What Tiger Woods did straight after a golf lesson which is recommended for amateurs to copy now
· Yahoo Sports
Butch Harmon has revealed that slow motion swings were the key to Tiger Woods working on the changes within his game after his first major win, and believes that amateur golfers should do similar after they have had a lesson.
Harmon played a crucial role in taking Woods to the very top of the game. He was his coach for much of his amateur career before continuing to work with him until the early 2000s.
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Woods won his first eight majors during their partnership. He also completed the Tiger Slam in 2001, where he held all four majors at the same time.
One of the most intriguing moments of Woods’ career came in the months after he won The Masters by 12 shots in 1997. At that stage, it appeared that there was nothing that the boy wonder could not do.
However, Woods decided that he wanted to overhaul his swing. And while it meant that he had to wait more than two years for his second major title, it went on to reap huge rewards.
Butch Harmon reveals how Tiger Woods learned to change his golf swing
No golfer can comprehend playing that well and still waiting to start all over. However, Harmon thinks that most amateurs can take something from how Woods went about making those changes.
Speaking to No Laying Up, Harmon revealed that slowing everything down on the practice ground was key to Woods creating his new swing.
“Think about ’98, he won one time. One, it’s all he won in 1998. He spent a whole year working on changes to his swing. Then came ’99, 2000, ’01, ’02, the rest is history. And I tell people that I give a lesson to all the time, and you guys can relate to this if you take a lesson from your local PGA pro, it’s going to take time, change takes time. When you go out and you don’t play good, you just throw it out. ‘Well, that’s not working’,” he said.
“Here’s the greatest player who ever lived, working harder than anybody who ever lived, and it took him about seven months to feel comfortable. I got a call from him one day on the range, it may have been around August, September, and he says, ‘okay Butch, I got it. I really got it now, right where I want it, everything’s good, the film looks good. I’m sending you the film’. He says, ‘everything was perfect’. And he was right. But he worked so hard on that. I wanted to do a little bit at a time. ‘No, I want to do it all right now’.
“A lot of you who are watching this show who take lessons, I’m going to tell you something he did that I think would help you when you take lessons. He must have hit balls with a slow motion swing a thousand times, just making a full swing in slow motion to put the hands and arms and body rotation in the same position every time where he could feel that he was trying to go.
“The average person, those of you who are watching, you can learn from that. Slow motion swings are a fabulous way for a player to feel what they’re trying to do, because in slow motion you can literally get your hands and arms and body in the right place. You can feel yourself coming down and how you come through the shot, and film it.”
The saying Tiger Woods used to have before a round during his peak
It is difficult to imagine what the experience of playing in Woods’ era must have been like. Everyone in the field knew that Woods was going to be unbeatable if he was anywhere near his best.
And it would appear that Woods fed off that aura to make him feel invincible.
Harmon shared what Woods used to say to him on the range when he was at the peak of his powers.
“I’ve seen the great players play, and I’ve never seen anybody control a ball like he did in 2000. Through the air, he had everything. He worked so hard on his wedge play, his short iron stuff with the three-quarter shots, he hit them all the time. Everybody talks about the shot out of the rough on six, to get up over the hill there. He took that six iron and just nuked it as hard as he could swing, got it up on the green and I think Roger Maltbie said, ‘this isn’t a fair fight’. He was amazing,” he said.
“He had a saying. He’s probably not going to like that I’m going to tell you this. He had a saying that he used to tell Stevie and I on the range. He goes, ‘I know that they know that I know they can’t beat me’. And that’s a hell of a saying. That was his mentality.”
Harmon must have felt enormous pressure working with Woods. Everyone felt that they knew what he was capable of once he won The Masters by a record margin 29 years ago.
However, the pair swiftly set to work on substantial changes. Golf has seen numerous players, including major champions, almost ruin their game because of their belief that their swing needs to be overhauled.
Had Woods gone on and not won another major, Harmon would have taken all sorts of criticism. And he would have been well aware of that during that wait for Woods’ victory at the 1999 PGA Championship.
It says a lot about the two men that they never lost faith that they were making the right decision.