Rocco Mediate Says Tiger's Problems Are From Coaches

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Interesting article here about Rocco's thoughts on TW and what the issues are.

Rocco Mediate is rarely at a loss for words.

Sometimes, that's not a great thing.

The ever-loquacious PGA Tour veteran weighed in with his opinion on old pal Tiger Woods' travails in the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday and effectively trashed the fading former No. 1's last two swing coaches.

"I love the way he plays, but I'm disgusted with what's going on with him because it's sad for our game," Mediate said Tuesday. "A lot of guys are happy Tiger isn't playing well. I'm not. ...

"We need to have Tiger back at the top, because he's the draw. It's fantastic all these other kids are winning, but they're not Tiger Woods."

Disgust?

Mediate believes that Woods' new swing under new coach Sean Foley is putting too much stress on his body. By design, it's supposed to do just the opposite, by the way.

"The physical motion is wrong," Mediate told the newspaper. "To get that stress off his body is a piece of cake -- the guys working with him just don't know. Sean knows some stuff, but what's going on with Tiger is not correct. That's why he keeps breaking and that's why the ball keeps going sideways."

Wow, hard to know where to begin here. Mediate knows more about the golf swing than Foley, whose students include Justin Rose and Hunter Mahan, who both won twice last year? Mediate didn't leave out Hank Haney, Woods' former coach, either.

"Starting with Haney until now, it was a complete and absolute destruction," he said.
As an aside -- Woods was more consistent from week to week under Haney than at any point in his career. Haney has the incontrovertible data to back it up.

"If it was me [as his coach], I would say to Tiger, 'Look, dude, I'm not helping you, you're getting worse. You've broken down three times and you've had 57 knee surgeries. It's not happening,'" Mediate said.

So, the assertion here is that none of Woods' issues are of his own making? Really? Recall that 13 months ago, after Haney quit as his coach, Woods hit rock bottom while flying solo at the Bridgestone Invitational, finishing one spot out of dead last, his worst 72-hole finish ever. He was lost and looking for a lifeline, and began working with Foley a week later.

Then there's the loss of his psychological edge, his crisis of confidence, his frequent and various injuries, the fact that his putting has been frequently ghastly, and that he hasn’t won on the U.S. tour in nearly two years. Woods beat Mediate in a 19-hole playoff to win his most recent major title, at the 2008 U.S. Open. Mediate is the defending champ at the Frys.com Open, where Woods will make his debut in a second-tier Fall Series event on Oct. 6.

If it were only as simple as the swing coach, Woods might have righted the ship by now.

Mediate lauded Woods' decision to play, although it might have been a condition of being added to the Presidents Cup team as an at-large pick. The U.S. team is captained by Fred Couples, who publicly asked Woods to add a tournament because he is ineligible to play in the current four-week FedEx Cup series.

"It just shows another side of him," Mediate said of Woods' commitment to the Fry's event. "He's trying to get better, trying to figure out his swing problem. When he gets his stuff together, he'll be No. 1 again and everything will be back to normal."

Normalcy and Tiger Woods? That not only would be welcome, it would represent a first.



http://steveelling.blogs.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/6267041/31647740
 
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Rocco never loss for words. I like him. I think he is right on with some aspects in the sense the swing just doesn't seem to fit Tiger Woods. Pretty interesting to hear his response.
 
Golf Channel said the same thing during the PGA. And I agree if anything he needs to just work with himself this winter and then get looked at before the masters. Interesting read though
 
Number one again? Not so sure on that one.

:popcorn:
 
Rocco should sell TW a V Harness. Problem solved.



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Tell us how you really feel Rocco...
 
Maybe they could work out a trade for some heat rub...hehe

Only if you get it from Dick's... or bird man.
 
Who wrote the article? Seems like whoever it was took every chance to editorialize their thoughts into almost a point counter-point debate.

Ever: NM, I missed the link below the article!
 
I always thought Rocco was on drugs and I think his ramblings above convinced me. :smile:
 
The writing makes Rocco come across as a bit of a know-it-all, but it's definitely interesting.
 
The writing makes Rocco come across as a bit of a know-it-all, but it's definitely interesting.

Interesting thoughts. This is now 2 PGA Tour players that have said the same thing publicly though. He and Bubba Watson both saying similar things. Whether they are right or not, who knows, but interesting.
 
