Tiger wins again and returns to N° 1 on the PGA Tour

Tiger Woods won the 2012 AT&T National, his third win of the year, and notified the world that he´s back and that he was correct when stating that it was only a question of time.

With the win, Tiger moves to N° 1 in earnings for the year and N° 1 in FEDEX points.

I was right when I wrote an article in my spanish language Blog, last February, on Tiger, and that all he needed was patience (Paciencia Tiger.....nada más). The truth is that a couple of bad tournaments (The Masters and The Players) are normal when competing at the highest level and on the toughest golf courses in the world.

What is clear is that Tiger put in the work. And nobody works on his game harder than Tiger. He made a decision to change his swing with Sean Foley and when he got healthy he was able to dedicate the hundreds of hours to do the necessary repetitions to automatize the new movements. Once this was accomplished, sometime in the second quarter, he was then able to sharpen his short game back to its original level of excellence. 

On the other hand, on the Mental side, I feel Tiger has been impeccable since his unfortunate club kicking incident on the 16´th tee of the Masters. From then on, he rarely got angry on the course and his talk with the press has always been optimistic, re framing positively his bad rounds, talking a lot about patience and always underlining that he is very close to playing great golf.

In his post victory press conference, Tiger reaffirmed the importance of being patient, and his description of his shots on the final hole ( "I hit a nice hard fade off the tee, and then I hit a nice sweet little draw in there into the green. It was good to be able to shape it both ways like that.") only confirm that he has regained full confidence and that his new swing is fully automatized.

As we have mentioned many times, an automatized swing is essential to be able to play great golf from the unconscious, sub-conscious, intuitive or automatic minds (synonyms).

With this win Tiger reaches 74 career victories on the PGA Tour, one more than Jack Nicklaus´ 73, and second to Sam Snead´s 82.

And what now for Tiger ??????

Short and simple: Win Majors again.

But, from the Mental angle, this will not be so easy for Woods. The fact is that Tiger is totally obsessed with winning more Majors in order to surpass Jack Nicklaus´ 18. (Tiger is at 14).

This obsession works against Tiger, due to what´s known in conscious autosuggestion as the "reverse effect". This law simply states that the harder we try to achieve an objective, the more difficult it becomes.

In golf there are, in my opinion, two clear examples of the "reverse effect": Sam Snead could never win the US Open and Greg Norman never won the Masters. Both great golfers became overly obsessed with winning these tournaments.

What Tiger must do is enjoy his three wins, enjoy his return to the top of golf, and be very cool and low key about this years British Open, and this years PGA Championship.

If he goes into these Majors like he would a normal tour tournament, without any obsession or excessive stress, his chances of winning one, or both of them, will be dramatically increased.