accurate fade. He also developed an introverted personality that struck many as conceited.
A stellar player as a collegian, Duval quickly rose to the highest levels of professional golf after winning the 2001 British Open. However, Duval hurt his back, and the blocking action that Duval used in his downswing to offset his strong grip and closed clubface aggravated the injury. When Duval attempted to swing without the blocking action, he started duck hooking everything, which was the natural result of his strong grip and closed clubface. When he started attempting to correct the duck hook, he started blocking everything to the right.
From the pinnacle of his profession after the British Open victory in 2001, Duval fell to 80th on the PGA Tour money list in 2002 and things only got worse from there. Duval made only four cuts in 20 tournaments last year and finished 211th on the money list. As Duval’s golf world collapsed around him, many of his fellow Tour pros who had once considered him to be a conceited jerk saw that Duval was actually living a life of quiet desperation.
Earlier this year, Duval started to attempt to put his golf game back together again by retaining well-known golf teacher David Leadbetter. Duval’s finish this week in the Deutsche Bank Championship is an indication that Leadbetter’s instruction may be helping Duval. Most people who follow golf closely are hopeful that Duval can make it back to the top echelon of professional golf.
Finally, legendary golf swing savant Moe Norman died Saturday at the age of 75 from heart failure. Along with Ben Hogan, many in golf considered Norman to be among the best ball strikers ever.
Tour pros everywhere marveled at Norman’s unusual yet effective swing. He assumed a wide, stiff-kneed stance far from the ball and took the club back with barely any body rotation, and then swung through the ball, finishing with his hands high and in front of him. Norman’s method was the basis of the Natural Golf style, which has achieved a moderate following among amateur golfers over the past decade or so. However, no golfer other than Norman has won a professional tournament using the Natural Golf method.