PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. — Tiger Woods has an entourage with him at all times.
Rob McNamara, Woods’ longtime friend and business partner, is never far from his side. Super agent Mark Steinberg is often around as well. Add in a caddie (Lance Bennett this week), a security guard, Tour officials and hordes of media and you’ve got one heck of a traveling circus. That’s not to mention the throngs of fans who are always clamoring for a peek at the 15-time major winner.
For many years, that entourage included a swing coach. For a while, it was Butch Harmon. Then Hank Haney. Then Sean Foley and Chris Como. But after Como was relieved of his duties in 2017, Woods went at it alone.
Seven years later, he remains without any formal swing coach.
Most Tour pros would be completely lost without an instructor. Fixing your own swing can be difficult — and at times, impossible — even for the best in the world. But Woods isn’t just any old Tour pro. He’s one of the best the game has ever seen.
“Sometimes it doesn’t look pretty,” Woods said ahead of the Genesis Invitational. “But I can still hit the ball flush.”
That doesn’t mean it comes easy. With the 48-year-old’s injury history, the days of hitting hundreds of balls at the range are long gone. Woods used to go and “dig it out of the dirt.” Now, he has to rely on his feels.
“A lot of it is my hands,” Woods said. “I built this golf swing the last few years, four, five years based on my hands and what that feels like.”
Tiger Woods is back, but is his swing? We asked a Top 100 Teacher
With a body that’s been through the wringer — injuries, surgeries, a major car accident — Woods doesn’t know what positions he’ll be able to get into on any given day. One day, the body won’t cooperate. The next, it will. Without any way to predict what will (or won’t) work from day to day, trying to build a repeatable swing is a challenge.
“One of the reasons I don’t have a coach right now, my body day to day, week to week just looks kind of different,” he said. “I can’t really model myself or fit any kind of model.”
The fortunate part for Woods is that the golf ball doesn’t care how things look during the swing. The only thing that matters is that the ball finds the center of the face.
“I think that more than anything [what] I try and do from a technical standpoint is making sure I can still hit the golf ball flush and solid,” Woods said. “I still do work on making sure that I can hit the ball out of the middle of the face.”
It might be difficult to make that happen consistently without a swing coach, but if there’s anyone who can find success with it, it’s probably Tiger Woods.