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One Under Par
Volume 5, number 4.

A Newsletter from KeyGolf...... August, 2004

TIGER, TIGER... BURNING BRIGHT?

We've all seen or heard the reports. “It must be Elin.” “It must be Butch.” "It's the knee surgery." Maybe it's any or all of his “other” involvements. “He's got too many distractions from his game and he's having trouble.” Well, the “having trouble” part is pretty obvious, though we hasten to add, that even when he's “having trouble,” he's able to play at a level most players would love to reach but can only muster occasionally.

Even as I write, Peter Kostis is giving what one might think is a “learned” diagnosis of Tiger's action (at the NEC). But it's really an after the fact, armchair, monday morning quarterback comment, good for TV, but not worth much more. Kostis says Tiger is getting “ahead of his swing” and moving too far over his left side.

So, that's one more description of a “result,” not a “cause” of anything. That's like going to the doctor and he takes a look and says, “Upon examination, I find that you are not well.” It's the President saying “The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country," or "A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls." Kostis is also talking about the obvious, after the fact.

(BTW, the preceding is in no way intended as a political statement. It is simply a convenient illustration of our point about the difference between "result" and "process" oriented statements and our desire that people learn to be more into the latter than the former. Unfortunately, the things we hear everyday from our neighbors don't make much of a dent on the average observer's psyche. It takes a blunder from a celebrity to make the headlines).

The cause of what Peter is describing begins in doubt that leads to a mismatch between how fast the mind works and the speed of physical (body) movement in response to that. The moment of doubt can begin with something as small as what golf ball to use or something even more overbearing, such as concern for post-sugery physical condition. Such experiences can leave residuals that breed thinking like "I hope this works. I hope my body will hold up." (Statements that reveal doubt). The doubt produces anxiety and the anxiety produces the kind of blocking hinderance that culminates in a mismatch in speeds. What follows is like a merry-go-round. The anxiety escalates along with the asynchronous effect from it. The harmony gets lost. Once it starts, one can only fight that off by luck or by accident while the negative results are apt to increase, be irregular, inconsistent or all three. That can be anywhere from very mild all the way to full fledged yips. One drive or shot may be great and the next may make it into another zip code. Did you see Tiger today? (8-22-04). His frustration and anxiety must have been on the upper level of the scale. Still he gets a lot better than average result. How strong is that?

Our focus here, however, is not in seeing the result, but in understanding and managing what happens before the fact that leads to that result.

It is no stretch to see that Tiger is missing more fairways and more greens than at any time since he moved to the PGA tour, but his putting is as good or better than ever (check his stats records). In view of his history, how does something like that happen? Well, it could be Elin's presence, or Butch Harmon's being no longer in the picture, or concern from his knee, but we think not any of those alone. As he acknowledged today in an interview after play, next week he must make commercials, which only adds more fuel to a fire that started elsewhere.

There was a time when Tiger moved to the ball, set himself and fired with precison. Now, he spends way too much time ”thinking.” You can see it. He makes all those Curtis-Strange-like motions appearing to be checking the positions of his club, usually after he makes a bad shot. He has seemingly set aside the thinking process that was visible earlier in his career that had all the earmarks of confidence and peacefulness that goes with being at ease. Bear in mind that confidence comes from having both the knowledge and skill (turned into habit) that supports our goals and objectives. One of those is not enough, and when you “mess” with anything in your portfolio, your internal world tends to hear something like Chubby Checker and the Twist. Is that not a pretty good visual of what “getting ahead of the swing” might look like?

Tiger is not at ease just now. He is tense, shows anxiety and that, unprotected, is fraught with uncertainty and loaded with a lack of trust in his swing. All natural consequences of human movement. That inserts the kind of tension and mis-timing of his swing that results in missed fairways. Same for his iron work and hitting less greens than usual. We already know that when he is at ease, he nails everything. Right now even his pinshot accuracy is not getting him as close to the hole as has been. And he's having more than his usual share of short game problems (but still gets the job done, thanks to his putting).

