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PGA TOUR: Montgomerie is having trouble turning his game around

/noticias.info/ By Mel Webb
GolfWeb European Tour Correspondent

There was unconfined joy at the end of the Quinn Direct British Masters on Sunday when Johan Edfors completed his second European Tour victory in the space of two months to continue a remarkable turn-around in form after a couple of years during which he looked for all the world like a man who didn't quite have it in him to make a mark on the circuit.

The stage for Edfors' triumph was The Belfry, the scene of so many stirring contests in the Ryder Cup since it first hosted the first of its four matches in the greatest team contest in golf in 1985. It has produced great deeds and wonderful moments and ought to be a home away from home for Europe's very best players.

In the normal course of events it would cause a major surprise if Europe's talisman in so many Cup matches missed the cut at The Belfry. But, for Colin Montgomerie, missing a cut has, sadly, become just that -- a normal course of events.

Last year Montgomerie pulled off a performance that few of even his most ardent supporters would have predicted for him as recently as 2004 when he won the money list on his home tour for the eighth time. It was a remarkable performance by a remarkable player and, apparently, underlined what he had always said since his seventh triumph in 1999, Name, that he still had it in him.

There is plenty of cloth to be woven in the mill yet in this season but Monty's suit is beginning to look more than a little frayed right now. He has had the worst start to a season in a distinguished career that is in its 19th year.

Like the honest man he is, he admitted as recently as last month that he had a problem. And like the determined man and, mostly, the positive man that he is, he said he was going to do something about it.

"My problem is 100 percent mental," he said. I know how to swing a club. "I know technically and physically what to do. It is a question of believing it.

"I am a great believer in if you think you're going to do it, you're halfway there. I am not quite thinking I am going to do it right now, so I am less than halfway there at the moment."

There, in those few short sentences, Montgomerie revealed both his greatest strength and, possibly, also his greatest weakness.

He does, indeed, have the archetypal perfect technique. It's not perfect in the sense that every move is modeled along classical lines, but what has made it so irresistible is the ability to produce the same set of movements, time after time, tournament after tournament. He has been like a well-oiled automaton for years and years on end.

However, the story of Colin Stuart Montgomerie, modern sporting hero, would not be complete, nor even totally honest in its retelling, if his Achilles' heel were not also borne in mind.

Look, nobody, not even the legion of Monty-haters that over the years has given him such an occasionally hard time, especially in the United States, would deny that the big man has been one of the best players in the world in the last 15 years.

But on the other side of the coin, not even the staunchest of his fans would dispute that his greatest weakness resides between his ears. Sometimes he has bristled at the mere mention of such a suggestion, but now, at last, he is prepared to admit that the problems he is currently experiencing are largely psychological.

"I am very focused on what I am doing," he said during the same interview from which his earlier quotes were taken. "I am just not believing, and believing comes with the act of doing. If you hole seven putts in a row, well, you believe the eighth one is going to go in, too. If you miss seven in a row, you don't believe the eighth one is going to go in, either, and it doesn't."

When Montgomerie drove away from The Belfry on Friday evening, it was the second time in four purely European Tour appearances this season that he had done so. In the U.S., he missed the cut in THE PLAYERS Championship by four strokes, pulled out of the BellSouth Classic the next week to practice and then missed the last two rounds of the Masters by a shot.

He has suffered in other ways, too. At the end of last season he had clawed his way back to eighth in the world. This week he is 22nd. He would be less than human if he were not at least a little concerned.

There is, of course, absolutely no chance at all that European captain Ian Woosnam would not pick his most iconic player for this year's match Ireland in September.

That would be something of a consolation for some people, but not our Monty. He wants to be there as of right and he could yet snap out of his reverie. He just can't afford to wait much longer for the muse to return, that's all. notas_de_prensa_archivo