Thursday, April 24, 2008 Chiongbian: Tiger Woods’ intimidation factor By Edgar R. Chiongbian Teetime
THE qualifying round for the Club and Class Championships at Cebu Country Club tees off this Saturday and Sunday. This is the time we find out from the single-digit handicappers who will win the coveted title as the 2008 CCC Club Champion. The rest of the flock will be competing in their own Class B, C, D, Senior’s and Super Senior’s divisions.
The two-day event is a multi-faceted tournament with three ways to compete and win. The first day of the qualifying round is also a monthly medal tournament. The two-day qualifying round will shake the field to reveal the top eight low gross players (without handicaps), 12 for Class A and they will compete scratch (no handicap) in an elimination process for the title of Class Champion of their division. Match Play will go on for two more weeks.
Meanwhile, the combatants in the same tournament will also get a chance to use their handicaps and win the alter ego champion of their division. And what might be a good reason to join the club championship tournament? It is to test your ability against the field and to check how the buayas will cope without the shield of a comfortable handicap.
I wasn’t able to make my comments last week on the Masters in Augusta, Georgia and would like to give you some of my views. My number one point is not about Tiger Woods but about how the small guys—I would say almost Filipino size—have won the Masters back to back. And this is the best proof that small-stature guys can win in the Majors and especially in the PGA. There’s definitely big hope for Filipinos and Asians in the future, although Asians are getting bigger and taller too but hopefully also more determined.
My second point is that the Masters and the US Open were always considered two distinct styles of a PGA tournament. The Masters use the difficult Augusta layout to challenge the skills of the pros, while the US Open is all about super fast greens, three-cut fairways and greens with tall grass, and long yardage if possible since it rotates around different golf courses.
What has happened, as even mentioned by some pros, is that the greens in the Masters in the last two years have become very fast, like US Open standards. So this and the lengthening of the Augusta golf course has made the Masters a very difficult tournament to play, giving some advantage to accurate/long hitters and best putters during the tournament.
I heard comments from many people that if only Tiger Woods sank those short putts, he would have won the Masters. But to me, there are two statistics that were not elaborated by the sports columnist and TV commentators, which I feel is the reason why Tiger Woods never won a tournament when he is behind and not in the last group in the final round.
It is the intimidation factor that Tiger Woods puts his opponents through when playing in the same flight. The other is that Tiger loves the challenge of going head-to-head/toe-to-toe with his opponent in the same flight.
So, if Tiger was playing with Trevor Immelman in the final round, I believe Immelman would not have been very confident and would lose some focus.
Tiger Woods would not have missed the short putts and more birdies on the par 5’s. To fill the rest of my opinion and view, Tiger Woods was really playing good but was missing the two ingredients above that would have been the formulae to win from behind.
GOLF TIP. If you need to place the ball in back of your stance to hit a solid shot with your irons, your swing rotation is too far back for normal ball position. This means you are hanging on your back foot as you swing down and sets the swing’s lowest point far behind the ball.
Ball location should be in the middle of your stance for short irons and two inches forward for long irons. You should be able to hit the ball solid when you shift your weight to your left side, while accelerating your shot through impact. Pressing your hips toward the target at the start of the downswing will shift your weight forward and bring the swing’s bottom forward as well, making the ball fly higher and farther.