Who wrote the article? Seems like whoever it was took every chance to editorialize their thoughts into almost a point counter-point debate.

Ever: NM, I missed the link below the article!

Steve Elling is a columnist. It is supposed to include editorializing and his opinions. Much different than if he were writing a news story.


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I love the comments by Rocco. I just wonder how much of this (because everyone is saying it) Tiger actually hears and thinks about.
 
I'm pretty sure Woods was getting knee surgeries when he was working with Harmon too.
 
Steve Elling is a columnist. It is supposed to include editorializing and his opinions. Much different than if he were writing a news story.


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Well aware of who he is. Seems from the article he took Roccos comments as a challenge to prove him (Rocco) wrong, Rocco was pretty much spot on with his assessment with the comments about Tiger's new swing. There's commenting and then there is being argumentative, which is what I took away from this piece.
 
57 knee surgeries??? I thought it was only 37??? :dohanim:

Interesting article...
 
everyone has their opinions. I thought this article was one of the more interesting pieces i've read about eldrick lately.

Once upon a time there was a Tour player so good that the other pros treated him like a god. Fred Couples said, "You get the feeling sometimes that the rest of us are all playing for second place." Tom Watson said, "He has raised the bar to a level only he can reach. Someday I'll tell my grandkids that I played in the same tournament with Tiger Woods."

The record book said pretty much the same thing. From 1999 through 2003, Woods won more than a third of the tournaments he entered. As recently as 2009 his winning percentage hovered near 30%, almost 10 points higher than that of Ben Hogan, the only other pro with a win rate above 20%.

Woods won often, and he also won big. He won his first major, the 1997 Masters, by a record 12 strokes. He ran away with the 2000 U.S. Open by a record 15 strokes, and a month later he won the British Open by eight. The following spring, when he slipped on his second green jacket, he owned all four major titles at the same time. Woods was player of the year every year. He won the Vardon Trophy for low scoring average every year. He was the leading money winner every year.


And he had the best tempo.

By best tempo I mean most consistent. Virtually every Tour player swings at about a 3-to-1 ratio of backswing to forward swing. But tournament pros are not robots; some of their swings deviate fractionally. The better measure of a golfer's tempo is repeatability. Which Tour pros can count on their inner clock to function flawlessly over four rounds?

To answer that question, I collect video of the pros under tournament conditions and then check for variability in their swing times. For example, I studied videotape of the 2002 U.S. Open that showed Tiger warming up for his final round and then shooting a cautious 72 to win his eighth major. When I timed his range swings I was tempted to shake my laptop to see if it was broken. Every single backswing timed out at 24 frames of broadcast-standard video. Could Tiger take it to the 1st tee? Oh, yeah. He drilled a three-wood down the fairway and then floated a wedge to the middle of the 1st green. Both shots were 24/8.

Woods gained his consistency after he scrapped the swing he used to win the '97 Masters and started building a new one under the supervision of Butch Harmon.

It's hard to argue retroactively against the switch. Once Woods got the new moves down he went on a half-decade tear highlighted by the Tiger Slam and a six-tournament winning streak. The only thing I can contribute to the discussion is my tempo data, which says that Woods swung faster in 2000 than he did in 1997. That's faster as in elapsed time, not clubhead speed. Tiger's rebuilt swing pared thirteen-hundredths of a second off his rookie-year swing.

But while Woods got faster, he maintained the critical 3-to-1 timing ratio. When I first timed him, using tape from the '97 Masters, he was a consistent 27/9. Five years later, with eight more major titles under his belt, he was an even steadier 24/8.


Different swings, yes. But identical in their adherence to Tour Tempo.

Perfection must be a drag, because Tiger went rogue again. In the 2002 season he fired Harmon and later that year hired Hank Haney. Haney's prescription (for a swing ailment that only he and Tiger lost sleep over) was a faster, flatter backswing with less wrist cock. It was a less pretty swing — Tiger's head bobbed like a cork on a wave — but Woods silenced the Haney haters with a six-win season in '05 that included a fourth green jacket and a second claret jug.

