What’s next for ‘mentally beat up’ Tiger Woods?

Tiger Woods, when he’s healthy, is renowned for his ability to grind out rounds of golf for respectable finishes -- and victories in the not-too-distant past -- even when missing his “A” game. The tenacity with which he commits himself to getting the most out of whatever he’s brought to work was on display several times last week at Jack Nicklaus’ Memorial Tournament.

There was his impressive rebound on the second nine after a miserable first half of his opening round on Thursday at Muirfield Village, and barely made cut on the number on Friday, after he did the same at The Players. In Sunday’s finale, Woods trimmed 11 strokes off his career-worst 85 of a day before. The five-time Memorial winner still finished last.

“I was expecting to grind,” said Woods, now ranked 181st in the world, after compiling yet another career-worst with his highest-ever 72-hole score at Memorial, a 14-over-par 302. “That, to me, is the fun part, is going out there and just grinding and fighting for everything I possibly can out there.

“After shooting whatever I shot yesterday, to be able to go back out there and get to 3‑under par and keep fighting and keep fighting; as I said, once ‑‑ the first shot of the tournament is just as important as the last shot and you’ve got to play the same,” Woods added. “So that’s the way I’ve always approached it. No matter what I’m shooting, that’s what I have to do.”

On Monday, Woods even joked about what many observers consider the not-so-funny state of his game.

“Well, I look at it this way,” he said during a press conference promoting next month’s Quicken Loans National. “It’s about getting reps. I got a lot of reps this weekend.”

While such persistence is laudatory, what’s increasingly head-scratching is Woods’ stubborn commitment to yet another swing change -- this one since finishing T69 at The Players Championship three weeks ago -- that had him spraying tee shots everywhere but the fairway at Muirfield Village all week.

Woods is officially in the midst of his fourth new swing since he turned professional, but seems to be tearing it apart and rebuilding it almost weekly under his fourth swing guru.

Tiger’s ex-caddie, Steve Williams, told Golf Digest recently that Woods was “obsessed with always getting better,” but his incessant tinkering and coaches carousel resulted in his former boss “renting several swings instead of owning just one.”

Since signing on with Woods in November, consultant Chris Como has guided his client to one missed cut, a withdrawal, a T17 at the Masters, a T69 at Sawgrass and now the disaster at Jack’s Place. Under Como’s tutelage, Woods is focusing on some sort of alternative rhythm that even the practitioner of the new swing struggled to describe.

With such gymnastic word-play needed to explain his current swing changes -- along with having no idea where his tee shots will end up as he deploys the new regimen in competition -- it’s no wonder Woods confirmed he was “mentally beat up.”

There was the opening hook and bogey on the 10th hole on Thursday, a tee shot later that same day so far into foul territory on the right on the 18th it was out of bounds, and the quadruple-bogey 8 on the 18th on Saturday to cap that miserable 85. And those were just some of the lowlights from a week that Tiger confidant Notah Begay III contended, in a Memorial post-mortem, that his long-time friend would want to remember so he could learn from his failures.

The always optimistic former world No. 1 conceded things were not going so well at the moment but affirmed such lousy results would not deter him from carrying on.

“I hit it awful, yeah. So what?” Woods said on Thursday. “I was going to go through this phase and stick with it, keep sticking with it. And some of the shots I hit were really, really good, but then I also had some really bad shots, too. And we need to work on that, too, and omit the bad ones.”

On Monday, Woods rationalized that he just needed more competitive play before he could accurately gauge his success under Como.

“You just don’t go from one to 10,” he said. “We’re taking it one, two, three, four, all the way to 10, taking it step-by-step and making baseline shifts, that’s what Chris and I were just calling it,” said Woods, employing more linguistic acrobatics.

“You can call it anything, progression, baseline shifts, you can come up with any terms you want,” he said, “but what it is that I’m taking it step-by-step above the game plan we have, and we have formulated for me to get better and get back to where I want to be in the game of golf.”

The only reason for yet another massive overhaul of a swing that long ago won 14 major titles and 79 PGA Tour events -- that makes sense to some of us who are most certainly not swing experts -- is the impact previous motions had on the 39-year-old’s injury-plagued frame.

