To Change,or Not to Change?
much success? Not long ago I put this to
I
Padraig Harrington, who won three major championships in the span of 13 months, and then promptly tore apart his game. Harrington, now 43, insists he’s better than he’s ever been, but the cold hard fact is that his last victory of note was the 2008 PGA Championship. (Harrington snapped a seven-year winless drought at this
24 /
NCGA.ORG / SPRING 2015
Why golf’s greatest players are tempted to reconstruct their swings at the height of their success BY ALAN SHIPNUCK
t is one of the most vexing questions in golf: Why do great champions change the swing that has brought them so
year’s Honda Classic in March). For him, the quest for self-improvement transcends swing mechanics and strays into the realm of the metaphysical. “It’s like the ying and the yang,”
Harrington said. “You have to remain in constant motion just to stay in the same place. Everything is in a state of constant flux. Acknowledging that, it keeps you moving. It keeps you excited. I’ve just spent two hours at the range hitting nothing but driv- ers, full-stop. A fellow like you comes along and asks if I’ve discovered the secret. The secret is, there is no secret.
The secret is in the search.” Here Harrington let out a boyish
giggle. “All that said, I’m hopeful that someday I’m going to find the secret.” It is this noble quest that led him
to split from his guru of 15 years, Bob Torrance, who had presided over his greatest golf. The victories stopped coming, but Harrington still insisted he was getting better all the time. Eventually, he came to seem detached from reality. When Harrington told an Irish radio show in January 2012 that he was working on his tongue position during his swing—“To relax
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