Lodge manager of Beaver River Lodge Richard McNeil takes a few swings at a brand new driving range shared by the Athabaska Lodge and the Beaver River Lodge located north of Fort McMurray, Ab. Sept. 1/2010. Companies are adding a variety of amenities at their work camps in order to attract and maintain staff.Kevin Van Paassen
Every so often a rarely used word comes into one's life and suits something that needs to be said. So it is with wackdoodlery, which suits what's transpired since PGA Tour player Charlie Wi offered some sharply worded comments last Friday about Mike Weir, Aaron Baddeley and swing coach Sean Foley, who is working with Tiger Woods.
Wi was essentially defending his swing coaches Andy Plummer and Mike Bennett, and their comprehensive swing method known as Stack & Tilt. Weir and Baddeley worked with Plummer and Bennett but are no longer with them. Wi said both were terrible ball-strikers and that they improved under Plummer and Bennett, but chose to leave anyway.
Wi also said that "whoever Tiger is working with" - Foley, that is - has the Stack & Tilt book and that he always calls Plummer and Bennett with questions. Wi added that Plummer approached Foley and said, "Hey, I don't think it's fair that you're using our material."
Wi's words have generated a river of commentary in articles, blogs and on Golf Channel, where Brandel Chamblee and Nick Faldo have been hard on Plummer and Bennett's instruction. The instructors are being painted as if PGA Tour players are leaving them in droves, which isn't true.
Their student Bill Lunde has won this year. Troy Matteson works with them and is the No. 1 ball-striker on the PGA Tour. Dean Wilson placed second in the RBC Canadian Open and said he wouldn't be playing without their help.
"Brandel Chamblee and Nick Faldo have turned down numerous requests from us to talk to them," Plummer said Tuesday from his home in Philadelphia about his interest in correcting the impressions he feels Golf Channel analysts are leaving.
"This has all struck a nerve with us, the way it's been handled," Plummer continued. "There's a perception that Mike Bennett and I have a scarlet letter on us. We want that to go away. As for Mike Weir, it's all okay between us. I talk to him all the time. We talk sports. We have lunch together. I'm not campaigning to be his coach again."
Meanwhile, Foley told The Globe and Mail he's paid his dues and hasn't faked his way to get where he is. Wi effectively painted him as a plagiarist. But there's not a swing coach, or a tour pro, or a writer, for that matter, who doesn't learn from others.
"I talked to Sean on the range in Boston [at the recent Deutsche Bank Championship]" Plummer said. "Charlie had it wrong about what I said to Sean, but I can understand him feeling that Mike [Bennett]and I, and by extension him, have been taking shots from the media because Mike [Weir]and Aaron left.
"We teach a system," Plummer continued. "I'm supportive of Sean and it's a huge accomplishment for him that he's been able to command the attention of some of the best players in the world [such as Woods, Sean O'Hair and Hunter Mahan] But it's fair to say that we've pointed Sean in the direction of how to systematize the swing. You hear Tiger saying that he's learning a system. He's using that word."
Foley acknowledged Tuesday that he told Plummer in Boston, "What I learned from you guys is how to articulate things I knew instinctively." Foley has always acknowledged many influences, including swing coaches and philosophers. He's widely read.
This could seem like nothing more than back and forth he said-he said nonsense if it weren't for the impact on careers
"I'm happy for Sean," Plummer said, "but here's where the rub is. He made a couple of comments that if Stack & Tilt is such a good system, why are guys coming to me for a watered-down version? That's where this strikes a nerve. Anyway, we'd like to put all this behind us. We're just trying to do good, and we find ourselves embroiled in all this stuff."
Plummer, Bennett and Foley are only trying to help golfers - very talented golfers - improve. That's not easy. Jealousy and resentment are common on the PGA Tour, where, these days, and in the PGA Tour's interview rooms and then in the media, wackdoodlery reigns.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca .