He’s the real deal!
Henrik Stenson

While a number of Swedish players have threatened to become a ‘Major’ force in world golf over the past decade or so, Henrik Stenson looks as though he could actually be the man to finally make that happen in the next few years.

With the volume of stats now available it can be hard – and, at times, worthless – to try and assess the talent of a Tour professional. That’s why the easy option is to always ask a fellow Tour player. To them, stats don’t mean an awful lot unless they have to justify something they’d rather not talk about.

And that is exactly what journalists did when they gathered to speak to Geoff Ogilvy after he lost to the world’s highest-ranked European, Henrik Stenson, in the final of the WGC Accenture Matchplay Championship in Tuscon. How far can the Swede go, they asked. They got the answer they were looking for.

“He can win anything he wants,” said Ogilvy, the reigning US Open champion. “He hits it long, he hits it decent, he obviously chips and putts pretty well. I can’t see any tournament he couldn’t win.”

But that is not likely to have been the response you would have been given from Stenson’s fellow pros back in 2001. They would have struggled to call the Swede anything other than tormented.

Just weeks after winning his first event on the European Tour (sandwiched between wins by Jose Maria Olazabal and Tiger Woods, no less) a number of Stenson’s peers had to watch in horror as the young Swede suffered a very public, and very bizarre, case of the yips with his driver.

He couldn’t hit a fairway. His swing was described as a shambles and his confidence was in bits. This from a player who had just won an event,
a feat some players never achieve. His problems reached a head at the European Open at The K Club weeks later when he lost more balls than he’d care to remember in the first nine holes. It was nasty viewing and Stenson’s reply was to walk off.

He doesn’t like to look back on those dark days – who would, after all – and he’s not exactly forthcoming in dealing out the dirty details.
“I normally don’t talk about what happened,” said Stenson after being probed about why, exactly, his game was a complete mess six years ago. “I sort of lost the swing, the confidence. And, when your caddie is rattling in the pocket to see if he’s got a provisional when you’re standing over the drive, you know you’ve got some sort of problem.”

That ‘problem’ was solved by Pete Cowan and Torsten Hansson. Cowan, a revered coach, overhauled the Swede’s swing while sports psychologist Hansson worked on his subject’s mental state, trying to get him to use his personality to better effect.

It worked. Sensationally. After a few years of character building, Stenson is now world No.5, the highest-ever world ranking by a Swedish golfer (Jesper Parnevik got as high as world No.7 in May 2000). He is also the highest-ranked European in the world, putting players like David Howell, Luke Donald, Paul Casey and Sergio Garcia in the shade, for the time being at least.