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Sunday, May 24, 1998

Teaching golf pros cover everything from swings to mental approach

By Kevin Sherrington / The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS -- Back when he ruled golf, Tom Watson didn't need much help. Then he started missing three-foot putts, and he got rabbit ears.

So, Tom, how many teaching pros have you had?

"A hundred," he says, shrugging.

No, really. How many?

"A hundred," he says, dead solid serious.

Everyone's a coach in golf. The problem is that most players can fix anyone's game but their own. They can't help themselves, but they sure can ruin someone else.

And players let them do it. Anything sounds good when you're going bad, and who isn't?

Some tour players hire as many as four coaches to work on them, covering everything from swings to short games to mental and physical fitness.

And, if they're going bad enough, they'll still entertain any suggestions.

"They're out there listening to their CADDIES," says Dallas guru Hank Haney.

They'll listen to anybody. Tom Kite, one of the game's best students, a man who wants to know exactly what he's doing all the time, no matter how bad, once spoke to a convention of teaching pros.

The running joke was that he had taken lessons from everyone in the audience.

Haney estimates he has coached more than 100 tour players. He figures David Leadbetter has done the same, which is interesting considering there are only 200 golfers on the tour.

And that's only two coaches.

Most teaching pros bear some basic similarities. Some are at least part head doctors, led in that area by sports psychologist Bob Rotella. Dallas' Randy Smith just wants Justin Leonard to feel comfortable when things are going well. So, sometimes, a round on the putting greens might end up with Leonard chipping balls at Smith's shins.

Others, such as short-game specialist Dave Pelz of Austin, Texas, get tougher with their students. But yes men or no, all teaching pros have one thing in common: they work for the players.

So imagine the surprise of a couple of security guards who report at the Masters that Hank Haney won't return Mark O'Meara's balls on the putting green. Or the shock of Plano, Texas' D.A. Weibring when he overhears a teacher tell a student, "Now, go out there and play good for me."

"Excuse me?" Weibring says.

How do you tell your boss he's all wrong? That's the problem facing teaching pros. They have to know what they can tell their clients, when to say it, and how loud.

Push a player too far, they say, and you push him right into someone else's lap.

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DELICATE SITUATION

Haney seemed to test that relationship with O'Meara the week he won the Masters. It started Tuesday, when O'Meara showed him his new swing.

"What's it look like?" O'Meara asked hopefully.

All he got was an expletive.

Haney recognized the swing. He knew O'Meara got it from his buddy, Tiger Woods, and his coach, Butch Harmon. Woods has taken a particular interest in O'Meara's game. He called O'Meara at the GTE Byron Nelson Classic last week and told him he had been watching him on the practice tee from the balcony of his hotel room. The swing never looked better, Tiger said.

That much was a relief. O'Meara doesn't need any more doubt. The bigger the tournament, the more testy he becomes. He walked off Augusta National after his opening round complaining of the yips.

"You shot a 74," Haney told him. "You're doing fine."

O'Meara insisted he wasn't. Coach and pupil, who have been friends and partners since 1982, became animated.

"He wasn't listening to me," Haney says, "so I wouldn't give him his balls back."

This is not standard procedure for most coaches. Haney says he gets away with it because he knows O'Meara so well, and he isn't afraid of being fired.

"A lot of guys are just trying to protect their jobs," he says.

A lot of people would consider this sound thinking, given O'Meara's reaction to Haney's tactics.

"People were saying he was in my face," O'Meara says. "He gets in my face, I'll knock him over. I mean, it's easy for a teacher or somebody else, but they have never experienced that.

"David Leadbetter has never stood on the 18th hole with a seven-iron, trying to hit it in at 12 feet and make a birdie to win. Neither has Hank Haney.

"Don't get me wrong. They're great teachers, and they're probably nice players. But there's more to golf than good fundamentals."

Haney twice deconstructed O'Meara's game -- swing and putting -- the week of the Masters. Most instructors wouldn't dare try anything so invasive, even if the player needs it.

They'd be afraid to ruin a player's confidence, such as it is.

"Corey Pavin's supposed to be tough mentally," says teaching pro Dana Bellenger, who works out of the Dallas Athletic Club and Iron Horse. "Then, how come he's playing so lousy? Because his mechanics are terrible.

