I suppose even a sporting legend like Tiger Woods will take his inspiration wherever he can but his inclination may be to consider that only fellow legends can offer the real deal.  As he makes his long-awaited proper comeback at the Farmers Insurance Open in the familiar surrounds of Torrey Pines in San Diego, he need only look across the world, to Melbourne, where his seemingly ageless mate Roger Federer is in yet another Grand Slam final.  The Swiss is 36 but still going strong, having been relatively injury-free until the later stages of his stellar career.  He has learned how to manage his body – and mind – to cope with the stresses and strains, the twists and turns of one of the most physically demanding of sports.

Federer still loves the sport and the competition and anything he wins now is a bonus.  He’ll get nervous when things get tense but essentially he’s playing without fear, for the fun of it – but with a tigerish competitive ferocity.  If Tiger’s newly fused back – and the rest of his body – can stand up to the rigours of more than a tournament here and there, he’ll be dangerous.  Not because he doesn’t care – he does, he can’t not, it’s in his blood, in his bones – but because he’s never not going to be a legend, the man many people believe is the best golfer who’s ever lived.

Of course he wants to win five more majors to beat Jack Nicklaus’s record but what’s a major?  An artificial media construct.  There are a handful of golfers who stand out as the best who’ve ever played the game.  Nicklaus is one of them.  Tiger is another.  That’s a given.  There’s Harry Vardon, Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, young Tom Morris, maybe not that many others who scared most of the opposition into submission before a shot had been hit.  Tiger is 42, young really for a golfer these days but he’s been through a lot and the spotlight is blinding, unremitting, so who knows how much this Tiger has left in the tank.

He’s still learning what he can and can’t do but he says he has no pain now and it doesn’t hurt when he takes the club back or before or after impact.  It doesn’t hurt when he walks and that’s all progress.  Now it’s all a bit a magical mystery tour, as he explained in his pre-tournament press conference:-

“I’d like to meet somebody who can swing it over 120 miles an hour with a fused back………no one understands that. So I have to rely on my own feels and play around with what my body can and cannot do.  It’s not going to look like it used to.  I don’t have the mobility that I used to and that’s just the reality.  Now it’s just a matter of what can I do and that’s just practising and getting my feels and trusting, experimenting a lot, to try and figure out what can this body do and how explosive can it be and how am I going to control shots with different shapes, am I going to get different feels…….Some of that stuff is different and I’m still learning it.”

It’s right up his street.  He might have launched into his shots with brutal force but he has always loved the creative side of the game, the conjuring up of miracle recoveries and if anyone can use finesse to counter today’s unsubtle power gamers, it’s TW.  Whether he ends up burning bright or raging against the dying of the light, we’ll hear all about it.  Augusta anyone?

Tiger apart, there’s a lot of golf going on.  Tommy Fleetwood, Rory McIlroy and co are playing in the Omega Dubai Desert Classic and there are a load of women taking to the fairways to start their season in the Pure Silk-Bahamas LPGA Classic at the Ocean Club Golf Course in Paradise Island, Bahamas.  The LPGA’s new advertising campaign is called “A Global Tour Like No Other” and bills the players, from 32 countries, as ” the most accessible athletes in sport”.

One day, perhaps, the message will get through:  golf is a game for everyone, everywhere.

 

It was September 2015 and a tall, lone figure was on the practice ground at Royal Lytham & St Annes golf club.  Gathered a little way to the side was a group of Americans – well wishers and supporters of their team which had come to contest the biennial Walker Cup against a strong Great Britain & Ireland side.  But the Americans believed they had a secret weapon – the supremely talented 21 year old Californian, Bryson DeChambeau who had earlier that summer become only the fifth player to win both the US Amateur and NCAA Championship (the latter the top US College title) in the same year.  He had joined a fairly exclusive club comprising Jack Nicklaus, Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods and Ryan Moore.  The lone figure was DeChambeau.  I edged closer and started to watch.

I already knew a little bit about him thanks to my research for the forthcoming broadcast of the match.  Bryson was a physics major at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas and at the age of 17, fuelled by his coach’s inspiration and Homer Kelley’s instruction book, The Golfing Machine, he had built himself a set of single length irons.  It made perfect sense to him.  With the clubs being the same length, the same lie angle and the same weight he was removing some of the myriad of variation that bedevils golf.   He reasoned he could use the exact same setup and exact same swing with every club.  That first set of clubs had evolved into the set he was swinging that day on the practice ground at Royal Lytham.  The irons were 37.5 inches long and the lies approximately 10 degrees more upright than normal, resulting in a high hand position at address.  He could therefore maintain a straight line in profile from his left shoulder down to the golf ball and more easily execute a one-plane swing.

As I watched one shot after another being dispatched into the distance I did wonder was I watching a passing fad.  After all, single set irons had been mooted as far back as the 1930s when Bobby Jones designed a set in which every two clubs were the same length – in other words, the 3 and 4 irons matched in length, the 5 and 6 and so on.  There was no advancement until the 1980s when Tommy Armour EQL irons were produced, all shafts being the length of a 7-iron.  The woods were the length of a 5-wood shaft.  They didn’t catch on.

