Golf: Tiger Chases His Tail As Questions Mount Over Crisis

Of all the extraordinary facts and figures that have attached themselves to the name of Tiger Woods in his phenomenal career one has cropped up this week that, given his fantastic talent, is more extraordinary than most. If Woods fails to win the World Golf Championship at Mount Juliet, near Kilkenny, he will not have a single strokeplay event to defend anywhere in the world.

He ran out of major championships to defend long ago, not having won one since June 2002, but who would ever have thought that it would come to this? Woods, after all, is the man who won two tournaments in the first few months of his professional career in 1996, won four the next season and built up to the years 1999 and 2000 when he won an incredible 17 times in 24 months, setting or equalling 27 US Tour records in the process.

In each of the years 2001, 2002 and 2003 he won five times but in 2004 he has one solitary success, in the Accenture matchplay event, drawing a blank at every strokeplay tournament. It represents a massive dip in standards for the 28-year-old and even if he wins at Mount Juliet, the question arises as to whether he can ever regain the peaks that set him so far above the rest of golfing humanity for the first six years of his career.

A few weeks ago the American magazine Sports Illustrated dared pose the question - unthinkable even in 2003 - "Is this the end of an era?" adding, "Woods's best days may be behind him", and the former world No1's display in the Ryder Cup only made that a more reasonable comment. It was not so much the fact that he could not get on with Phil Mickelson and lost a foursome and fourball match with him, as his display in the singles, that mystified. The US captain sent Woods out with the specific instruction to win his match against Paul Casey and set an example for the rest of his team. Well beat Casey he did, but only because the Englishman played about as badly as he can and was unable to take advantage of Woods, who was close to his absolute worst.

In the first nine holes of that match Woods managed to hit two fairways and three greens in regulation, so providing Casey with openings at almost every hole and which he did not take advantage of. Three weeks ago Woods was displaced as the world No1 by Vijay Singh, who last night pulled out of the Kilkenny event. He had been at the top for a record 334 weeks, 264 of them in succession, a wonderful achievement. At his best he was simply untouchable and, as Singh said: "If you're playing with Tiger and he's playing well and you're not playing well, you're going to look like an idiot."

Gambling habit

Johnny Miller, the US commentator and 1976 Open champion, pays tribute to the Tiger of the recent past when he says: "He's a phenom. He's the whole deal. He's one of those rare athletes that come along, like Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan, who want that pressure and can handle it.

"It's hard to say that Tiger is better than Jack Nicklaus under pressure, but he might be. One of my little what-if games is that when we all pass on we can play this tournament where all the greats can play at the age they want to and we're all going to play with the same equipment. Tiger would probably win, but he'd have to be at his very best."

Woods at his very best has not been around this year. If there is a single reason, no one but he knows it, and he protects his privacy as fiercely as possible. It could be the fact that his father, Earl, is seriously ill again with cancer, for Tiger and his dad have always been extremely close.

It could be the fact that he is persevering with Nike clubs when it seems evident to everyone but him that they do not suit his game. He achieved his immense earlier success with Titleist and the reasons for changing can only be commercial - which begs the question, how much money does this billionaire require?

Perhaps a gambling habit has taken his focus from the game. Woods has learned how to party, in places like Las Vegas, with the likes of Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan, basketball legends, and is known as a high roller.

Or maybe he is simply in love. Last November he got engaged to Elin Nordegren, who was working as a nanny for Jesper Parnevik when Woods met her. It is amusing to learn that Woods, so aggressive on the golf course, was so timid in love that he asked a friend to ask Elin for their first date. She, not unnaturally, was appalled by this sideways approach and turned it down flat, forcing Woods to do his own dirty work. Woods, who at his university, Stanford, had the reputation of being a bit of a nerd, apparently struggled for weeks before he could bring himself to do it.

Of course, his decline might just be technical. It was at the US PGA of 2002 that Woods let it be known that he was no longer consulting his long-time coach Butch Harmon on a regular basis and he has not won a major since. At first Woods said he knew enough about his own swing to be able to put it right should a glitch occur but that, as it always does, imploded pretty quickly. Woods has far too much pride to go back to Harmon and now he appears to be asking another well-known guru, Hank Haney, to oversee his swing. Haney is the coach of Woods's best mate, Mark O'Meara, and good judges say that Woods's swing is becoming more and more like that of his 47-year-old friend. Why Woods would want such a thing is yet another mystery in the on-going puzzle of why he is now so relatively poor where once he was so wonderful.

Nicklaus's slump

An article in the American magazine Golf World, by the respected teachers, Jim McLean and Carl Welty, shows they have no doubt that not only is Woods playing poorly, it is because he has changed the outline of his swing.

They say: "Tiger began to change his swing noticeably in early 2002, often using the same swing drills as O'Meara. Photographs show that Tiger's backswing position in 2003 and 2004 has evolved into an almost carbon copy of O'Meara's. Mark's swing is one that promotes a draw, indeed it is the shot he plays almost exclusively. On the other hand Tiger, in his early years and up through 2001, often hit the ball dead straight, or even with a slight fade off the tee. But in the last two years he has changed to an inside-out, draw-type action and in that time he has had trouble consistently drawing the driver."

It is the driver that gives Woods the most trouble and where once he was long and straight he is now mostly in the right rough, and struggling. Statistics can be made to prove anything, of course, but the driving accuracy category on the US tour is one that cannot lie, or at least not badly, given that you are either in the rough or in the fairway.

In 2003 Woods was fairly bad off the tee, hitting only 63% of the fairways to be in 142nd place. This year, though, he is worse. He has aimed at 900 of them and managed to miss an incredible 382. That means he is hitting 57.6% of fairways and is a scarcely believable 173rd in that category, making him all but the worst driver on tour.

Woods, by the standards he has set, is in a slump, a fact often excused by others saying that everyone experiences such things, and that even Nicklaus had 2 years when he did not win a major - the same period in which Woods has also gone winless in the championships. But significantly Nicklaus, during his fallow period, through 1968-69 and the first half of 1970, had five top 10s in the 10 majors played in that time; since June 2002 Woods has had only three and his other placings have been significantly worse than those of Nicklaus.

But if Woods can turn things around - if he gets married, say, and wants to show his new bride what he can do - he can take heart from Nicklaus's record when he broke out of his slump. In his next nine majors, Nicklaus finished first, sixth, second, second, fifth, first, first, first and second.

Woods, who has eight professional major championship victories, is on record as saying that he wants to exceed the record of 18 won by Nicklaus and if he needs an incentive to break out of the darkest period of his professional career, those figures provide it.

Whether, though, a fortune now estimated at $289m (£160m) has dulled appetite and ambition only he knows, and for the moment he is not telling.