Understanding what separates Woods from the rest of the world’s elite players and how you can develop a similar performance practice
Watching Tiger Woods and Francesco Molinari walk up the 18th fairway at Augusta late yesterday afternoon, the difference between the two players (indeed, the difference between Woods and the majority of the other contenders in The Masters) was abundantly clear.
Make no mistake, with my Latin ancestry I wanted the Italian to win and until the back nine (where Jack Nicklaus famously said the tournament really begins) it seemed as if Molinari would capitalize on his successes from last year including his first PGA tour win, the BMW PGA and the Open Championship, but there was something about Woods you just couldn’t ignore and here’s my take on what that something is.
As every golfer and his dog knows, Tiger Woods practised Meditation and Tai Chi as a young man and indeed he used Meditation as part of his performance practice right up until his life – both public and private – began to fall apart around the Thanksgiving holiday in 2009.
If you’re anything like me you’ll have felt a whole host of responses to Woods over the past ten years, from revulsion at the way he treated women when the sex scandal broke (particularly his remark that wasn’t so much an apology but an arrogant claim that he “thought he was entitled.”)
Following this maybe you began to see him as a bit of a pathetic figure, crying crocodile tears in a staged press conference and being reprimanded by Augusta National chairman Billy Payne for his lack of moral scruples. Then perhaps derision watching him go from the world’s first billionaire sports-star to the butt of jokes on late night TV, to the beginnings of compassion at that awful mugshot of the drink drive episode in 2017 when police in Jupiter, Florida found him asleep – or passed out – behind the wheel of his running car in the middle of the night.
His road to recovery reads like Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, which tells the story of a man cursed by the gods to endlessly push a rock up a mountain but upon reaching the top, the rock rolls down again, leaving Sisyphus to start over again.
Woods entered a rehab clinic for sex addiction, got divorced, was deserted by his sponsors and fans, endured humiliation and haranguing from crowds who’d previously loved him, had major reconstructive surgery on his knee and four back operations before publicly announcing a return to his mother’s religion of Buddhism and a daily practice of Meditation to help him get back to the player and the man he’d once been.
So what did I see watching Woods and Molinari walk up the 18th fairway yesterday, ten full years after his epic fall from grace?
Well, I have quite a trained eye from three decades of ‘deep practice’ so I tend to see where athletes are breathing from and how centred they are in their bodies. Many of my students have messaged me today to say they noticed how Tiger was focusing on his breathing, especially during those pressure shots but is this all there is to it? After all, he’s not the only player on tour using breathing and Meditation as part of his performance practice.
What Tiger Woods’ demeanor showed me over the last two days of the tournament and particularly on Sunday afternoon (which you can clearly see in the photographs) demonstrated his own dedication to deep practice as his attention is drawn inwards, his breathing slow, his shoulders loose, his chest empty and his centre of gravity low in his abdomen (there’s no doubt in my mind that he was using awareness of his t’an tien / hara to centre his mind, calm his emotions and deepen his breathing – the result of his years of Tai Chi training).
Compare this to the photographs of Molinari whose shoulders and upper-body are tight and whose centre of gravity and breathing are located in his chest; all contributing factors to the feelings of anxiety and emotional turmoil that ultimately lead to him losing the tournament he had been leading for so long.
Former US Ryder Cup captain Paul Azinger, commenting for the BBC alongside Padraig Harrington said that it was Tiger’s ability to bring his mind and body together that was the key to his amazing resilience, explaining how some players have good technique but let themselves down mentally and vice versa. However, I believe there’s something altogether more profound going on here.
I’d like to suggest that Tiger’s ability to bring his attention within himself and to anchor it in his body and his breathing enabled his shots to simply flow. Researching the connection between the breath, the quiet mind and effortless movement since the turn of the millennium it was a kind of vindication for me to witness the truth of this on the world stage in what is surely one of the biggest stories in sporting history.
Three-time major winner Padraig Harrington said that Molinari had simply been intimidated by Woods and this was evident in the way the Italian’s mind and body disconnected as he became overwhelmed by the situation which no amount of positive thinking, psychology or knowledge of technique could dispel. The only thing capable of counteracting these symptoms is what Woods was demonstrating; bringing together the mind and the body by drawing the attention deep inside, and this can only be accomplished with a performance practice that is based on the eastern approach that Woods has returned to.
So many coaches and players nowadays are talking about breathing and Meditation but clumping it together with mental game techniques as if it’s in the same ball park; it isn’t. These deep practises are just that, practises and not techniques. This is what constitutes Tiger’s hidden fathoms, it’s what lies beneath that aloof exterior, it’s what he’s focusing on and what he’s trained for many years.
Soon I hope there will be a sea change in golf and indeed across all sports as athletes and coaches finally wake up to the fact that the mind that’s focused on technique or positive thinking is not the part of the mind required to produce powerful and precise yet effortless motion, particularly when the pressure’s on.
The part of the mind that is aligned to the meditative state and which ensures the reduction of mental interference, the nullifying of nerves and adrenaline and the delivery of fluid motion, can only be trained by focusing on your breathing in the correct way and not simply by “thinking about breathing” as many are prone to teach and try.
What Molinari and the majority of players have yet to discover is the subtle power that comes from deep practice, where the mind and body can seamlessly connect and allow the right shot to manifest itself at the right time. But this takes practice and can only be taught in a competent way by someone experienced in the process rather than from a coach who’s read about it books and is teaching from an intellectual perspective only.
Earl Woods once famously said of his son that “Tiger has the inner swing” and for me as a trainer of eastern movement and performance principles who’s been banging on about these things since the turn of the millennium, yesterday’s win finally showed the world that there is a level of play which transcends the game of golf as we currently know it, and which will be accessed by more and more players from the club amateur to the elite when eastern performance practice becomes the new norm.
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