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Now, I don’t spend my days watching the golf channel in order to catch Brandel Chamblee saying something ridiculous about a golf swing. But every time I tune in (and it’s not all that often) I have to sit back in amazement at the things that come out of Chamblee’s mouth. I instantly turn on the DVR so that I can play it back and not miss anything, and before you know it I have another video.
 
How could anyone who knows anything about the golf swing say on national TV that Tiger Woods is “coming over the top”. Are you kidding me? Tiger has never “come over the top” in his life. All you have to do is take a minute and watch his swings. I mean, come on already – here they are, right in front of you. How obvious is it that his hands are not moving out and over anything. They are, in fact, moving in a trajectory somewhere between the toe line and the ball. In 2009 they were falling straight down in transition, almost behind him. In 2000 they were more out than they are now. Tiger is trying to get back to a hand path that will encourage his lower body to rotate and make it easier to do so. His rehearsal is most definitely “over the top”, and then, of course, he does nothing like that when he hits the ball. I say of course, while of course Chamblee fails to see any of this. He sees Tiger’s swing coming “over the top”. Yikes.
The other thing Chamblee claims is that Tiger is too steep on his wedges due to the forward lean of the shaft, producing what he says are the “deepest divots of his career”, and certainly much deeper than Mickelson’s divots, which are “much shallower”. Again, this is nonsense. Mickelson steepens his shaft on the way down, leans the club forward and takes massive divots. The shots from the last round prove this. Tiger shallows his club starting forward, then leans the club forward and takes massive divots of his own. These are two of the best players of our generation, probably the best two, and they are both great wedge players. There is nothing wrong with taking big divots on soft fairways with wedges. Ever watch video of Trevino? He takes divots the size of small animals.
All these TV guys talk about Tiger as though he died and came back as some chump who stupidly took his swing apart and can’t put it back together, while they constantly allude to all the specific mechanical problems that are making Tiger lose, as though the greatest player of our time doesn’t have the intellectual wherewithal to know exactly what he is doing. I mean, the guy gets no credit for what he has accomplished, and the manner in which he went about doing so. Woods is a cerebral golfer, the opposite of a Couples or Bubba. These knuckleheads on TV are so far behind Woods in the “golf IQ” category that it’s comical. He will laugh at them all in the end. I can’t help but root for him.