Tiger tinkers puzzle Price

Enlarge Image

Gregory Shamus / getty images Renowned ball striker and three-time major winner Nick Price is coming to Canada to tee it up in June�s Montreal Championship. Price has won two Canadian Open titles. (POSTMEDIA GETTY IMAGES)

MONTREAL -- Nick Price is one of the greatest strikers of the ball golf has ever seen, and he is among those baffled by a great player's obsession to change his swing.

The World Golf Hall of Famer didn't mention Tiger Woods by name, but the former world No. 1 certainly came to mind after Price's comments.

"It's a mystery to me why someone who could dominate so much would want to change anything," Price said Wednesday. "We're always trying to get better, but sometimes guys try to make a quantum leap instead of putting one foot in front of the other. That's when they get into trouble."

Price, an 18-time winner on the PGA Tour -- including three majors and two Canadian Opens -- added his name to a growing and impressive list of players committed to play in the third edition of the Montreal Championship, slated for June 22-24 at Richelieu Valley. It will be Price's first trip to Montreal since 2001, when he tied with Woods for 23rd at the Canadian Open at Royal Montreal.

Mark O'Meara, the 1995 Canadian Open champion, also committed Wednesday for the $1.8-million Champions Tour event. It will be his first tournament in Montreal since 2001.

Price, a 55-year-old native of Durban, South Africa, was the best player in the world in the mid-1990s. He topped the PGA Tour money list in 1993 and '94 with records for single-season earnings each year and spent 43 weeks atop the Official World Golf Rankings. Price's best season was 1994, when won the British Open and PGA Championship before capturing his second Canadian Open at Glen Abbey to cap a six-win season.

In a conference call from his home in Jupiter, Fla., Price admitted to having tinkered with his swing, but that was long before he established himself as one of the best players in the game.

"I did that early in my career," he said. "I was a very streaky player. When I was on, I played really well. But it didn't happen enough for me.

"When I started working with (David) Leadbetter back in 1982, I basically tried to refine my golf swing to make it efficient without any extraneous moves, which I had plenty of before working with (the renowned swing coach). I just tried to streamline my golf swing."

Price recalled that when he was playing his best golf, Arnold Palmer said to him: "Whatever you do, don't change anything." Price didn't.

"I think it's one of the reasons in that five-year period I played as well as I did," he said. "I just kept working on all the idiosyncrasies that sort of crept into my game.

"It's very difficult to change one's golf swing," Price added. "You get into bad habits. You get lazy with your posture and lazy with the discipline of your address position, ball position, all those sorts of things.

"The thing we tell all the amateurs we play with to be wary of in the golf swing is the address, setup and posture. We are as guilty as they are, because we get into bad habits, too."

Price figured "bad habits" have contributed to a forearm injury he is currently rehabilitating with physiotherapy. It began with tennis elbow and ultimately led to two torn tendons.

"My posture got really bad, and with any sort of tennis elbow injury it's the result of your arm doing too much work," he said.

Price, who has won four times on the Champions Tour since joining the 50-and-over circuit in 2007, said the injury has affected his play this season. He has managed only one top-10 finish -- a tie for seventh at the Allianz Championship in mid-February -- and had to withdraw in his last appearance a month ago.

Like many of us, Price tuned into the struggles of Kevin Na last weekend at The Players Championship. Na, who held a one-shot lead after 54 holes, came unglued with endless waggles, half-swings and intentional whiffs before almost every shot before finishing five shots back, tied for seventh.

He attributed his struggles with trying to get comfortable with a new pre-shot routine.

Price figures it was more than that.

"I think the guy was fighting off demons," he said. "When you're playing well, you keep the game as simple as you possibly can."

-- Postmedia News

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 17, 2012 C12