"If it's good enough for Tiger it's good enough for us, right?"

At the 1997 Masters, against the best golfers in the world, Tiger Woods had virtually lapped the field, winning by a record 12 strokes. He was being hailed as the next Jack Nicklaus, who is considered the greatest golfer of all time.

Woods had joined the pro tour only seven months earlier, at age 20, and captivated the game and its fans as no rookie ever had. He had won four of the 15 PGA Tour tournaments he entered, earning $1.8 million in prize money and some $60 million in endorsement contracts.

Now that alone is an amazing feat but what surprised me the most is the story of what Tiger did after winning the 97 Masters.
It would have been really easy for Tiger to bask in the glory of his new found fame and success and continue on the same path. Instead he took the advice of his friend Michael Jordan:

And so he did, Woods studied videotapes of his performance: slamming 300-yd. drives, hitting crisp iron shots right at the pins, draining putts from everywhere. And he thought, as he later told friends, my swing really sucks. He realised that his swing or form was poor and he needed to address the technical flaws to his swing.

One thing that has stood about Tiger and Michael Jordan was the combination of amazing natural gifts mixed with a fierce competitive nature and what the Japanese call kaizen, or continuous improvement. Toyota engineers will push a perfectly good assembly line until it breaks down. Then they'll find and fix the flaw and push the system again. In Michaels later years, when his athleticism was no longer what set him apart in league that feature some of the worlds best athletes he added a deadly fall away jumper to his arsenal and learnt how to use the extra attention help defenders gave him to get his team mates open baskets.

In other words, Woods, already considered the best by many of his peers, was gambling that he could get dramatically better--and was willing to do whatever he thought might help him someday surpass his idol Nicklaus as the greatest ever.

When Woods phoned his coach, Butch Harmon, after the 1997 Masters and told him he wanted to rebuild his swing, Harmon was confident his star pupil could pull it off. But he cautioned that results wouldn't come overnight--that Woods would have to pump more iron to get stronger, especially in his forearms; that it would take months to groove the new swing; that his tournament performance would get worse before it got better. The ability to think down the road, to think long term is something that all coaches struggle to instil in their players and the funny thing is, the older the players get the harder it is to make changes to their shot mechanics. Players of all ages get too caught up in the now; I can't make a shot right now with this technique or it feels strange. The jump shot and the golf swing are cousins, mechanically, but golfers recognize certain basic laws of a good swing, and most hoopsters cherish the idiosyncrasies of their jumpers.

Both men were aware of how such an apparent slump would be depicted by some golf commentators and fellow pros jealous of Woods' early success and fame. The Masters was a fluke, they would say; Woods was a flash in the pan.
But Woods didn't hesitate. He and Harmon went to work in a kaizen sequence of 1) pounding hundreds of practice balls, 2) reviewing tapes of the swing, and 3) repeating both the above.

Tiger (like many young basketballers) had arrived on the tour swinging full bore on most shots. He would violently rotate his hips and shoulders on his downswing, which produced prodigious tee shots. This is similar to basketball players that use little power from their legs to shoot the basketball, they start twisting their bodies or dipping the basketball to compensate for a lack of power generation from the legs. And like these basketball players who use a lot of arm or wrist to shoot the ball Tigers arms couldn't keep up with the rest of his body, and he'd yank the ball into the rough.

Harmon had Woods restrict his hip turn and slow the rotation of his torso on the downswing, changed his grip slightly, and got Woods to hold held the clubface square to the target line.

These changes produced more consistently straight shots than the old swing, and follows some of the principles we apply in our teaching of shooting the ball. We try to get our players to have a relaxed wrist, fingers and thumb on the follow through so we make sure that they start with relaxed, spread finger in the set point or start of the shot. Like Tigers "square to the target line club face", we try to get our players to square up to the basket by making a straight line from the eye, ball, elbow, knee and toe on the right side (if right handed) of the body. If our players can get to that position and then use their legs as the main power source to shoot the ball the ball should fly straight and true to the basket.

The new swing is so efficient that Woods can hit the ball as far as before--when he needs to. But one goal of the makeover was to help him control the ball better, even when he dialled down the power. That payoff didn't come quickly.

Woods won only one Tour event during the 19 months between July 1997 and February 1999. Tiger often became frustrated but stayed the course and continued to believe in himself. Each time he lost, he declared that he was "a better golfer" than when he was winning in early 1997.

It takes real commitment and belief to "keep on keeping on" but the truth is you can always improve. As of 2008 Tiger Woods has won 14 major championships and has 5 more to go to take the #1 spot. Which leads us back to Bill Runchey's question: