Stroke of Madness
The solitary act of swinging a golf club unites a hundred thoughts into one fluid second. So how, when the slightest glitch can destroy a career, has Tiger Woods managed to overhaul his swing three times? And, more important, why?
ESPN THE MAGAZINE / FEB 2013
Almost from the beginning he was doing it. At 10 months old, the story goes, Eldrick Woods climbed down from his high chair in the garage of his family's house in Cypress, Calif., grabbed hold of a child's plastic toy club and began precisely mimicking his father's golf swing, lefthanded -- a piece of legend given to us only by Earl Woods, since no one else was in the room at the time. Its plausibility is bolstered, however, by the fact that some five years earlier and 100 miles south in San Diego, a boy named Phil Mickelson had done exactly the same thing. Watching his father hit balls, Mickelson at 18 months had also copied his dad's swing, mirroring it lefthanded. Mickelson, a righty in every other way, would stick with that lefty swing, becoming the most accomplished southpaw in the sport's history, winning four majors and 40 PGA Tour events. Woods, though, was different.
After two weeks of swinging his plastic club lefthanded (this is, again, according to Earl), Tiger apparently grew dissatisfied with the motion. As the father looked on, his son waddled to the other side of the ball and -- in the part of the tale that always engaged Earl the most in the telling -- switched his hands, moving the right below the left, intuitively finding the proper grip. Earl called to his wife, Kultida, elsewhere in the house: "We have a genius on our hands!"….