Finishing up with the day job tomorrow and heading strong into the holidays. An afternoon outdoor service at Lake Benson Park with our great friends at True North Church and then a few families over to our house for some Christmas eve socializing. Then, waiting for Santa!
I’m not planning on writing much over my Christmas break. I figure if my kids don’t have to do homework, maybe I won’t either.
Merry Christmas to all!
I passed my 20 question Titleist Performance Institute CGFI test – getting 19 of 20 correct. I needed 16 to pass so I think I’m graduating magna cum laude, or something.
Now, I can put “CGFI” after my name (Certified Golf Fitness Instructor).
I’m waiting for some of you (Jess) to put other words to those initials.
Sincerely,
Kurt Ehlert, CGFI, TPITA (Total Pain in the . . .)
I wrote a while back about the integrity of JP Hayes. I’ve found an antidote to him, if you want one.
Bernard Madoff, former head of NASDAQ, widely respected big-time money manager, has recently been uncovered as a fraud. He admits that he defrauded folks of about 50 billion dollars. He received millions and millions of dollars from very rich people (and foundations) and made it appear he consistently got 12-14 % returns. This occurred year after year after year in the world’s largest known Ponzi scheme. No one seemed to think this was unusual enough to blow the whistle. (In case you don’t know, investments don’t work this way. No matter what you invest in, you shouldn’t get consistent returns. Beware someone who says they will or have!)
The clue to his swindling nature was in his handicap scores.
Bernie Madoff's Golf Scores
Look at those scores. Remarkably consistent! Even when he didn’t play much between December 98 and May 2000, he still shot in the 80’s. No one has that much consistency – at least, no one who is a 10 handicapper. Their scores should have much more variability. That doesn’t mean he didn’t shoot those scores – he just may not have reported the worse ones.
I wonder if his club’s pro realized he was a cheat.
Golf really does reveal a lot about the man.
At the risk of piling on to an overhyped subject, I want to give my opinion about the new Tiger’s Paw.
Tiger said at his tournament interview this week that his not so newly operated knee feels “unbelievable” and that it hasn’t felt this stable in years.
This interview clip on The Golf Channel was followed by a discussion of how this new knee might affect Tiger’s golf swing. There was some conjecture by Frank Nobilo that Tig would need to change his swing, with a “soft” left knee at impact – in other words, a bit of a lower body slide that Tiger has never done before. That left some question as to how Tiger might adjust on his return.
Are the Tour players holding some hope that Tiger 2.0 might not be as good as Tiger 1.2 (or whichever swing iteration you want to put on him)?
Don’t hold your breath, mis amigos.
Look, there are two ways of looking at this:
1. Tiger has played with a bad knee for nearly his entire professional career. Now he has a good, stable knee to really drive into. He is excited because, now that he is swinging short irons and wedges, he sees just how much better he is going to be with a solid, painless lead leg. Bad news for numbers 2 through infinity on the Tour.
2. Tiger will take some time to adjust to this new knee. He’ll have to change his old swing a bit to its third professional variation. And that swing will now take place on a knee that feels great and stable – a new sensation for Tiger, but not a bad one – at all. Remember, he changed his swing twice on a bad knee and just kept racking up wins. Again, bad news for everyone not named Eldrick.
I can’t picture too many ways that a stable lead leg, which he now has, hurts Tiger. As I learned at our TPI seminar last weekend, the knee is one of the components of the body in an athletic maneuver that needs stability. Tiger hasn’t had that, yet he is the greatest player of his, and maybe all, time.
Now it is stable. And that lets the mobile segments above and below fire at will, which they couldn’t do as well before. (Hip and ankle for those wondering).
And that doesn’t even take into account his mental state, with confidence in a new, pain-free, stable knee.
I also would like to add that as a left knee ACL tear survivor – I lived without my left ACL from high school to about the age of 36 – that confidence in a stable, pain-free left knee is very, very important in a golf swing. As an aside, I like to think that without that injury, my chances of making the Tour would have been vastly improved. (I didn’t say it was valid, just that I like to think it)
Watch out world – a new and improved Tiger is out there!
Just finished with Day 2 of the Level 1 training for the Titleist Performance Institute. Again, very interesting stuff. As I mentioned yesterday, we’re learning how body mechanics and deficits in mobility and stability can create difficulties with the golf swing.
Today, we finished up learning how to do an 11 test evaluation of a golfer. This consisted of our 80 person class breaking into groups of 2 spread all over the room and hallway and having one be the “client” while the other was the evaluator. It doesn’t seem like a lot of tests, but when done well, it takes a full 7 minutes to finish. At our stage, where we aren’t exactly smooth (”Um, sir, could you squat – no, wait – stand – no . . . Let me look at the sheet!”), we were allotted 20 minutes a person to do the eval. John Walker, a PT from San Diego, and I did just fine, thank you. No one got a hamstring pull, we got good info and finished well in advance of the bell.
Later, we tried to compare people’s evaluations and the deficits described their with what we predicted their golf swing would then look like. Some of the attendees got their swings taped for this part – not me, thank goodness. I mean, there are a lot of golf pros there, including Claude Harmon (Butch’s son), and I don’t want them laughing out loud. After a bit, we kind of got the hang of it. We could predict some swing problems just by knowing the physical limitation. Cool!
We also went over some exercises to help correct those problems. New insight – if you’ve never felt your gluteus medius, I have a couple of exercises for you. Mine are still yelling at me.
Your butt exposed - including the gluteus medius
Now what? That is a great question. My first thought is to evaluate my 15 year old son and a few of his buddies and try to get them on a program to help their condition before high school golf starts in February. After that, I don’t know. There are a lot of TPI certified golf pros and a few fitness guys in Raleigh – I may get in touch with a few and feel them out about working together. After all, I’ve got 1375 square feet of open space from my old business adventure, just sitting there waiting to be used.
