75TH ANNIVERSARY / MIND M
for me to do that. It changed my men- tality about the game. I went down a deep, dark path.” That path started when Faxon be- gan working to fix the consequences of that first tip from his father. “The head-down thing restricted my turn and got me tilting and leaning back from the target on the downswing,” he says. “That opened the face and forced me to have to roll my forearms to square the clubface. I didn’t like the way that looked, not having that good extension so many great players had and for years tried to get that forearm rotation out of my swing.” The effort caused Faxon to lose his clubface awareness, and in his second full season in 1985 he was stricken with the driver yips. “It was a horrible feel- ing,” he says, pantomiming a severe shudder. “I hate even talking about it. I would wake up in the middle of the night from a driver nightmare with my forearms aching from all the tension.” Though the two have remained good friends for more than 40 years, Faxon soon stopped working regularly with Leadbetter and began, in his words, “to take more lessons from more different teachers than any tour pro ever.” Faxon battled tenaciously to stay on the tour, in large part with his short game and putting, and earned his first victory at the 1991 Buick Open, but serious scar tissue remained. In his third win, the 1992 International, Faxon was so fear- ful of spraying his driver that he didn’t use a tee for the entire 72 holes, opting for low bullets with big dog off the deck that cost distance but stayed findable. Faxon reached a career best of 11th in the world ranking in 1997. When he ar- rived at Riviera in 1995, several months of consistent golf had got him to 14th in the Ryder Cup point standings, mean- ing he would need a high finish and some luck to nab the 10th and last au- tomatic qualifying spot. “I knew Lanny (Wadkins) wasn’t going to pick me be- cause I was a rookie and hadn’t won enough,” says Faxon of the US captain that year. “But I badly wanted to make that team and got myself very focused.” That week at Riviera, before a prac- tice round, Faxon happened to get a look from Leadbetter, who suggested
Such duality is not unusual... Many touring pros need to be great at one area of the game to make up for weakness in the other. In the final round, Faxon shot 28-35- 63, tying the major record for nine-hole score as the lowest 18-hole score. That day Faxon missed only two fairways and hit the first 17 greens in regula- tion. By dramatically holing a 12-foot putt before the packed amphitheatre behind Riviera’s 18th green, Faxon clinched the last automatic spot on the US Ryder Cup team in the last qualify- ing tournament. travelling to the UK to try to make it through qualifiers for The Open, but in the 66 majors he played, he posted only four top 10s. The best of those was fifth at the 1995 PGA Championship at Riviera, won by Steve Elkington in a playoff over Colin Montgomerie. There Faxon’s parallel paths finally merged in harmony to the point that his ball striking was actually better than his putting. “It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever ac- complished in golf,” he says. “Every- thing you play the game for, in that one round, I did. The best I ever executed the lessons I’ve learned.” It was a lot, and in some ways, too much. “I was and remain immensely curious,” says Faxon, who transitioned from doer to thinker in his full swing after turning professional in 1983. He began working with David Leadbetter, who the year before had given Faxon a quick and simple lesson at a college tournament, which led to improve- ments that helped the Furman senior win the Haskins Award as the nation’s best collegiate player. “That’s when I started investigating my golf swing,” Faxon says with em- phasis. “I thought the secret back then would have been to learn the mechan- ics of my golf swing, but it wasn’t good
was shaped by the intuitive and joyful approach he brought to all sports as a boy – revel in the fun, closely observe the best players, emulate them in a way that be-
COME TOGETHER On Sunday at the 1995 PGA, Faxon shot a 63 with all elements of his game firing.
comes your own. At 14, after giving up his favourite sport, hockey, to focus more on golf, Faxon took up table tennis as a winter sport. Although he had played only ga- rage ping-pong with his friends, once exposed to advanced play, he excelled with lightning speed. Within a year, right after winning his first of three Rhode Island Junior golf champion- ships, he took the state 17-and-under table tennis title, a combination that got him into Sports Illustrated’s Faces in the Crowd and into the US Open of Table Tennis. Faxon’s full swing had an extra de- velopmental element that disrupted the purity of that process. “My dad was a good player, but he never tried to coach me,” Faxon says. “The one thing he did tell me when I started out was to keep my head down – never look up, never watch the ball, and my head would stay down for an extraordinary amount of time.” The remnants of that exaggerated move would lead to ineffi- cient compensations that with a driver made him close to the opposite of what he was with a putter. Such a duality is not unusual at golf’s top level. Many touring pros need to be great at one area of the game to make up for weakness in the other. The strong part isn’t bothered by a lot of thought while the inferior part is accompanied by a great deal of analysis. Ben Cren- shaw, whose putter was intrepid but whose long game became inconsistent when he began to make swing changes, always contended he played his best golf as a teenager, when, he said, “I didn’t think, I just did.” Not that Faxon didn’t have a distin- guished career. Along with the 1993 Australian Open, he won eight times on the PGA Tour, his last victory com- ing in the 2005 Buick Classic at age 45, where he closed with a 61. He revered the majors, early in his career always
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 21
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