Game theory | Golf’s fallen superstar

Tiger, de-clawed

Is Tiger Woods past it?

By R.G.

WHEN Tiger Woods burst onto the global stage in 1997, The Economist was ecstatic:

NOT since Kim Jong Il’s five holes-in-one on his first day on the links, which may have owed a little to the North Korean dictator’s hagiographer, has golf seen anything like the feat achieved last week at the Masters tournament in Augusta, Georgia, by Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, a 21-year-old African-Thai-American-Indian. Sweeping the ball further than anyone thought possible, reducing the course’s mighty par-fives to a drive and a pitching wedge, Mr Woods won by a record-breaking 12 strokes. If Tiger is this good at 21, what will he be like at 35, the age when golfers usually peak?

As it turns out, he peaked a little younger than 35. Since 2009, when his personal life fell apart, he has ceased to dominate the game. He has not won a major tournament since 2008. He won no PGA tournaments at all in 2010, 2011 or 2014. And this year he has played rounds that would not look out of place in a club championship contested by middle-aged insurance salesmen. Small wonder he has announced that he is taking an indefinitely long break from the sport. The question is, can he recover?

Physically, there is no reason why he cannot. He is only 39 and in far better shape than Jack Nicklaus was when he won the Masters in 1986, at the age of 46. Sure, Mr Woods suffers from back pain. His former coach, Butch Harmon, thinks this may be because he is swinging too hard in the hope of hitting it as far as his younger rivals. But his main problem, surely, is mental.

How else to explain a short game that has degenerated from divine to disastrous? A decade ago, under pressure so intense that amateurs can barely imagine it, he could float a chip shot up the slope of the 16th green at Augusta, stop it in exactly the right spot and watch it roll sideways down the hill before hesitating on the edge of the cup and dropping in. Now he is hitting shots like this one. I have, literally, seen my grandmother do better.

Perhaps Mr Woods will beat his demons. Perhaps he will rest a while, put his head in the right place and come roaring back. But it is hard to think of a player who has overcome such a dramatic slump in the past. Ian Baker-Finch, who went from British Open champion in 1991 to missing 32 consecutive cuts in 1994-7, never got his game back. Bernhard Langer offers a more hopeful example: he cured his yips by switching to a long-handled putter. But Mr Woods’s problems appear to go deeper than this. He does not seem to believe in himself any more. And in golf, as in life, such doubts can be self-fulfilling.

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