0 For '03

Tiger Woods didn't win a major this year, and the reasons are as complex as the game itself

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By Jaime Diaz

Photos By Darren Carroll

November 2003

For a while now, we've thought of Tiger Woods as immune to golf.

Why wouldn't we? Sometimes he made winning major championships seem easy, as he did at the 1997 Masters and the 2000 U.S. and British Opens. Sometimes -- as with the bounce he received on the last playoff hole of the 2000 PGA -- he has been amazingly fortunate. But even when things were going against him, Woods' talent, technique and toughness let the legend grow.

Then in 2003, a year that seemed teed up for Woods, 27, to blow ahead of Jack Nicklaus' career pace for winning major championships -- the Golden Bear went 12 majors without winning one between the 1967 U.S. Open and the 1970 British Open -- Tiger's immunity ran out.

After winning at least one major in five of his previous six full professional seasons, Woods won none this year.

But what was truly shocking was the manner in which he lost. All told, he completed the Grand Slam events 18 over par for the year, by 11 strokes the highest cumulative total of his career.

It was like watching Superman zapped by kryptonite, triggering a backlash on all the Woodsian assumptions. The collective vision of Woods' road to a record 21 major victories has gone from a downhill straightaway to a grinding ascent along Alpine switchbacks.

The three nagging issues bedeviling the world No. 1 at the end of 2002 -- a damaged left knee, a more distant relationship with longtime teacher Butch Harmon and an inability to find a high-tech driver he likes -- remained largely unsettled throughout the 2003 major championships. Considering the mental and physical baggage Woods was carrying, his four PGA Tour victories and leading stroke average entering the last month of the season were remarkable.

Still, Woods' mystique was diminished as other players found they could not only outdrive him but often outplay him. There are more players than ever capable of winning majors, epitomized by Ben Curtis and Shaun Micheel. The sophisticated marriage of ball, club and swing that makes virtually every pro "long enough" has mitigated the rise of a ruling class of power players. And a trend toward narrower major-championship setups, specifically designed to combat technology, put four control players in the winner's circle and fewer big bashers on the leader board.

THE SWING AND THE COACH
Any close observation of Woods this year would find him battling with his swing more than at any time since his celebrated retooling of 1998. Many of his swings featured a pronounced drop in his downswing and a slightly ungainly follow-through, the arms whipping through a fraction late. His misses went in both directions, and at times, Woods seemed confused.

"When I get over a shot, I'm comfortable, I know what I'm doing, and then I don't trust it," he said in late August. "I feel great over the shot, then as soon as I come down it's, Oh, no, don't hit it right. Something like that has been happening a lot, for some reason."

Some instructors, like Jim Hardy, view the reason as faulty technique. "Right now, it looks like hard work for Tiger," says Rudy Duran, who taught Woods from age 4 through 10. Says John Anselmo, who took over from Duran until Woods began his association with Butch Harmon when Tiger was 17: "I always taught Tiger to play within himself, which means swinging through the body and not through the hands. He hasn't been playing within himself."

"He's definitely out of sync with his swing," says Nick Price. "Tiger's game is control and intelligent course management -- aggressive conservatism. But you can't do that driving the ball into the rough. Frankly, he hasn't played very well since he left Butch."

The saga of Woods and Harmon is a hotly murmured topic on the tour's practice ranges and in its locker rooms. What makes it all the more intriguing is that since Woods announced at the 2002 PGA that he and Harmon would no longer work together closely at majors, he hasn't won one after winning seven of the previous 12.

Woods downplays the situation, saying, "Oh, yeah, I'm still going to work with Butch. Just not as much." But Harmon is miffed. "I don't really understand what Tiger is doing with his swing, because I haven't spent much time with him lately," says Harmon, whose last extended session with Woods took place in Las Vegas before the U.S. Open. "I would always leave that option open, because we had a lot of success. It's his decision, and I wish him well. I just hope he's making the right one.

"There's no question Tiger understands his swing," Harmon says. "I haven't really taught him anything in a couple of years, but I've been his eyes to make sure he gets in the positions we've worked on."