Padraig relies on old master

December 2, 2009

The old world meets the new this week when Bob Torrance visits the Titleist Performance Institute in San Diego.

The revered 77-year-old Golf coach from Largs is in California with his star pupil, Padraig Harrington, for Tiger Woods Chevron World Challenge at Sherwood Golf Club, Thousand Oaks.

It is Harringtons last event of the season before he embarks on an eight-week break and he has taken the opportunity to invite Torrance to the Institute to talk to the boffins there as the three-times Major champion prepares his game for the Masters in April.

Just how Torrance, a man of few gimmicks, will get on with Titleists bright, young technocrats is open to imagination.

However, Harrington is convinced there is a place for both in his relentless quest for as close to golfing perfection as he can achieve.

The single-minded Dubliner insists he has faith in what he was advised to do with his swing earlier in the year when he was hooked up to the TPIs new world testing system.

However, there is absolutely no truth in the rumour that he might be leaving the man who helped to construct a game to beat the best.

Bob is still as much a part of the team, even more so than ever, said Harrington. He is coming out to the TPI with me for the first time. It coincides with Tigers tournament.

Torrance is a genius. He knows the sequence of what can and cant be done, and why some players will swing the club one way and another player will swing it another way.

It was the venerable Ayrshireman who put Harringtons game back together during a five-hour session on the practice range before The Open at Turnberry.

And the contrast in Harringtons record before and after the Turnberry get-together is striking.

From February to June, as he wrestled with changes he was trying to make to his swing, he missed six cuts, including the Irish Open, US Open and the French Open.

From August to November he had eight top-10 finishes, including seconds in the WGCBridgestone and the Barclays in America, and in Europe a third in the Portugal Masters and fourth in the Dubai World Championship. The data from the TPI showed what was wrong, the Irishman explained.

But I couldnt figure out how to correct it.

Interestingly enough, a lot of the work I had been doing seemed to be at loggerheads with what I do with Bob. But when I worked with him at Turnberry he pointed out why I was struggling.

Thats why he is a genius.

Now the idea is to have Torrance talk things over with the bio-mechanical team at the TPI, which will ensure that everyone is signing from the same hymn sheet next season.

IT IS difficult to feel sorry for the richest sportsman in the world. Surely, however, there has to be a touch of sympathy for Tiger Woods over his baffling 2.30am crash into a fire hydrant outside his gated home at Isleworth in Florida.

His reluctance to explain to the police might look like the behaviour of a man who believes he is above the law.

At the same time, here is an individual who, partly through no fault of his own, has never been allowed to live in the real world.

He is constantly surrounded by black-suited men who look - and sometimes act as sinisterly as - members of the mafia.

He is hidden behind a management team that operate as if he was a world statesman on a hush-hush mission, instead of a sports person.

It is virtually impossible for a member of the media to talk one-to-one with Woods.

How different it was with legends of another era, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson.

Almost in any circumstances you could walk up to Nicklaus and Watson and have a word.

If you try that with Woods you are almost frog-marched away.