AUGUSTA, Ga. — A coach of your favorite golf stars offers this: “You hear this more than anywhere else at Augusta: ‘I can’t get my range game on the course.’
This is not a pre-tournament comment. It’s something you hear after the Thursday rounds are posted.
There is a reason for this, just as there is a reason for everything. The tournament’s practice range at Augusta is about 300 yards wide, flatter than the club’s famous fairway behind it, with only about a dozen pins and a dozen pines to aim for. On the course itself, once you’re off the tee, there are few flat lies, lots of pine straw, teetering greens – and a nervous system in overdrive. So, in this sense, the range and course of the tour – on Thursday, on Friday, on the weekend – are on different planets.
But there is something else going on more Mastersthe first Grand Slam event of the year, than anywhere else. At 4:30 Thursday afternoon, there were six players on the range and six instructors. There were two players on the field with instructors. There was another player near the green, his coach behind him. During the afternoon, more players came to this temple of practice for a post-round session, every last one (except one) accompanied by a teacher. Every coach had a phone or a tablet in hand, and many of the players had Trackman devices that diagnosed their every move.
This is a relatively new development, the player and coach continuing to work together after the start of a tournament. In the 1990s, you would often see Ernie Els and sometimes Tiger Woods on a range without an instructor with a tournament in progress. (Every blue moon, you’d see Els or Woods alone on the range, the corpse sent home for the day. Unbelievable to watch.) But over the past 10 or 15 years, and you see it more than anywhere else on the Augusta Tour, the professional golfer has gone from lonely cowboy to Yourme Hereme CEO of the Team.
In 2015, Jordan Spieth won the Masters. In 2016, he was the third-round leader after an indifferent Saturday 73. He had only gone that week. On Saturday night, he made an emergency call to his swing coach, Cameron McCormick, asking for help with a short-handed case. McCormick arrived Sunday morning. Whatever they worked on worked, until it didn’t. Spieth shot a 73 on Sunday and Danny Willett won by three. Over the last decade on the Augusta range, you see a player, you see an instructor and a gizmo.
“It’s probably been a real thing for the last 10 or 15 years,” Adam Scott said Thursday. He is 45 years old and has been a touring pro playing the world for 25 years. “There aren’t 85 coaches here this week, but then there’s someone like Pete Cowen who has a bunch of guys. And I’m not just saying coaches. There’s coaches, trainers, psychologists. There’s a lot of coaches.”
But only one coach is allowed on the range with the player at Augusta, and he is always the primary driving coach. It’s good for business. A swing coach at the Masters is usually pretty invisible, but when you’re inside, it’s an enviable spot.
“Ideally, you have everything organized before you get here,” said Scott, who shot a 72 in the first round. “I feel like a lot of times when I had a coach here, they just looked and didn’t say much. Even on a day like today, when you’re a little off, sometimes you just need someone to say, I didn’t feel well today, but I don’t think it’s bad. What do you think? ‘Nothing wrong with it. Go hit 20 balls and come back tomorrow.’ But everyone seems to be going for perfection.”
Augusta National it is not a course that lends itself to excellence. Things go wrong. It’s kind of a head game because Augusta National, the club, sells the pursuit of perfection, but things go wrong from Thursday morning to Sunday night, for every last player.
And that’s the point of the unnamed mental coach here – players are looking for perfection on the range with an evolving tournament, and that’s counterproductive. The real work, said the mental coach, should be between the player and the caddy, because the player and the caddy are there together. You can’t make a bailout in the golf tournament.
“Early in my career, there was a phase where the coach wasn’t around too much and I think that was good,” Scott said. “At 21, I didn’t know what bad golf was. I would go out and play.
“Later, it was more about taking it to the next level, with more eyes on it. That’s how it worked for me, and it worked well. Now I have a lot less of that. I talk to Trevor (Immelman) often about how I feel and my movement, but I don’t have him watching all the time. There are phases.”
Rory McIlroy, for example. There were times in his career when his lifelong swing coach was behind him every time he took to the range. And then there was last year, when McIlroy won the Masters. There was no talk about his team, no discussion that we did this and we did that. He and his caddy, Harry Diamond, were on the driving range. He and Diamond were on the 18th green Sunday night. McIlroy signed his playoff scorecard. The only other signature required was that of his opponent.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com
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