Through the years, competitive golf has had its share of fitness fanatics. One of the first was Frank Stranahan, also known as the “Toledo Strongman,” who won pair of British Amateurs in the 1940s and who was as devoted to his gym workouts as he was to his golf game. Then came nine-time major winner Gary Player, who at age 83 still likes to brag about how many sit-ups he can do. In later years, Greg Norman and Nick Faldo took themselves to the top of the professional game, thanks in no small part to the workout regimens they followed.
But it wasn’t until Tiger Woods joined the PGA Tour that professional golfers fully realized the importance of physical conditioning and what an advantage it could be in terms of distance and stamina. Woods first showed that when he won the 1997 Masters, using his prodigious power to transform the par-5s at Augusta National into par-4s as he secured a record-setting 12-stroke victory. He might have looked like a skinny kid at the time but even as a 21-year-old Woods was a committed gym rat. By 2000, when he won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach by a staggering 15 shots, he had developed a tremendous amount of muscle mass, which showed as he powered shots from Pebble’s high rough. A month later, his eight-stroke victory at the Open Championship on the Old Course in St. Andrews was one of the greatest ball-striking exhibitions in major championship history.
Woods at his peak could do things no other player in the history of the game could do. The 213-yard 6-iron bunker shot to win the 2000 Canadian Open (and become the first man since Lee Trevino to win the U.S., British and Canadian opens in the same year); hitting no more than 9-iron second shots into any par-5 at Augusta National; hitting a 436-yard tee shot on the par-5 fifth hole at the Old Course the Sunday of his 2000 Open Championship win: That highlight reel was made possible, in no small part, because of Tiger’s strength, speed and conditioning.
His successes induced a good number of tour pros to start hitting the gym instead of the bar. Elite amateurs soon followed. Eventually recreational players added workouts to their practice and playing time, many led in that direction by PGA club professionals who saw this trend as a way to get their students playing better.
Thus a new phrase entered the lexicon: golf fitness.
But it wasn’t only Tiger who lit the fuse. The movement also was stoked by the creation in 2003 of the Titleist Performance Institute. Located at a 30-acre test facility the equipment maker had operated in Oceanside, Calif., since 1997 and run by Class A PGA club professional Dave Phillips and chiropractor Greg Rose, TPI offered what was then the most cutting-edge program to help golfers reach new levels of success and proficiency.
At TPI, Phillips and Rose used data from three-dimensional motion analysis systems to determine how players generated speed and then transferred it throughout their bodies. They also employed physical screenings and exercise protocols to identify physical weaknesses, not only so they could prescribe ways of building those up, but also to discern what things golfers could – and could not – do from a swing standpoint when it came time for instruction. There was no model swing as far as they were concerned. Phillips and Rose believed that the best way to help players improve was by working on a swing they actually were capable of making while developing a fitness program that might enable them to do even more down the road.
“The idea was to create an Olympic training center for golf,” says Phillips.
It was groundbreaking stuff, especially when combined with advanced club-fitting techniques. The first golfers to use TPI were Titleist staff tour professionals such as Ernie Els, Brad Faxon, Davis Love III and Adam Scott. Then, the company made it available to elite amateurs who played their gear. After that, recreational players who found they could be fitted and fixed just like someone from the PGA Tour viewed TPI as a golf fantasy camp.
Titleist executives saw the program as being good for the overall health and growth of the game as it also allowed them to better service their constituents, from tour professionals all the way down to weekend players, and sell more clubs and balls in the process.
Eventually, Titleist and the TPI co-founders concluded that they needed to bring their initiative to a much broader audience, even as Phillips and Rose continued to work with the company’s tour staff.
“It was the only way we could really make a difference in the greater golf world,” says Rose. That led them to drop the fantasy camp aspect and create education programs through which they could share their knowledge, which grew every time they collected data on a new golfer. That data was the basis for what came to be called the Body-Swing Connection. “The first seminars were held in 2007, and today, we have certified more than 19,000 golf professionals, who operate in 63 countries,” Rose says.
Now, that is a revolution, and thanks in many ways to Phillips and Rose, and also to Titleist, it has spread all over the world.