Did I say he silenced the Haney haters? That would be wrong. Tiger still hit it farther than most off the tee, but young lions like Bubba Watson and Dustin Johnson sailed their tee shots 20 yards past him. More alarming, Woods found it increasingly difficult to find the fairway. At the '06 Ryder Cup he yanked his opening drive in a four-ball match into a K-Club pond that wasn't thought to be in play. "Tiger's opening tee shot made us all feel at ease," said Europe's Colin Montgomerie.

Woods dismissed his critics. He said he was "getting close." It wasn't my fight. Nevertheless, I half expected the phone to ring and a voice to say, "This is Hank Haney, and I was just wondering if you had any fresh tempo numbers on Tiger," or "This is Brandel Chamblee, and I need some evidence to support my contention that Tiger is screwing up his swing."

I was ready for either call. I had data showing that Tiger's '05 swing was faster than his '02 swing. With Harmon at the helm, Woods had been a steady 24/8. With Haney, Woods was 21/7.

Note that I didn't say a steady 21/7. As he struggled to master his new swing, Tiger seemed to have turned off his internal clock. Some backswings took 22 frames, but others took 19. Some swings seemed to have been cobbled together from different golfers — a Byron Nelson backswing with a Moe Norman downswing (23/6). The variability did not surprise me. When a golfer is consciously manipulating the club, his tempo will suffer. It was only a matter of time, I predicted, before Woods got comfortable with his new mechanics and regained his rhythm.

A year passed, then another, but Tiger's timing ratio refused to settle around a Tour Tempo node. His swings had a lurchy quality, like a man trying to heave a sack of grain onto a dock. Tiger hit his best shots with a 21/7 swing, but it wasn't a tempo he could summon at will. Why couldn't he?

It's a fair question, when you consider that our Tour Tempo training tones had found their way to lesson tees around the world. The only two guys on the planet who didn't know that bad tempo could be corrected in five minutes were the world's greatest golfer ... and Charles Barkley.

I had to consider another possibility: that Tiger Woods was the first posttempo golf star, a player so gifted that he could disregard rhythm and timing and simply will his ball into the hole. In 2009, after all, he won six PGA Tour events, won all five of his Presidents Cup matches and closed out the season with a two-stroke victory at the Australian Masters.

Then came that fateful Thanksgiving weekend, when Tiger crashed his car — proving that Tour Tempo was not, as we had claimed on the book jacket, "golf's last secret finally revealed."

Woods didn't play again until the 2010 Masters. Naturally, I was eager to see how four months away from the game, including a stint in rehab, had affected his tempo. One of the first swings I timed was Tiger's tee shot on the par-5 13th, a sweet little draw that traced the curve of the dogleg and found the middle of the fairway. Clicking the mouse to advance Tiger's swing frame by frame, I counted 19 frames to the top of his backswing and an additional six frames back to the ball.

John Garrity, my Tour Tempo co-author, was on the speaker phone from the Augusta National press room. "Nineteen?" he asked, his voice rising. "With a fairway metal?"

I shared his surprise. I had never seen Tiger get down to 19 frames with a long club. "Moe Norman was 18/6," I said, "but he had a much shorter swing."

"So which is it? Is Tiger a 21/7 or an 18/6?" Garrity asked.

I gave John my best scientific assessment: "I don't know."

Later that year, Haney dropped Woods as a client and Tiger started working with a brainiac named Sean Foley. Since then, Tiger's full-swing tempo has shown occasional improvement, but his tempo fractions at last month's PGA Championship, during which he landed in 22 bunkers and missed the cut, were abysmal. Long game, short game, everything was broken.

I can no longer dodge the conclusion that Woods — the player I singled out in Tour Tempo for having the best tempo in tournament golf — now has the worst tempo in tournament golf.

"It's a process," Woods has said, trying to explain his struggles. "Any time you make changes you want to go back to your old motor patterns, especially when you're under the gun."

Tiger may be missing the forest for the trees. Yes, it takes a lot of reps to consciously train your muscles to follow new patterns. That's why swing changes are so bad for tempo. Timing has to suffer when you're trying to control a position of your body while it is swinging a club at more than 100 mph. But if tempo is as critical to shotmaking as the pros say it is, you'd think that Tiger would practice his new moves at his prescribed tempo. Many pros, in fact, do just that.

Woods does not, as far as I can tell.

It would be self-serving for me to suggest that he perform his swing drills to a 21/7 Tour Tempo track. And I could be totally wrong in my belief that any of Tiger's swings — whether molded by Harmon, Haney or Foley — will hit it long and straight when executed at a consistent 3-to-1 tempo.