"It's a balance of mental and physical."

Still, Bellenger says he handles golfers delicately. Most of the teaching pros do. Many go home before the tournament starts, just to stay out of the way.

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SHOWING SUPPORT

Even when they do make suggestions, it often comes off as only a confirmation of what the player wants.

Mike Wilson, a Leadbetter protege, says he usually doesn't volunteer anything to Flower Mound, Texas' Paul Stankowski.

"Last week, he said, ÔI'm thinking about making my left hand a little stronger on my grip,' " Wilson says. "I tell him, ÔYeah, that's great for your swing.' "

The rest of the time, Wilson looks like someone afraid to join the conversation. On the practice tee last week at the Nelson, a pair of manufacturing reps badger Stankowski about a club they're pushing. Meanwhile, Wilson hangs 10 yards back of the group, pinching his chin between his thumb and forefinger.

He speaks only when Stankowski turns to face him. Even then, his tone is so low that Stankowski cranes his neck to hear him.

Dave Pelz is at the other end of the spectrum. Pelz became famous in the early 1980s when he put another wedge in Tom Kite's bag, and Kite became one of the best golfers in the world.

Pelz doesn't do psychology. "Some players want to know the secret, and others just want to feel good," he says. "I don't believe in either one."

Pelz does robots and computer graphics and visual aids. "We try to deal as much as we can with reality," Pelz says.

Translation: We tell a guy he stinks if need be.

Forty-four PGA Tour players have attended Pelz's school, and another 50 or more have asked for his services. Last week at the Nelson, he worked with Weibring on his putting.

Or worked OVER Weibring. A bear of a man, the only time Pelz is unobtrusive is when he's standing behind Weibring as he lines up a putt.

At one point, he asks the caddy for his car keys. He takes one and plunges it into green. The idea is to get Weibring to take a lower line on his putt, requiring him to strike the ball harder, a Pelz specialty.

Weibring putts, and the ball caroms off the head of the key. "I can't do this," he says, shaking his head.

He couldn't do it last week, anyway. He missed the cut.

Weibring hopes Pelz will allow him to strike some balance in his game. He puts great golfers in two categories: the type who know exactly what they want to do all the time (Jack Nicklaus, Tom Kite, Justin Leonard), and the talented golfers who don't think too much and just let it flow (a group he declined to delineate).

"The rest are those stuck in the middle," Weibring says, "and the horror stories are when somebody gets rabbit ears."

That's what happened to Tom Watson, when he couldn't make a three-foot putt.

"He told me one reason he didn't get over it as quickly as he might have," Byron Nelson recalls, "is that nobody would talk to him about anything else. You, me, friends, everybody. He said, ÔI've had a thousand calls and letters, people telling me what I should do to change my putting.'

" ÔIt's hard to get the thoughts changed around when you've got that to go through.' "

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MIND OVER MATTER

The best golfers tune it out. That's what makes Leonard so good, Smith says. "He has more willpower on a golf course than any player I've ever seen," Smith says.

Mind control has its limits for most, but not all. At a PGA tournament several years ago, a reporter asked Jack Nicklaus why he never looked away from a shot. He half-jokingly added that it looked like Nicklaus could make the shot go where he wanted by force of will.

Nicklaus didn't smile. "I can," he said.

Most golfers require a little more help. They have to find a coach who will give it to them, and they have to have the patience to work at it.

And even that isn't always good enough in golf. A man slams down his clubs in the clubhouse of Fort Worth's Shady Oaks Country Club a few years ago. He yanks off his golf shoes and tries to push the picture of an ugly round out of his head.

He can't. "Painful," he mumbles.

Ben Hogan overhears him.

"Painful to watch, too," the great golfer says.

And then a miracle: Hogan, who offered advice with the same eagerness that you might dangle a thousand-dollar bill, picks up the man's club. He shows him a grip, a stance, a shoulder turn, the works.

The lesson goes on until a crowd gathers, and an embarrassed Hogan exits.

A year goes by. The impromptu Hogan lesson is now legendary. A friend encounters the lucky recipient and asks what the great man did for his game.

"He gave me a hook that it took three months to get rid of," he says.

(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

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