Word: golfed
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When the British Open was contested at Royal Birkdale Golf Club in 1998, Justin Rose, a 17-year-old English amateur, finished in fourth place after holing a 40-yd. (36 m) pitch shot on the final hole. The defining image of the tournament was of Rose smiling at the heavens after his improbable shot, his arms raised in jubilation. Pundits and players alike predicted that he would be golf's next great champion...
...went on to miss 21 consecutive cuts in professional tournaments, trailing the leaders by such a distance that it seemed he might never again make it to the final day of play. His slump sent him searching. He started out by hiring one of the great experts on golf technique, David Leadbetter, who showed him how the mechanism of his swing could be broken down into components that could be rebuilt for greater reliability. Then, in 2006, Rose hired Nick Bradley, a Buddhist who told him that successful golf incorporates elements of reincarnation, as the completion of each shot sets...
...gurus on his return to top form is not unusual for a professional golfer; the debate over whether the game is best mastered through technical engineering or mental fine-tuning may be more pertinent to this sport than to any other. When Tim Gallwey published The Inner Game of Golf in 1979, in which he documented the division of a golfer's psyche into a "thinking" and a "feeling" self, he articulated what lovers of the game have long understood: there are two approaches to becoming a great golfer, and each appeals to a certain type of personality...
...studying the angles and positions of an accurate swing. The latter approach embraces more poetical notions like rhythm, focus and visualization, and is exemplified by "feel" players such as the Texan Ben Crenshaw, who credited his 1995 U.S. Masters victory to the mental strength instilled in him by his golf mentor Harvey Penick, and who mused mysteriously that the U.S. Ryder Cup team won in 1999 because "there was something in the trees...
...great golfers of each generation fuse the two approaches. Tiger Woods regularly reassembles his golf swing - sometimes midround - if he feels his technique needs tweaking. But as the son of a Green Beret father and a Buddhist mother, he brings to the game an idiosyncratic brand of mental resilience and focus that is unmatched by his rivals. When Tiger was 13, his father, Earl Woods, hired a Navy clinical psychologist who reportedly used interrogation techniques to test the boy's concentration. "I tried to break him down mentally," Earl once said. "I tried to intimidate...