And if I'm wrong, I'll admit it in Tour Tempo 3: Timing Is for Twits.

But I don't think I'm wrong.

WHAT IS TOUR TEMPO?
Confused by the numbers? Here's a quick tutorial. John Novosel is the Kansas inventor who discovered that virtually all Tour-quality golfers—no matter how frantically or leisurely they swing—have the exact same tempo: a 3-to-1 elapsed-time ratio of backswing to forward swing, measured to impact. This ratio is expressed in frames of broadcast-quality video— e.g., 27 frames to the top of the backswing and 9 frames down to impact. (A 27/9 in Tour Tempo lingo.) Sam Snead in his prime was a 24/8, Ben Hogan was a brisk 21/7, etc. Novosel allows for a plus-or-minus one-frame margin of error due to measurement limitations. A swing timed at 25/8 or 27/10 meets the 3-to-1 standard, but a lurchy 31/6 sends your tee shot into the neighboring marsh.
 
Anything written by Steve Elling is worth as much as used toilet paper. He's got a major bone to pick and doesn't exactly hide it in his articles.

As for Tiger's swing, it takes about 10,000 hours to master it no? That's 416ish straight days, going at it 24 hours a day. Why should we be the least be surprised he doesn't have it down yet especially when he had to shut it down for 4 months?
 
Anything written by Steve Elling is worth as much as used toilet paper. He's got a major bone to pick and doesn't exactly hide it in his articles.

As for Tiger's swing, it takes about 10,000 hours to master it no? That's 416ish straight days, going at it 24 hours a day. Why should we be the least be surprised he doesn't have it down yet especially when he had to shut it down for 4 months?

It does? It takes 10,000 hours? How do we know this? Why would anybody ever switch to this method if they are essentially going to take 3 years off from the game?
 
This is lame...everyone knows Hank Haney is the best teacher in golf :sarcastic:
 
Does that heat rub come in a menthol scent?
 
It does? It takes 10,000 hours? How do we know this? Why would anybody ever switch to this method if they are essentially going to take 3 years off from the game?

Just google 10,000 hours of practice. Realistically it takes about 10 years at 3 hours a day to fully master something. Don't confuse fully master with decent enough to perform though.

If I said to you, "JB, your swing is decent but you'll never get to a +2 handicap with it. I can guarantee you you can but only if you go to left handed." You say sure why not, I'll take that chance because I really want to be a +2 handicap. The second you switch sides, you're going to be god awful. The grip won't feel natural, the setup, the entire motion, etc. You'll probably jump to a 30+ handicap. Once it starts to get a little more comfortable and you can manage around a course hitting more solid shots, you'll see your scores start to come back down back to a 3.6. Once you've put in the time to fully master it where you can go from playing golf swing to golf, your scores come down even further and voila you're a +2.

The main point though is you can't expect perfection and 100% trust it if you haven't put in the hours to turn it from awkwardly rough into just manageable.
 
Golf, heck sports, needs more athletes like Rocco who just speak their mind and not care who or what others think.
 
Just google 10,000 hours of practice. Realistically it takes about 10 years at 3 hours a day to fully master something. Don't confuse fully master with decent enough to perform though.

If I said to you, "JB, your swing is decent but you'll never get to a +2 handicap with it. I can guarantee you you can but only if you go to left handed." You say sure why not, I'll take that chance because I really want to be a +2 handicap. The second you switch sides, you're going to be god awful. The grip won't feel natural, the setup, the entire motion, etc. You'll probably jump to a 30+ handicap. Once it starts to get a little more comfortable and you can manage around a course hitting more solid shots, you'll see your scores start to come back down back to a 3.6. Once you've put in the time to fully master it where you can go from playing golf swing to golf, your scores come down even further and voila you're a +2.

The main point though is you can't expect perfection and 100% trust it if you haven't put in the hours to turn it from awkwardly rough into just manageable.

Man I respect your opinion but I'm gonna disagre with it. Tiger changed from his original swing, to harmon's swing, to hank's swing and now to foley's, with exception of the most recent change he has I would argue "mastered" the swings in much less time than 10,000 hours. Is it because of his once freakish athletic ability, most likely, but the whole 10,000 hour thing is crazy.
 
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