The seeds for that upheaval largely were sown some two decades ago by Wally Uihlein, then the chief executive officer of the Acushnet Company. At that time, Phillips was the director of instruction at Caves Valley Golf Club in Maryland. The learning center he ran there was one of the most highly regarded in the country. He was an early expert in computerized swing analysis and biomechanics and worked with a number of PGA Tour pros and promising young amateurs. It was also not too far from the town of Gaithersburg, where Rose had established the Clubgolf Fitness Center, one of the first golf-specific health clubs in the country.
“Dave and I met and knew a bit about each other,” Rose says. “He was interested in what I was doing with golf fitness, and I was intrigued by what he had going on at Caves. Then one day, he asked me to see a young golfer named Peter Uihlein and do one of my work-ups on him. I said sure, and soon after Dave came down with Peter, who was 11 or 12 years old at the time (and who would go on to win the 2010 U.S. Amateur). And his father also happened to be Wally. I evaluated Peter and when he was leaving, Wally said, ‘What you both are doing is the future of golf, and I want to be a part of it.’ ”
Uihlein felt that way for several reasons: He realized that technological advances in equipment were going to be harder to come by due to restrictions on product development by the USGA and the R&A. So, he needed to look for other ways to help golfers improve. But Uihlein also had a front-row seat to the Tiger Revolution. As the head of Titleist and Footjoy, Uihlein saw how physical conditioning was changing the game.
Uihlein understood that the best way to keep his company prosperous was to help golfers of all ages and abilities find ways to play better, more often and much longer into their lives. After what he had seen at Caves and Clubgolf, Uihlein believed he had found the best ways to do that.
But before he fully embraced that approach, Uihlein dispatched some associates from Acushnet as well as several touring professionals who represented Titleist to visit Phillips and Rose and make their own assessments. Peter Jacobsen, for one. Tom Kite and Brad Faxon to name two others.
“I remember going to Clubgolf and being pretty amazed at the size of the facility and all they were doing there as far as understanding how the body moved during the swing and the role that fitness played in golf,” Faxon says. “I did a series of exercises with Greg as a sort of screening, and one thing he determined was that I was not using my legs properly. Greg also pointed out that my left side was nowhere as good as my right. That made sense, I guess, because I had sprained my ankle some years before and had lost a lot of flexibility in it and could not swing or transfer energy as well as I should.
“Greg gave me some exercises to help strength that ankle and also so I better utilized my legs,” Faxon adds. “I noticed results right away, when I started to hit the ball farther.”
Others who made the trip to Maryland at Uihlein’s request were also impressed. In 2003, Titleist formed a partnership with Phillips and Rose that led to the creation of TPI.
Faxon still marvels at how the results of the initial work he did with Rose and Phillips and the ways the TPI program has enabled him to stay fit ever since. “I am 57 now, and the flexibility in that ankle I sprained is so much better,” he says. “I have no restrictions whatsoever.”
Similar stories abound. Consider Phil Mickelson, who after winning this year’s AT&T Pro-Am at the age of 48, talked to the news media about the work he has long been doing with a TPI-certified trainer, Sean Cochran, and how that has helped him remain competitive.
When people talk about distance gains, they would be remiss not to credit improved fitness and training as being every bit as significant as advances in equipment, if not more so.
As Uihlein had hoped, TPI is also having an impact at the club level, where PGA professionals such as Bill Stines at Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio have hired TPI-certified assistants for their members.
“We develop and customize workout routines for them,” Stines says. “We help them better understand their swings and their physical capabilities so that they can play better and play more often. We have even built a state-of-the-art fitness center for them. It is full all the time, and that’s because they see it another way to get better at golf.”
Current Acushnet CEO Dave Maher was one of those associates that Uihlein asked years ago to visit Phillips and Rose. Maher looks back at the many ways it has impacted the game in those years with obvious satisfaction.
“TPI and the Body-Swing Connection has done a lot of what we hoped it would in the beginning,” Maher says. “By making golfers healthier, it has made the game healthier. It has certainly made tour professionals better and club professionals more effective and more valuable to their members. It has helped recreational players get better, too. Every step of the way it has been a real positive.”