“It’s the pattern we work on, we’re trying to change it,” Woods said last week. “It’s kind of what you have to go through. And unfortunately, I can hit it either way, because of this move we’re working on. But it’s so much more flush, and so much more solid, and a lot easier on my body, when I seem to do it right.”

How many years Woods has to implement the new swing remains to be seen, though the former world No. 1 appears to believe he has all the time in the world.

“I’ve gone through phases like this, rounds like this before in the past,” he contended. “Sometimes it’s taken me about a year and then it kicked in and I did pretty good after that ... I’ve had periods where I’ve played good for four or five years, where I’ve won close to 20 tournaments in that stretch.”

But that was then and this is now. And now, Woods is six months shy of his 40th birthday, with his most recent (and many believe his last) victory coming at the 2013 WGC-Bridgestone Invitational. As Woods has been fond of recounting (though not lately), Nicklaus was 46 when he won his 18th major championship. But Nicklaus stayed with one coach, Jack Grout, throughout his career.

“If I wanted something, I just walked back in the bleachers (where Grout was seated) and say, ‘what do you see, Jack Grout?’” Nicklaus recalled last week ahead of his tournament. “He’d say, ‘your head position is a little off,’ and that would be about it. And it was a pretty simple thing.”

There is nothing simple about what Woods is undertaking for the umpteenth time, especially since he acknowledged he was no longer married to the “new/old” swing he put into play at the Hero World Challenge in December. The end game, though, could not be more basic: eliminate the two-way misses that force Tiger to get up and down for par -- and worse -- from uncharted territory.

How and when he’ll make that happen is anyone’s guess, though the question of how to fix Tiger Woods has the golf world as fixated as ever. Nicklaus believes only the winner of 79 PGA Tour events can cure what ails him.

“I think Tiger just needs to go back and review some of his own things, rather than listen to somebody else,” Nicklaus opined from the CBS broadcast booth during Saturday’s telecast. “He’s the only one inside him who knows what’s really going on. He’s the only one who’s going to be able to fix what he’s got.”

Brandel Chamblee reiterated on Sunday that the elixir he has been prescribing for some time is just the tap of an iPhone away.

“I believe that if he actually called (former coaches) Butch (Harmon) or Hank Haney, either one of them, that within a month or two they’d have him back playing some solid golf,” the Golf Channel analyst said after Woods scuffled to the end of his embarrassing week in Ohio. “I really do believe that.”

Even if either legendary swing coach were to agree to re-enlist with Woods, there would be no guarantee that either could undo the damage to his game that Chamblee believes was self-inflicted. But Harmon, for one, has gotten Rickie Fowler and Suzann Pettersen back to the winner’s circle after long winless droughts for each. (Fowler won The Players Championship in May and Pettersen tuned up for this week’s KPMG Women’s PGA Championship with her 15th LPGA Tour win at the Manulife LPGA Classic on Sunday).

Of course, neither Fowler nor Pettersen is Tiger Woods in his heyday -- but then again, neither is Tiger Woods, circa 2015.

As for the scuffling golfer in question, Woods admitted it was mortifying to struggle so mightily in front of the hordes of fans who still follow his every move inside the ropes. He was also not ready to sound the alarm on a game that has fallen apart so shockingly and quickly.

“Unfortunately you have to put (swing changes) into play, and doing it in front of the world, and of course I’m going to get the scrutiny. That’s part of the deal,” he said on Monday. “But also I’m very proud of the fact that I stuck with my game plan. I stuck with it, and I was finally able to hit the shots on Sunday that we’ve been looking for.”

As he has said countless times in the past, it’s all part of the process of getting unstuck between the motions of former swings and the one he and Como are in the midst of deploying.

“I had to go through those painful moments, just like I did at Torrey Pines and Phoenix, to be able to make the leap I did at Augusta,” he said, referring to the withdrawal after 11 holes at the Farmers Insurance Open following his then-worst 82 and missed cut at the Phoenix Open.

Despite Woods’ ever-hopeful attitude, the question remains: what (other than a June 18 tee time at Chambers Bay) is next for Tiger?

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