Here is an edited version of an email I sent last summer to a longtime friend, a golf instructor who is world famous but whose name I do not wish to use in this message. 

How do you explain David Duval’s fall, and partial resurrection?  Multiple choice:

a) He has never recovered from his beatings by Tiger – a condition that also seemed to afflict Ernie Els and many others

b) He was always kind of a hippie and he simply crossed over some inter-planetary boundary and entered another universe

c) In his efforts to beat Tiger by imitating him, he made himself so fit and thin that his golf swing no longer worked because it was trying to function on a different platform – I note that he is recently starting to show sporadic signs of playing well again, and that he now appears to be at least as fat as he used to be before he became obsessed with Tiger

d) Playing at the highest level requires a level of concentration and intensity that he lost, and never recaptured

e) None of the above

I ask, because I got to thinking about some of the fallen stars I had mentioned in one of my earlier emails (Ian Baker-Finch, Bill Rogers, etc).  For that matter, is it possible that Duval, like those other guys, started tinkering with his swing and over-tinkered?

Editor’s Note:  the response of the golf coach was, in essence, ‘All of the above, plus some bad coaching.’

[Posted @ mecmoss.com 12 Feb 2012]