Would this slightly eccentric young American (he has worn the Ben Hogan flat white cap since the age of 12) change the thinking of the golfing world?  Time, I thought, would tell.

The United States lost that Walker Cup on the windy Lancashire coast but DeChambeau was the only one of the visitors to be undefeated with two wins and a half from his three matches.  Not surprisingly, the professional ranks beckoned and in 2016 he broke through for his first win as a professional on the Web.Com Tour, the satellite tour to the PGA Tour.  That same year he signed for Cobra, who committed to mass producing single length irons.  Then came the potential game changer at the 2017 John Deere Classic.  DeChambeau recorded his first PGA Tour win, closing with a 65 to turn a four-shot deficit into a one-shot victory over Patrick Rodgers.

The story of single length irons will undoubtedly continue to unfold and be helped by the success of the young Californian.  He claims that many of his peers on tour have expressed an interest in understanding how the clubs could benefit their games.  But, most telling of all, perhaps, is the release of Cobra’s figures in the first year they have mass produced single length irons.  The Cobra F7 One Length irons accounted for a whopping 60% of their sales with the speed of their success taking the company by surprise.

DeChambeau has been playing single length clubs for seven years now, believing utterly in the science behind their performance.  I wonder, just wonder what the game will look like in another decade or two?  Will the professional tours be full of players who have never swung variable length clubs, just as nowadays there are players who have never hit a persimmon driver?  What a legacy that would be for Bryson DeChambeau.  It’s exactly a year ago, at the PGA Show in Orlando, that Cobra showcased their revolutionary irons – what a twelve months it’s been.  Bryson’s comment at the time?  “This is something that is going to change the game.”

Mo’s instructions were terse and to the point:  “One subject only, Rory and the boys in Abu Dhabi, looking ahead to the Ryder Cup and no whittering on about people no one’s ever heard of.  And NO photographs of frozen bunkers.”

Well, that’s me told and just when I thought I was getting to grips with winter photography, in my own small, phone-y  way.  No chance of suffering from delusions of competence, let alone grandeur in this parish.

Still, being hunkered down in Staffordshire in the depths of winter, it is lovely to see Rory (surely no one needs the surname McIlroy until all the youngsters named after the Holywood star start hitting the major-winning trail?) back in action and apparently fit – the slight thickening of some wall in his heart notwithstanding.  He started with a 69, three under par, in the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship presented by EGA (Emirates Global Aluminium), only three shots behind the joint leaders Hideto Tanihara, of Japan and Tommy Fleetwood, Europe’s No 1, the defending champion, of Southport.

I know people who can’t stand Rory – they’ve never met him but there’s something about his bounce that irritates them, just the way one of my cousins loathes the sainted Roger Federer and my father and uncle excoriated the inimitable Harry Carpenter every time he appeared on the television screen, did that little rabbit thing with his mouth and then expertly and seamlessly introduced whatever sporting occasion it was.  Dad and Dick did not care that Harry was the consummate professional, they didn’t want to know that he was kind, generous, industrious, charitable and that no one else had a bad word to say about him; they just wanted to jeer and sneer every time he appeared.  If they’d met him, they’d have been courtesy personified but they didn’t want to meet him, they didn’t want to understand him, they wanted to indulge their anti-Harry prejudice to their (mostly good) heart’s content.

I don’t know Rory well, though Maureen does but he’s one of my favourites and I’d love him to win the Masters this year, to complete the career grand slam.  He’s more than capable of winning at Augusta, even though other courses may suit him better but he may never win the green jacket he so craves.  It won’t make him a bad golfer or a bad person but it’ll always be a gap in his resume and the longer he goes without winning in Georgia in April, the more it’ll become a gaping hole no matter how many other majors and victories he racks up.

At the moment, I doubt he’d swap his career for Danny Willett’s Masters title.  With luck Willett will train on but he’s struggled since his moment of glory at Augusta.  This is an important year for the Yorkshireman but being a one-hit wonder must surely be better than being no wonder at all.  The trouble is that when you start to struggle, hordes of bright young things, as yet untroubled by life and doubts, start to stream past, dreaming of majors and Ryder Cup glory.

Thomas Bjorn, who once threw away the Open at Royal St George’s but enjoyed an excellent, extended career, is facing one of his biggest challenges as Europe’s captain in the Ryder Cup match against the Americans in Paris this September.  The USA, triumphant at Hazeltine last time out, are full of confidence given the high standing of Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, Rickie Fowler, Patrick Reed and their cohorts but it’s never easy to win away from home, even in these global golfing times.

