Longtime Houston attorney Tom Kirkendall's observations on developments in law, business, medicine, culture, sports, and other matters of general interest to the Houston business, professional, and academic communities.
Organized by decade, the list only includes a few Texas courses, including Houston’s venerable Champions Golf Club.
Given the dire financial condition of many courses these days in the face of a soft golf market, Golf Digest chose one old course in Florida as a lesson in real estate development that is frequently forgotten:
Whitfield Country Club, a residential development in Sarasota, Fla., was built in the mid-1920s by Donald Ross, the country’s premier course architect. To sell memberships and home sites, Whitfield’s developers hired the great amateur player Bobby Jones as spokesman. And yet Whitfield failed within a year, a victim of Florida’s real-estate bust that struck well in advance of the stock-market crash. Whitfield proved that even a marquee designer and a celebrity endorser don’t guarantee success, a lesson with resonance even now. . . .
It’s hard to beat the weather in Texas during Autumn when the oppressive heat of Summer gives way to delightfully cool mornings and warm days.
Here is a slideshow of photos (music by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, Through the Morning, Through the Night) that I took during a recent early-morning round at the Tournament Course at The Woodlands, which is in great shape preparing to host the local Champions Tour tournament the weekend after next.
A couple of interesting articles on very good golfers at different stages of their careers came across my desk yesterday.
Jaime Diaz – consistently one of Golf Digest’s best writers – wrotethis Golf Digest article on his conversation with Jack Nicklaus in connection with the Golden Bear’s 70 birthday (H/T Geoff Shackelford). Although Nicklaus still holds the record for major championship victories at 18, he tells Diaz that he now thinks he could have accomplished substantially more if he had really applied himself (he believes he left about one third of his effort on the table). Nicklaus goes on to note that his failure to learn proper pitching technique until relatively late in his career cost him several major victories.
The other insightful article is this Sean Martin/GolfWeek piece on the hottest golfer on the PGA Tour this year – the relatively unheralded Matt Kuchar, who lost his Tour card earlier in the decade and appeared to fall off the golf map after a stellar amateur and collegiate career.
Martin does a good job of explaining the swing change that saved Kuchar’s career. And as with many things in golf, there is a Houston connection to Kuchar’s conversion.
When his golf game was bottoming out five years ago, Kuchar came to Houston to see Jim Hardy, who sort of specializes in golf swing reclamation projects.
Kuchar initially worked with Hardy, who then introduced him to his acolyte, Chris O’Connell. From there, as Martin explains in the article, O’Connell helped Kuchar change his swing to one that rotates much more around his body rather than up and down along the target line. As Jeff Ritter pointed out here awhile back, the swing changes that Tiger Woods is now making with his new swing coach (Sean Foley) are quite similar to the ones that Kuchar made.
It took a couple of years, but Kuchar has now fully embraced the swing change and the results have been amazing. With his win last weekend at the Barclay’s, Kuchar is now first in money earned this season on the Tour, has now finished in the top 20 in 11 of his last 13 tournaments and has the most top 10 finishes this season on the Tour. Not surprisingly, Kuchar will be one of the members of the U.S. Ryder Cup team next month.
Charles Murray reasons (H/TSteve Sailer) that it is becoming statistically less probable that Tiger Woods will catch or exceed Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 major golf championships:
The combination of qualities that enabled Nicklaus to win 18 majors and has enabled Woods to win 14 is freakish. . . .
The role of those psychological strengths is why so much of the commentary about Woods’s play since he returned is beside the point. The commentators focus on whether his component skills are returning to their pre-scandal levels. He can return to precisely the same place on the bell curves of the component skills that he occupied before the meltdown in his personal life, but the package will not be the same. Tiger Woods has experienced a sort of concussion to that Chinese puzzle of psychological strengths, and there must be some residual damage that won’t ever go away.
The long-term effects can be quite small. When we are talking about the extremes of human accomplishment, there is no wiggle room. The package changed at all is no longer at the one-in-many-millions extreme that is required. Woods will still be a sensational golfer, winning a lot of tournaments and probably a few more majors. But to predict that Woods can win five majors between now and the end of his career – something that only 17 other golfers have done in their entire careers – assumes that nothing in the last year has significantly degraded the freakish combination required for extreme accomplishment. I find that assumption untenable.
Murray may be right. As I noted after his last major championship in mid-2008, Woods’ poorly-designed and excessive exercise regimen has damaged his body needlessly. Moreover, his swing has problems and his remarkable putting skills have eroded since his comeback, although that may simply be attributable to concentration problems stemming from the scandal and his pending divorce.
Add to those problems the fact that a half-dozen young, world-class players have emerged over the past two years to challenge for major championships and that only Ben Hogan (8) and Nicklaus (6) have won a large number of majors after the age of 35 (Woods will turn 35 later this year).
Thus, what once looked like a sure thing isn’t such a lock anymore. My sense is that Woods still can beat Nicklaus’ record, but not unless he makes big changes in his training. And as noted earlier here, does Woods really have any true friends who can help him get pointed in the right direction?
Geoff Shackelford provides a good overview of how the R&A’s fiddling with St. Andrews’ iconic 17th hole is likely to have unintended consequences during this weekend’s Open Championship.
