John Huggan: Take pity on go-slow Kevin Na

The battle between body and mind has always been one of the most fascinating aspects of the greatest game. But rarely has it been so graphically depicted than at last week’s Players Championship. Kevin Na’s struggle to get his swing started in a way that would allow him to hit the ball was both compulsive viewing and the last sort of image any golfer should have bouncing about in his/her brain.

Again and again, the unfortunate Na tried. Again and again he failed. Either his swing wouldn’t get going at all, or, so uncomfortable did it feel, he was compelled to eventually swish the club over the ball. All as a prelude to re-booting the whole wretched process. It was difficult – although some ungracious souls have managed – not to feel some sympathy for the 28-year-old American by way of South Korea. No, he’s not the swiftest about the links, but it was clear he was both fighting hard to fix his affliction and painfully aware of the potentially detrimental effect it could have on his playing partners. His heart, if not his club and head, was in the right place.

There have, of course, been variations on this theme in golf and other sports. Former darts champion Eric Bristow famously had trouble letting go of his arrows. Snooker ace Patsy Fagan was hounded into retirement by an inability to use the rest. And baseball player Steve Sax, pictured right, second baseman on the 1988 World Series winning Los Angeles Dodgers, was temporarily and strangely unable to throw to first.

In golf, former Ryder Cup skipper Mark James played the entire 1983 European Tour season re-gripping the club multiple times before every shot. Sergio Garcia suffered from the same sort of malady and, a decade ago, was loudly heckled by a tough New York crowd at the US Open. And Jose Maria Olazabal went through similar agonies over the ball, his particular idiosyncrasy a constant glancing from ball to hole, hole to ball.

“I just couldn’t get comfortable at address,” recalls James. “It was torture. I got to the stage where I was actually counting how many times I was re-gripping. At the Dutch Open, I was up to 29 re-grips. I had to step away and start again. My forearms were burning. So I had to give them time to recover.

“The thought that it could finish my career did briefly cross my mind. If it had stayed with me into 1984 I was in big trouble. I assume Kevin’s thing is akin to mine in that he can’t get comfortable on the takeaway. If that is the case, it isn’t psychological, it’s purely technical. When he gets the club moving away from the ball on a path he feels happy with, he’ll be fine. His problem, of course, is how to do that.

“The mind is such a powerful thing. If I made myself start the swing before I was ready or comfortable, I would just hit a bad shot. Which is where I suspect Kevin is right now. He wants to pull the trigger but, if he doesn’t feel right, he knows he is unlikely to put his best swing on it. So he doesn’t pull the trigger. It’s technical, not psychological.”

Maybe. Na’s swing coach, Dale Lynch – who also works with his fellow Australians Geoff Ogilvy and Aaron Baddeley – doesn’t quite agree with James’ assessment. “I’ve only been working with Kevin for a while, but this has been an on-going thing with him,” he reveals. “It gets worse when he is under pressure and has been highlighted recently by his being in contention.

“It’s something he clearly needs to work on. And he has reached the stage where he has acknowledged the problem and is willing to work on it. I have already given him some things to try – but I’m not going to say what they are in case they don’t work and we have to go to something else.

“Kevin has always been very technically oriented. Instead of merely giving him a feel for the shot he is about to hit, his waggle is designed to give him a key for the backswing. So for him it’s a technical thing, not a feel thing. For him, the waggle is a rehearsal.

“Ultimately though, I see this as both a mental and technical issue. There’s always a crossover between the two. And this is a perfect example of that. We’ve been working on Kevin’s address position and his backswing, getting the club into the right position. His driving has always been relatively poor, so getting the club where it needs to be on the way back has always been a battle for him. That’s the technical part. The mental side kicks in because he needs to ‘let go’ and trust what feels new and different.

“He’s tenacious though. I don’t know if many people could deal with this and still hit great shots.”

Still, acknowledgement of Na’s on-going struggle has not been the prevalent reaction from a generally hard-hearted media over the last week or so. Rather than try to understand the problems facing him, many have focused instead the effect he has on the field’s pace of play. While it is true that the typically snail-like processions on the PGA Tour represent an ongoing problem, it is a bit of a stretch to place all of the blame at the door of a young man at least making an effort to fix his contribution to the long-term mess.

The same cannot be said of PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, however. During a quite extraordinary press conference at the Players Championship, the diminutive official appeared indifferent to the cancer his organisation is helping to spread throughout the game.

“I actually think we might want to experiment with penalty shots,” he said, ignoring the fact that such a punishment already exists in the PGA Tour guidelines on slow play. “But I don’t think penalty shots make a difference, to be honest.”

In other words, the man at the head of the world’s biggest and most powerful tour is unwilling to acknowledge the insidious influence his members have been having over the wider game. And because of that, he – seemingly arbitrarily – fails to apply his own rules. Last week, in fact, was the 20th anniversary of the last one-stroke penalty for slow play on the PGA Tour. Ironically, the player asked to add one to his score was Dillard Pruitt, who now works for the tour as – you guessed it – a rules official.

So, at least as long as Finchem is in charge at the tour’s Ponte Vedra headquarters, the smart money is on Na fixing his individual problem well before “the commish” gets his head out of his backside and decides to do his long overdue bit to alleviate slow play. All it would take is the application of basic logic.

“I heard of a guy in the States who had to waggle exactly 20 times before each shot,” says James. “He couldn’t get out of it. So he went to a psychologist, who told him to start counting at 18.”

Good thinking. If only that psychologist had Finchem’s job.