The Europeans will have taken a lot of confidence from their victory in the EurAsia Cup in Kuala Lumpur last week but they’ll know that it wasn’t all that easy.  The score, 14-10, sounds conclusive enough and the Euros dominated their Asian counterparts in the singles but the visitors were behind after the foursomes and fourballs and it’ll be interesting to see how many of the team will be playing in Paris.  Ireland’s Paul Dunne, who didn’t win a point, indicated that he was a real team man when he said he’d rather lose all his matches and be on the winning side than win all his matches and lose the trophy – and he meant it.  Don’t rule him out of the Ryder Cup team but it’ll be tough to get in, with the likes of McIlroy, Justin Rose and Jon Rahm, who weren’t playing in Malaysia, pretty well certain to make it.

Vive la France.  Allez les oles!

 

 

“Hello World,” he said on turning pro over twenty years ago.  Those words heralded the arrival of Tiger Woods into the world of professional golf and nothing in this sport has ever been the same since.  In those very early days one tour professional apparently asked Sandy Lyle if he knew Tiger Woods.  “No, I’ve never played there,” replied Sandy innocently.

I first watched Tiger in the flesh in his first Masters as a professional in 1997.  The fanfare was deafening and I rushed eagerly to see this new kid on the block.  He went out in 40 blows, four over par, and I left him at the 10th tee thinking he’d been well and truly over-hyped.  He came home in 30, never looked back and won his first major easily with a record score.  That was the beginning of a remarkable career which may or may not be over.  Yesterday, Tiger made a gentle return to the competitive arena in the 18-man field in the Hero World Challenge, a tournament he hosts annually in the Bahamas.  With a total of eight operations behind him – four on his left knee, four on his back – it really shouldn’t be much of a discussion as to how successful/long his return to competitive golf may be, should it?  Well, that’s just the thing with Tiger, you can never really tell.  He has had a habit of surprising us down the years.

It was 1999 when I first commentated on Tiger in a major and as it happened that was his second victory at golf’s most elevated level.  Over the next ten years I had a front-row seat watching the career of the world’s most famous athlete unfold as he hoovered up 14 majors in his quest to match Jack Nicklaus’ total of 18.  There was no one to match him.  His length off the tee, his scintillating irons and his ability to hole crucial putts and chips distanced him from all opposition.  And his mind…..well, it was like a steel trap.  For the first time ever, for the ONLY time ever, the most famous athlete in the world was a golfer.  My admiration for him as a player knew no bounds and what an immense privilege it was to be inside the ropes alongside him as he repeatedly carved his name in the history books.

But there’s no doubt he changed over those years.  Was it the pressure-cooker fishbowl he lived in, being constantly “on show”?  Or was it the constant fawning of those around him – Tour officials, fans, managers and the like?  Whatever it was, he became increasingly arrogant, increasingly controlling and quite simply, not a very nice human being.  If asked a question in his media conference that he didn’t care for, he would ascertain who the questioner worked for and would then ensure that that publication, TV channel, whatever, would not get any interviews or quotes from him in the future.  He would frequently say to professional journalists, “You’re a piece of work,” with more than a hint of a sneer.  I witnessed it so often – intimidation and control.  Not pleasant.

I did many post round interviews with him and there is one that stands out in my memory.  It was the World Golf Championship event at Dove Mountain in Arizona, the matchplay, and Tiger was drawn against the big-hitting JB Holmes in the first round.  Tiger’s opening tee shot sailed out of bounds, almost ending in a swimming pool, and from there he played woeful stuff, by his standards, to be four down with five to go.  From this platform of poor play he fashioned a birdie, birdie, eagle, par, birdie finish to win on the last.  I got to interview him greenside so he was still very much in the moment, pumped at his Houdini escape.  Gone was any caution. There were no guarded comments, just a proper conversation about golf and his evident delight and joy in his finish.  He behaved like a proper person.  I loved it.

We are now in an era where most of the players competing in the upper echelons of the world stage have never played against Tiger or seen him work his magic on a golf course.  Yesterday he played with Justin Thomas, the 2017 season poster boy of golf with five wins including a major on his resume – a sustained year-long performance that had everyone hailing the arrival of a new superstar.  But, hold on a second – Tiger won at least five times in a season on no fewer than TEN occasions and he won ten times worldwide in 2000 alone.  There is no one playing nowadays who can yet come close to Tiger’s dominance and win rate, so is it any wonder there is more than a frisson of expectation as he prepares for yet another comeback attempt?

I wonder what motivates him now though?  Not the dosh, surely, but possibly the rediscovered joy of being finally pain-free on the course?  To be sure, it must pique his interest to see what he can really do against today’s young guns.  More interesting, however, was his comment in a recent interview that his children, Sam, 10, and Charlie, 8, were now keen to play golf with him.  He lamented they had only ever known their Dad as a “youtube golfer” – his description.  He is strongly motivated to show his kids exactly how good he is on a golf course.  We don’t need to look further than Scotland’s Paul Lawrie who had a wonderful second half to his career when motivated by the desire to play golf with his boys and show them just what he could do.

Tiger’s career is no doubt on the wane from those heady, sublime days when the game looked effortlessly easy for him but perhaps we may still witness a few glorious sunsets in his twilight years.  And, who knows, perhaps this happier person may become a nicer one too.