The entire interview is fascinating, but a couple of points stood out. First, Haney confirmed my suspicion that Woodsí swing problems derive mainly from deteriorating confidence in his longer clubs:
Tiger has an overall lack of trust with his driver that manifests itself in different ways. One, he obviously swings extremely hard, and sometimes too fast. He feels like he isn’t in the right place in his swing, or that he isn’t going to hit the right shot, and the anxiety of that tends to make people speed up. The quest was to get him to make the same swing with his driver he did with his irons in terms of effort, speed, his head not tilting, rocking and dropping. He was like, "I need to fix that, I’m going to work on it, I’m working on it, I’m going to work on it, I understand," and so on, but I didn’t see it to the extent I felt he needed.
The other observation that stood out to me are ones that Haney makes at the end of the interview regarding a topic that I noted during the immediate aftermath of his infamous car crash:
You’ve said that Tiger needs friends at such a difficult time in his life. Is it hard for such a high-profile individual to find friends?
Yes. Very hard. Especially true friends.
Is your friendship with Tiger on a peer level, or is there a big-brother quality to it?
I think some of my messages to Tiger were along the lines of a big brother, but I don’t know if he ever viewed me that way. Remember, I’m 54 and he’s 34. So I’m sure age is a factor with that.
How does he respond when you try to be close to him? Does he draw lines in the friendship?
Tiger’s different. I’m sure that’s why he’s the golfer he is. I don’t take that personally. It’s not for me to judge how he should be.
At the end of the day, how well do you feel like you really know Tiger Woods?
I always felt like I knew Tiger from observing him. I did not feel like I knew him from knowing him.
Is not how and when he is going to settle up with Elin. Or even when he is going to play again.
No, the most interesting question about Tiger is this — What has happened to his golf swing?
As noted earlier here, I haven’t been comfortable with the public flogging that Woods has taken and continues to take as a result of his personal indiscretions. Seemingly without any true friends and receiving more than his fair share of bad advice, I find it quite easy to have compassion for Woods.
But putting the less interesting personal issues aside. The swing — what has happened?
Because Woods is the best golfer of our time, his swing has been heavily scrutinized over the years. Butch Harmon successfully refined the young Woods’ upright stance and steep swing plane during Woods’ early years on the PGA Tour. But Woods eventually grew tired of the outspoken Harmon and ended up with Hank Haney at the recommendation of Woods’ pal, Mark O’Meara.
Haney teaches a one-plane swing, so Woods’ swing became flatter and more around his body under Haney. Although Woods never has been the ball-striker of a Ben Hogan, after some initial questions (see also here), the Woods-Haney partnership took off when Woods won the Masters in 2005. Woods went on to win an incredible 51% of his PGA Tour starts from July 2006 through last year (32 wins total).
Woods captured six majors over that span, including the 2008 U.S. Open over Rocco Mediate that he somehow won playing on a broken leg and torn ACL. Even though I expressed concern about Woods’ misguided training regimen at the time, it appeared that it was only a matter of time before Woods would break Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 major championships.
Haney then helped Woods return from reconstructive knee surgery in 2009 to win seven times, but none of them were major championships. Nevertheless, this season looked to be a good one for Woods as Pebble Beach and St. Andrews were in the rotation for major championships.
But then Woods personal life blew up and everything changed. Woods put his golf game on ice and missed the first three months of the season. Woods somehow tied for fourth at the Masters in his first start of the season, but he was clearly not sharp in doing so.
The last couple of weeks have been pretty ugly, what with the missed cut at Quail Hollow and a withdrawal at the Players Championship because of a sore neck. In the meantime, Woods had lost so much confidence in his swing that he was at the bottom of the both tournaments in terms of driving distance and accuracy.
To add insult to injury, Woods main competitor — Masters champion Phil Mickelson — is poised to overtake Woods as No. 1 in the World Rankings soon.
Well, there certainly is no povertyof opinions. As a student of the golf swing, my sense is that Woods has lost confidence in his swing of the longer clubs, such as his driver, 3-metal and hybrids. He seems much more comfortable swinging his “control” clubs (mid and short irons). But for whatever reason, Woods’ arms have become disconnected from his upper body during his swings with the longer clubs, which has resulted in a large number of mishits. As the mishits mounted and Woods’ confidence waned, he also lost distance off the tee, which only aggravated Woods’ frustration.
Jeff Ritter — who is one of America’s top young golf instructors — does a very good job below of analyzing Woods’ swing with the driver while comparing it to the swing of one of the best ball-strikers of all-time, Sam Snead.
Woods will probably rebound to the top levels of the game once he sorts out his personal life and straightens out his swing. But Woods’ body is increasingly breaking down under the strain of high-level golf and a needlessly brutal training regimen, so regaining his physical health may be an even bigger problem than regaining some sense of emotional stability in his quest to top Nicklaus’ record.
If you are interested in golf, don’t miss this Golf Digest 60th Anniversary article (slideshow here) on the most important American golf courses of the past 130 years. 
Is not how and when he is going to settle up with Elin. Or even when he is going to play again.