Rebuilding Tiger Woods. A year ago his reputation and his whole way of life were under reconstruction; this time it is “only” his entire golf game.
Woods does not go through swing coaches quite as fast as he once went through cocktail waitresses, but his decision significantly to overhaul his technique, on top of all the other upheavals in his life, continues to puzzle and divide the golfing world before the Masters, the first major of the year.
Is Woods laying the foundations for another tilt at Mount Nicklaus? Does he even know himself? “I feel almost ready to tee it up on Thursday,” he said yesterday as he prepared to make his seventeenth appearance at the tournament he has won four times.
Depending on whom you speak to, that word “almost” is either ominous for his rivals or, more likely, masks that his game is still a work in progress.
Never one to duck a question, Ian Poulter placed himself in the sceptics’ camp yesterday. He played down Woods’s chances of winning a tournament for the first time since the Australian Masters in November 2009, his longest drought. “I don’t think he’ll finish in the top five,” the Englishman said. “I think at the minute there’s a couple of inconsistent shots.
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“The shots he was hitting at Doral [Woods came tenth at the WGC-Cadillac Championship], they were very inconsistent. You can’t afford to hit shots like that round this course and get away with it.”
Woods smiled yesterday when the locker-room thoughts were relayed. “Well, Poulter is always right, isn’t he?” he said. What he could not deny is that for every burst of promise in recent months, there has been an immediate downturn.
Woods blew a four-shot lead over Graeme McDowell in the Chevron World Challenge in December, hit a pair of 75s in Dubai, when he was fined for spitting on the green, and, last month at Doral, hit a couple of drives that would have embarrassed a weekend golfer. One was measured at 122 yards, and it was not his shortest. His tour rankings — 191st for driving accuracy, 57th for greens in regulation and, most pertinently for Augusta, 107th for putting — are not those of a man to fear.
Woods insists that he is nearing the end of the reconstruction under Sean Foley, his coach of the past eight months, although he readily admits that it is not a short-term project. “It takes time,” he said. “It took a long time with Butch [Harmon] and it took a long time with Hank [Haney] and so far it’s taken a long time with Sean. It’s taken a long time to develop the motor patterns and know what the fixes are. I’m finally starting to shape the ball both ways and being able to fix it if I don’t.”
Justin Rose, another of Foley’s pupils, has been working with the Canadian for more than 18 months and says the work is not yet complete. He urges patience.
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Foley sounds like he is growing a little irritated by the second-guessing. “I can’t hide from the fact that when I started with Tiger, he was No 1 in the world and now he’s No 5 [No 7 as of last week]. I don’t really care — I don’t look at development that way. It’s not based on a weekly referendum of, ‘Oh, this was better, this was worse,’ ” he said.
There are those, including Jack Nicklaus, who worry that Woods is trying to think his way round a course. A conversation between Woods and Mark O’Meara on the practice ground yesterday started jokey and then quickly became an animated discussion, with swing planes being dissected.
“When Tiger started out, there was nothing mechanical about him,” Nicklaus told Golf World. “Now he plays by mechanics. When he really has to win something, the touch and feel that he reverts to produces some unbelievable results. That’s how he should play all the time.”
Whatever the state of his swing, there are also the issues of whether Woods can possibly have the intensity of old. “Without a doubt,” Haney says, “there has been a slip in his work ethic.” Even with all these doubts, it will be no shock if Woods is in contention. He has not finished below sixth at the Masters since his last victory here in 2005. He managed fourth last year after a 20-week break.
However, he is not in the business of competing but reaching the “gold standard, 18” set by Nicklaus by adding to his 14 majors. And even Poulter accepts that stranger things have happened. “You can never rule him out, can you, he has such an incredible record round this golf course,” he said. “But I don’t see it this week.”