So what happened? We don't know the facts, any more than anyone else, which means our view is cast as no more than speculation, but at least based on informed perception. If you have watched Tiger from the beginning (who hasn't?), you know that he has a fiery disposition, born of the Driver/Persuader style he exhibits. (Drivers tend to believe they can do it all themselves). It is not hard to notice that he sees himself with a role in helping others, especially children and youth (Persuaders want such interaction). And you know that he is often misunderstood in both respects since his Driver leads to that abrupt pattern that rarely looks sensitive to others, even though the Persuader is there, urging him to do things like sign a golf glove for a kid that got hit by his ball. What all that shows is that he senses a deeply felt commitment to be the very best “model” he can be, even if it's not in the quiet, sincere projections, and level-headed mode of a Craftsman, which he is not. Stewart Cink may be there, but not Tiger. And we note that Stewart appeared to play within his style throughout the NEC.

Somewhere along the way, young Drivers tend to reach way beyond their boundaries, at least for awhile (and don't forget, Tiger, is not exactly in the ancient group, yet). That's not bad, just the way it is. Added together, Tiger's style, along with his advertised (by others, mostly) “mission,” his status in world golf, his vulnerability to the challenges about Butch, his concern for his personal life (more for Elin than himself) make for a volatile, almost rancid, environment. What he is now doing in the midst of all that cacaphony, is trying to make himself an even better golfer than he was when he was the emerging darling of the fairways. We are not privy to his reasons for forcing so many issues, unless it is simply that his inner man is saying, “OK, folks, you want me to go higher, I'll try to get there for you.” Where he used to be more attuned to the present, he is noticeably caught up now in the future and the past. Enter old man anxiety. The more he tries to “figure it out,” the more the pressure is aroused. Once you begin to make changes of any kind (as in swings, people, objectives, procedures), each one creates a little imbalance. After while what was several separate “little's” becomes one "huge" abcess. That introduces increasing measures of disorientation, with a domino attribute and effect.

(That vision can be cancelled, of course, if we take the view that Tiger is really beyond humanity, which we offer with a touch of irony as a way of pointing to his vulnerability as no different from the rest of us. And we note that no amount of anything called "mental toughness," will turn off the human autoimmune system - fortunately for all of us).

At such a point, all the external and internal pressures come together like scrambled eggs and the next thing he knows, instead of doing what he already knows how to do, he starts experimenting, looking for "it," and making changes, in much too rapid succession. Then the entire message directed inwardly, taxing the non-discriminatory system is, “I'm not sure what I want or need.” Too many mentally suggested commands or garbled self-talk and “whammo,” fairways and greens missed, in highly uncharacteristic fashion for Tiger. The one burning issue we can see clearly, is that Tiger, through no real fault of his own, still doesn't understand how to manage anxiety and/or the automatic principle. He had the head start provided by his mom from the Eastern philosophies that tends to breed a calm mind and quiet inner world as easily as most of us learn to walk. That does not, however, exempt one from needing the tools that manage all of that, especially under the gun.

The majority who watch him tend not to understand what's happening and, apparently, he doesn't either. But what is evident is that it has been building steadily, leading to too much conscious mental actitvity during play, too many internal messages and commands, frustration accompanied by a loss of the rhythm and balance that marked his earlier career. In turn, for him, just like for all golfers, that brings up more experiments, more checking, more attempts to “fix” something (that probably wasn't “broke” in the first place), and that rather furtive exercise has compromised what he had built into an originally well-formed habit system, at least good enough to put him far out front of his peers. He is presently set into an approach that breaches what was working quite well. UNTIL... finally, normal defenses and fortifications have been encroached and over-ridden.

Oh yes, and we must not skip past another dynamic, also very common to all of us. Remember the "genius" group in school? The outstanding people? If you look closely you will recall that the majority always had subtle ways to "call them back" toward the group, and they had equally subtle needs to be less noticeable so they could blend in. That same undertone could be affecting all this, too. It isn't the kind of thing that anyone wants to lay claim to, but it is part of our lives and likely of the picture we are looking at here. So Tiger, among the other things, may be allowing himself to creep back toward the pack, without even being conscious of it. At worst, that would get one of the monkeys off his back.

So the current picture is not the same as the past. He still manages better than most, but his winning patterns have fallen off. Even he is having trouble getting it from the practice tee to the golf course. With no tongue in cheek, we say that it is a short step to a remedy. If Tiger knew what we know about the automatic principle and the management tool we call “clear key,” he would be back in his favorite saddle in short order. Using a clear key will not only bring out the best of what is owned, but it will help restore the best of what has been mastered in the past, to the extent that attention is given first to the proper way to ask for it. We do not believe that Tiger never owned what he showed us during those really outstanding years. It is only a short step to get that back, which, right now, would have to be registered as a step in his favor.

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