Now, if I can only evaluate myself . . .
I am posting from Austin, Texas, home of the put-upon Texas Longhorns’ football team. I’m down here in the Horns country at the Titleist Performance Institute’s Level One Seminar.
The TPI is the foremost authority on how a golfer’s physical limitations affect his golf swing. They provide certifcation seminars multiple times throughout the year at various locales. Greg Rose, a chiropractor, is the driving force behind these seminars and the education process and he is in charge of this seminar. These are designed for golf pros, fitness professionals who have golfers as clients (or want to build up that part of their business), and health professionals. The typical health pro who comes to these is a physical therapist or chiropractor. I am the only MD at this seminar (out of about 80 people) and from what I can tell, will be the only MD who is certified by TPI in the state of North Carolina.
If I pass the test.
It is a two day event. We started at 8 this AM and just finished at 5 tonight, with a similar schedule tomorrow. Today’s topics – golf swing faults, at least the Big 12 of them, as seen on video analysis. In the afternoon, we started learning how to assess an individual to find out what restrictions or deficits they have physically as they relate to the golf swing. Tomorrow, we finish the assessment part and go into exercises to correct the physical problems.
Very cool. I’m certain there is nothing being done like this in the world, not at this level. And their way of linking the swing fault with the physical issue is very interesting.
I’ll fill you in tomorrow on Day 2.
Q school may be the most interesting tournament of them all for the psychotic golf fan. These guys have struggled in various ways to make it to the pressure packed 6 rounds that make up the final stage of Q school. All of them will be playing on some tour or another, but only the top 25 and ties get their PGA Tour card to play with the big boys next year.
In watching it, two guys really showed their IF (intestinal fortitude) capacity. Ted Purdy, who has long been on the tour, needed par on the water-filled 18th hole to save his card. He pulled his approach into a bunker with a downhill, slippery shot to a pin about 15 feet short of water. He hit a great shot that drifted to about 10 feet below the hole – then trickled that putt in to make the tour on the number. The relief and joy in his face was great to see.
Will Collins, a career mini-tour player, had been in the last 7 Q schools, but hadn’t made it to the last stage until this year. He had played great all week and was at the cut number of 19 under on his 18th tee. He hit a bit of a nervous drive into a bad lie in the rough on a hill. I thought he made a great decision to take a short iron and lay up in the fairway, then hit his third about 15 feet below a tough pin. And put that one in on the high side. Unlike Purdy, Collins was stonefaced – almost as if he was shell shocked.
What is most amazing is that these guys are playing for way more than most of us ever will. For Purdy, it is getting back to the highest level of golf instead of the Nationwide, where he must feel old and out of place. For Collins, it is verification that all his years of struggle were worth it – he has finally proven that he belongs in the big time. And each of them needed that last putt to increase their salary next year by thousands and thousands of dollars.
Great stuff. I felt more personal angst about watching those two putts than I ever did for Tiger or Ernie.
In spite of everything I’ve seen over the last 6 or 7 years, I think Michelle Wie is finally growing up.
I’m not being critical, mind you. I wasn’t very mature in college, and certainly wasn’t as an international sports sensation at 14 years of age. But most would admit that Michelle and her parents have made some strange moves in the last several years regarding her career.
Yesterday, however, she seemed to start the right track. She made it through the LPGA Q School and will make her full-time debut on the LPGA next year.
Team Wie has usually shunned the standard approach to women’s golf in the past. You know, play in junior tournaments and win a few, play in USGA tournaments as a junior (against other girls, not the Public Links against men), go to college and play as part of the team, then go on tour. Part of the reason for ignoring the LPGA has been that trying to get past the age restriction to play on the tour would have required her to play in 10 LPGA tournaments in a year, thus cutting down on her ability and time to play high-endorsement fee, overseas tournaments – and play against men. This, in retrospect, was an unfortunate decision.
Now, she says she’ll play on the LPGA. And her teacher, David Ledbetter, was quoted on The Golf Channel yesterday as saying she won’t go after the PGA again for “a few years.”
Both of these are as they should be for such a talented college age golfer. Let’s hope her parents leave her alone to grow up even more in her first fulltime season on tour.
It seems that PGA Tour players are in an enviable position for potential endorsements.
With Plaxico Burress slamming all NFL players’ reputations with his non-pistol holding waistband and poorly executed “cover-up”, Alex Rodriguez divorcing his wife to hang with an old pop icon, and Sean Avery of the Dallas Stars mouthing off about his former girlfriends and current NHL players, where are companies with endorsement dollars to turn? It seems the public almost feels that each of these distinct incidents is just more of the same for all the major sports. What is a company to do? No matter the economic climate, companies are going to spend money on endorsements. They just will have to spend them much more carefully. And taking a chance on an NFL’er or hockey player might seem like too much risk nowadays. Who would want to take a chance on anyone in the NFL? Even Tom Brady, Mr. All American quarterback, has had children out of wedlock (is he in the NBA too?).
Golfers, like Davis Love, Justin Leonard, Ernie Els, and many, many others, have squeaky clean reputations. Tiger’s not perfect in endorsment land – he swears occasionally when he “mishits” a shot – but people sympathize with that and don’t despair at the foolishness of it. Golfers are the current athletic role models most parents should be pointing their kids to. And companies should be very aware of that if they want to maintain healthy reputations themselves.
Vijay Singh is oftentimes maligned as aloof, a range-o-holic, and an unfriendly caddy killer. Some of this stems from his long ago suspension from the Malaysian tour in 1985 for allegedly doctoring his scorecard, some from his public persona, some (I’m sure) has some basis in reality.
But, this from Tim Rosaforte at Golf Digest should at least make you reconsider your opinion.
