I watched
all of Tiger Woods’s play on Wednesday and Thursday this past week at the WGC
Accenture Match Play. Tiger has become such a polarizing figure.
Either people love him or hate him it seems. If you post something about
Tiger on a blog or social network, the haters hate and the lovers love.
Round
One vs. Gonzalo Fdez-Castano
Tiger
comes into the match play a #5 seed. That was odd. He plays a
relatively unknown player from Spain in Gonzalo Fdez-Castano (Gonzo).
Gonzo wins the first two holes and it was looking like Tiger would be closed
out by the 10th. Tiger had driving issues and some match play mistakes,
like going into the desert when Gonzo had done so. Gonzo started to
play poorly and was obviously nervous. Tiger played just well enough to
win, edging Gonzo 1up. It wasn’t impressive, but it was a win and that’s
what match play is all about–playing good enough to beat your opponent.
Round
Two vs. Nick Watney
In round
two versus Nick Watney Tiger tightened up the ball striking quite a bit.
Interesting how things can be so different from one day to the next on the same
golf course. The only really bad tee shot Tiger hit on the back was his
tee shot on #10, which went into a left fairway bunker and gave him an awkward
stance with heels touching the lip. The resulting shot from that bunker
found a club flying backward then hitting Tiger in the foot and the ball flying
right of the green into the desert by a cactus and rock. The language
after that shot was NSFW. The following cactus shot was the 2nd left
handed shot Tiger hit in as many rounds. The joke was that Tiger hit more
left handed shots than Phil Mickelson, who of course took the week off for a
family vacation.
As good
as the ball striking was in the 2nd round, the putting was not. Tiger
missed some seven putts fewer than 15 feet, many blocks to the right. The
most crucial miss right was the final putt on the 18th hole after bombing a 300
yard drive and stuffing a 188 yard approach to less than six feet. The
putt had to drop to extend the match to extra holes. Opponent Nick Watney
was so sure Tiger would make the putt that he’d already started looking at his
yardage book and planning his strategy for the first playoff hole.
Puzzlingly, Tiger’s clutch putt didn’t drop. In fact it didn’t even tough
the hole.
After the
round Tiger commented on the blocked putts and said he should be able to fix it
in about a day. A technical answer which puzzled me. If it is that
easy to fix, why not fix it before
Analysis
Paralysis
During
the past week, and in previous recent appearances, I’ve seen Tiger making
rehearsal moves with the swing. He’s doing them over and over, changing
and looking at positions. He seems to be focusing heavily on body
positions, club positions, swing plane and any of a number of 27 other
technical aspects of his swing. I’m wondering if he’s focusing too much
on being technical and using technical explanations for bad swings, rather than
using feel. After every tournament in post round interviews, Tiger
already has the explanation for whatever has gone wrong technically and how
he’s going to work on it.
It seems
like Tiger plays better when he’s feeling and visualizing shots and especially
putts, versus being a robot or machine. Perhaps this is a case of what my
pops calls “analysis paralysis.” Maybe a feel based approach is better
than over analyzing
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