The kid gets luckier still
By JIM LITKE / AP Sports Writer
It hardly seems fair.
The kid is already rich. He already hits the ball a mile. He's
already won four times this season, including the Masters, and
he's even been linked romantically - by the tabloids, anyway -
to supermodel Tyra Banks. But this week, if it's possible, Tiger
Woods gets luckier still.
The PGA Championship, the final major on golf's calendar, goes
up for grabs starting Thursday over a Winged Foot layout Woods
has played only a handful of times, yet already gleaned a life's
worth of experience from.
Make that two lifetimes.
Woods' teacher, Butch Harmon, now 53, learned the game there,
beginning when he was no taller than a 5-iron. And the man who
taught Butch, Claude Harmon, knew the place better than anyone.
Nearly a decade after his death, the man who fathered four
teaching pros and taught them all himself still holds the scoring
record on both the East or West courses: a matching pair of 61s.
At his pretournament news conference, someone asked Woods the
most important advice the teacher gave the pupil.
"Overall," he said, "I'd guess it was to stay
below the hole at all costs."
Other topics of discussion included the steep bunkers, the
deceiving wind conditions and uneven lies, but the conversation
usually meandered back to the small, severely contoured greens.
That was by design.
"He keeps harping on me the entire time," Woods said,
referring to Harmon and reciting the line like the harried college
student he could have been. " 'Play to the fat side and you'll
feel comfortable.' "
Getting to the fat side of the green is another lesson, taught
in a different classroom. That was why Harmon had Woods on the
course the past few days, playing balls from some places the TV
cameras have yet to discover, toward pin placements the tournament
committee won't reveal until Sunday. But Harmon knew where everything
was - or would be - just the same.
"Little secrets," he called them, things he learned
"over all these years myself and from my dad."
Those bits of local knowledge aside, the question of how much
Butch Harmon, or any other teaching pro, can do for Tiger Woods
this weekend is part of an ongoing debate on the PGA Tour. No
players dispute that swing doctors can heal the little things
that go wrong from time to time. How much they actually accomplish
beyond that depends on who you talk to.
Claude Harmon taught kings and presidents. He was one of the
most prominent teaching pros of his day, not to mention a tour-caliber
player who starred in one of golf's most memorable David-beats-Goliath
scenes when he won the 1948 Masters. For all that, he never attained
the fame or fortune already claimed by Butch, the oldest of his
four sons.
That may be because the teacher-as-superstar is a relatively
new job listing, something that took hold in the public's imagination
when Nick Faldo's career took off and his teacher, David Ledbetter,
took much of the credit for rebuilding the Englishman's swing
top to bottom.
But for every story of a Faldo emerging from swing analysis
a more capable and confident competitor, there is a story about
someone like Bob Tway, wandering aimlessly from guru to guru for
years, glassy-eyed and hesitant all the time, muttering to no
one in particular about arcane points of the swing plane.
In that sense, at least, nothing has changed since the first
pro charged money for the first lesson. Some students walk away
happy and some sad, but all of them with lighter pockets. And
so maybe the final word on the value of teachings pros helping
playing pros should be Lee Trevino's. He once said, "I'll
hire when I find one who can beat me."
Those might have been fighting words to Claude Harmon.
"My dad," Butch Harmon said, "believed you had
to be a good player to be a good teacher, that the idea was, 'How
do you teach somebody a shot if you can't hit that shot?"
But the son understands that philosophy has limits, that nobody
who ever played the game is capable of teaching Woods some things,
if only because no one else ever played it the same way. And he
thinks his old man would have been flexible enough to recognize
it, too.
"His teaching philosophy was that he didn't mold a person
to be like him."
Harmon admits to trying to rein in Woods in the two previous
majors, coaxing him to use a 2-iron or 3-wood off the tee instead
of the driver. However, after watching Woods drive the green at
the 324-yard sixth hole the other day in practice, he was rethinking
that strategy, prepared to let the kid hit the driver on as many
as seven of the 14 driving holes.
That had Woods feeling pumped Tuesday.
"If you drive the ball long and straight here," he
said. "it's really not that hard."
But a moment later, it was clear the teacher's message of caution
wasn't completely wasted. "But if you start spraying it,"
Woods added, looking properly chastened, "you're facing a
world of hurt."
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