He changed his swing." He had started the process 13 months earlier, under his new coach Butch Harmon. Amateur, held at the TPC Sawgrass, The Oregonian newspaper reported: "Eldrick 'Tiger' Woods conquered all the worlds of junior golf, and then he did a curious thing. Earl called to his wife, Kultida, elsewhere in the house: "We have a genius on our hands!" As the father looked on, his son waddled to the other side of the ball and - in the part of the tale that always engaged Earl the most in the telling - switched his hands, moving the right below the left, intuitively finding the proper grip. Woods, though, was different.Īfter two weeks of swinging his plastic club lefthanded (this is, again, according to Earl), Tiger apparently grew dissatisfied with the motion. Mickelson, a righty in every other way, would stick with that lefty swing, becoming the most accomplished southpaw in the sport's history, winning four majors and 40 PGA Tour events. Watching his father hit balls, Mickelson at 18 months had also copied his dad's swing, mirroring it lefthanded. Its plausibility is bolstered, however, by the fact that some five years earlier and 100 miles south in San Diego, a boy named Phil Mickelson had done exactly the same thing. At 10 months old, the story goes, Eldrick Woods climbed down from his high chair in the garage of his family's house in Cypress, Calif., grabbed hold of a child's plastic toy club and began precisely mimicking his father's golf swing, lefthanded - a piece of legend given to us only by Earl Woods, since no one else was in the room at the time. ALMOST FROM THE BEGINNING he was doing it.
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