Head Trip

Imagine this scene: Tiger Woods, standing on the 18th tee at a major championship. He has a one-shot lead and all he has to do is make par to win. Instead of taking a fairway wood or long-iron and playing it safe, he takes out his driver and unleashes a mighty blow. Unfortunately, it veers left off the clubface and ends up behind a tree in the heavy rough.

Undaunted and again eschewing the safe and sane option of chipping to the fairway, he takes his 3-iron and attempts to slice the ball around the tree and hit the green. Instead, the ball flies straight into the tree and advances about 25 yards. Now, faced with the difficult task of getting up and down to win the championship, he yanks his third shot left and into a bunker. His 4th shot, the shot he needs to hole in order to win, flies long and ends up in the short rough surrounding the green. He now has to hole his chip shot from the thick grass just to tie for the lead and force a playoff.

The chip slides by the hole and he loses the championship.

Does any of this sound familiar? If you follow golf, it should. Two short months ago, Phil Mickelson lost the US Open in just this fashion. And Tiger Woods? Well, Tiger wasn’t there that day, having missed the cut at the Open for the first time as a professional. It was, in fact, the first time he had missed the cut at any major tournament as a professional.

As punishment for his failure, Tiger forced himself to watch every moment of the tournament on television that weekend. What must he have felt, I wonder, as he watched Mickelson’s meltdown on the last hole? It’s not the first time something like this has happened. In the 1999 British Open, Jean Van de Velde blew a 3-stroke lead on the final hole and lost in a playoff. Even great players like Tom Watson and Arnold Palmer have double-bogeyed the last hole to lose the Masters.

It is, however, one of the few things that Tiger hasn’t done. And, as much as anything, it illustrates the yawning divide between Woods and the rest of golfing world. It’s not his physical skills, though they are considerable. Mickelson, currently ranked # 2 in the world, hits the ball almost as far as Tiger does and his short game is considered by some to be even better than Tiger’s. But there is one place where Tiger is, pardon the pun, head and shoulders above the rest. It reminds me of a line from the 1981 horror film Wolfen:

“It’s all in the head, Dewey”.

From the neck up, Tiger Woods has no peers. It begins with his affirmation “Second place sucks” and it continues with his constant efforts to improve his game, to get better. For most golfers at the professional level, tampering with the golf swing is as appealing as bungee-jumping off the Eifel Tower. The ranks of insurance salesmen are overflowing with golfers who’ve “lost” their swing. A minor change here or there, sure, but major changes? No way. They’d just as soon play the game with a rake and shovel. Since turning pro, Tiger has rebuilt his swing from the ground up twice. To get better.

No one has ever consciously combined the physical and the mental game in golf the way Tiger has. Only his idol, Jack Nicklaus, comes close. Obviously, all athletic endeavors require both the mind and the body working in sync but usually this happens on an unconscious level. Ask any player – even a great player – why they’re paying well or poorly and, as a general rule, they can’t tell you. Their best answer is usually a stock cliché: “I’m seeing the ball well” or “I’m in the groove” or “I’m really feeling it” is the best they can do.

Some of this comes from the superstitious nature of most athletes. They don’t really understand how they’re able to do what they do or where it goes when they suddenly can’t do it anymore. It’s a though there is a switch inside them somewhere and sometimes it’s flipped on and sometimes it’s not. There have been very few players who understood themselves and their abilities well enough to be able to perform at a peak level when the switch was turned off and none of them have done it like Tiger Woods.

Take last week’s World Golf Championship at Firestone, for example. In the final two rounds of that tournament, he played more like Tony the Tiger than Tiger Woods. At one point in the third round, he made four bogies in a row, something he’d done only once before as a professional. The temptation must have overwhelming to say “this isn’t my week” and just phone it in for the rest of the tournament. After all, he’d won the last three times he’d teed it up, two of them majors. Anyone can have an off day, or an off week.

Not Tiger. Somehow, he managed to keep himself in contention and finally win his fourth in a row in a playoff. Now, it’s easy enough to say that Tiger was lucky to win. Certainly, the tournament was there for the taking and several players had their shot at it. That they couldn’t close the deal at a time when Tiger was clearly off his feed says more about them than it does about him. No one ever said Tiger couldn’t be beat. But he doesn’t beat himself.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us back to Phil Mickelson. Since the US Open, Tiger has entered five tournaments. He finished second in one and then won the next four. Mickelson, on the other hand, hasn’t contended in a single tournament since his disastrous finish. He says he’s put it behind him but his play says otherwise. Time will tell if he can clear his head and once again play at the level he’s shown himself capable of the last few years.

Tiger’s level.

For Tiger, however, it’s business as usual. Day by day, hole by hole, swing by swing, thought by thought, the quest for improvement never ends. He’s the greatest player in the game today and his becoming the greatest of all time is almost a fait acompli. And when it happens, he will be remembered for his physical talents: his prodigious drives, his silky putting stroke and his uncanny knack for getting the ball in the hole from impossible lies. But his greatest weapon has never been in his golf bag.

It's in his head.