All Eyes on the Tiger

It won’t just be the army of golf betting fans who will be scrutinising Tiger Woods’ return to the professional game in the Accenture World Match Play in Arizona this week. Nervous fellow competitors will join them as the Tiger endeavours to show the world either that he can still work the old magic or that he has lost his touch after so much time away from the fray. At the back of player’s minds will be the worrying notion of a third possibility after the claim from the maestro himself that he believes he will now perform better than ever before.

According to Tiger, he has been plagued by knee discomfort for a number of seasons. This has led to a distrust of the stability that comes only from a strong pair of legs and a consequent undermining of the crucial confidence he has needed to obtain from a reliable stance. Certainly, if Woods is right, being able to forget about stance worries and focus on the fine tuning of the rest of his swing may well lead to an even more formidable opponent for his pretenders who have been able to actually contemplate winning golfing events during his absence.

There is an old adage in golf which states that the bad golfer remembers the good shots while the good golfer recalls only the bad. As Tiger has lain in convalescence, he will have replayed his most recent imperfect shots over and over again in his mind, and, standing on his new, theoretically solid stance, he will have remedied all flaws in those errant swings. In the process he’ll have persuaded himself that it will all be different from now on and he will finally be able to unleash his true superpowers on the world. Mind games are one thing; walking out onto that first tee and translating them into reality is another. We’ll discover the truth over the next few days.