Does Tiger Ever Wish He Could Have a Mulligan?

I keep finding myself getting caught up in the ongoing Tiger Woods saga. It's irresistible. He is such a fascinating character. Someone recently claimed that he was the smartest golfer ever. This was promptly followed by a rebuttal from Sam Adams, citing Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus as two players who were at least if not more golf smart than Tiger.

Whether Tiger is smart, or intelligent, particularly where golf is concerned, depends on your point of view. One thing for certain is that he is different. I was interested in his post round interview, after once again just making the cut on the number at the Memorial. In it he was asked whether, considering his erratic driving, he ever considered using a long iron or three wood in order to just get the ball in play off the tee. He replied, as though it was a silly question, suggesting he could revert back to his old swing and easily get the ball in play, but he didn't consider that to be "progress."  He went on to discuss release patterns and the importance of feeling and being committed to the new release pattern, even when the driver is sending the ball left, right, but rarely centre, and he is playing the worst golf of his career.

At the Players, after a particularly dismal round, he claimed that a positive thing was that he had scored as high as he could have possibly scored. How, pray tell, is that a positive? Furthermore, it wasn't even accurate. On seventeen, after barely clearing the water and nearly spinning it back into the drink, Tiger used a sand wedge to belly the ball in for a deuce. He made two when he was inches from making five and he yet he claims he couldn't have scored any higher. He also claimed that a positive thing about the week was that his warm ups were good. Since when are your warm ups even relevant? Tiger seems to have gone from judging his game by whether he wins or not, to how his warm ups are going.

Despite all the evidence that would seem to scream for a different approach, Tiger seems still to be committed to once again building a new swing that will  enable him to dominate the game again. If he succeeds, he will prove that he is truly amazing, but he will surely still have wasted so much time and energy building new swings when he could have been winning Majors with the one he already had. That is what he will have to live with. Had he not tried to fix something that was definitely not broken, Tiger would almost certainly have broken virtually every record worth breaking, shy of Byron Nelson's eleven in a row and eighteen in a season. Instead, he continues to struggle and search for perfection, and still chases Jack and Sam's records, when what he already had was more than good enough to have eclipsed them both.

You have to wonder, when he lays in his bed, alone with his thoughts, whether he ever asks himself why; whether he ever wishes he could have a Mulligan and just have that old swing and that lanky, sinewy body back. If he doesn't, he really is amazing.