Niccolo Machiavelli, Tiger Woods and Golf

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

Niccolo Machiavelli

During a golf discussion recently with a very low single figure golfer friend I was amazed to be once more subjected to the whole “If only Tiger had stuck with the swing he originally had – who knows how well he could have done…” argument. It is an argument so frustratingly tedious it positively makes me writhe with anger. And it always says so much more about the person delivering it than it ever will about Tiger. Tiger sits there at the top of the rankings with so many majors I can’t even keep count, so many records broken and so clearly in touch with his game that even when playing badly he still comes second in the Masters. And yet people love to still trot out the assumption that he could have been so much better.

Tiger does what Tiger does and that has made Tiger – the best golfer in the world and possibly the best we’ll ever see. But more interestingly and this is where the Machiavelli quote comes in he does what he does to “understand for himself.” Of course he still uses coaches and of course he has his ups and downs but ultimately the swing change was to create a swing that he could “own”.

He freely admitted that only two people had ever “owned” their swing in the past. Ben Hogan and Moe Norman. He wanted to be the third. Hogan we all know about and if you get a chance to watch his Shell series match with Sam Snead (often for sale on ebay) you will sit back in awe at his ball striking and precision. It is from another world. He found out his secrets by “digging the dirt” and doing it his own way. If it hadn’t taken him so long in the early days to get rid of his hook and he hadn’t had such a horrific car crash at the peak of his career he would surely stand as the greatest golfer of all time. But “ifs and ands and pots and pans” and all that.

Norman was an equally intriguing if much less well known character. (Sign up for my first secret if you’re looking for links to his swing) . Wrongly described as an autistic savant he was clearly enormously eccentric but his ball striking was simply incredible. Endlessly accurate, time after time after time but circumstances decreed that he never really left his native Canada often. But again he “understood things for itself”

They were, as is Tiger, outstanding examples of Machiavelli’s first type of person. The type that he describes as excellent. The rest of us strive for it and all those critics out there just slot themselves into his third category. They sit and watch the television with a beer perched on their fat bellies and a variety of snacks beside them trotting out wisdom to hide the futility of their own lives. It’s always easier to criticise others than it is to really look back at your own life or golf game.