Tiger Woods Should’ve Seen My Guy Instead of His Guy

In case you don’t follow golf, Tiger Woods — once upon a time the greatest golfer of his era — fell ignominiously to earth Thursday and Friday, playing horribly at the British Open, failing to make the cut, and slinking off to the airport to fly home afterward.

Tiger’s problem is neither mental nor emotional. He doesn’t have a case of the yips, and he’s still strong as an ox. The reason Tiger played lousy golf in Northern Ireland last week was that he overworked himself physically for too many years — most egregiously by overdoing his weightlifting after the knee surgeries, training with the NAVY Seals, undergoing a spinal fusion, and all the other procedures he has undergone — and then he bought into conventional methods of treatment and went to the wrong people.

He should have gone to my guy — a body guy in San Diego named Pete Egoscue, who created something called the Egoscue method. I follow it religiously.

The basic idea is that there are four parts of the body meant to bear weight: your ankles, your knees, your hips, and your shoulders. The problem is that in modern life, practically everything we do causes us to hunch over or otherwise misuse our bodies in a way that puts stress on parts of our bodies that are not meant to be weight-bearing structures. As a result, we have pain.

Mix in championship golf, the SEALS training, and all that bodybuilding, and you have a body that has practically gone through torture, bearing weight where it should not.

I found an Egoscue practitioner, a gentleman named Peter Larrieu, a dozen years ago in my then hometown of Irvine, California. Pete crafted a series of stretching exercises — no pills, no potions, no notions, and above all, no surgery — to stretch my body back into proper alignment, and to get me to put my weight on the parts of my body that are meant for that purpose.

I’m no Tiger Woods, but I still play bogey golf.

I’m no Tiger Woods, but next Sunday I’ll be doing an Olympic distance triathlon here in Boston. And if it goes well, I’ll be doing a half Iron at the end of August, three weeks after my 61st birthday.

I’m able to do all these things because for the last dozen years, I’ve been doing the stretching exercises that my guy, Pain-Free Pete, has given me. I don’t do them every day, and sometimes weeks will go by without the stretching. But I do them often enough, and as a result, my body functions the way it’s supposed to.

Like everybody else, I hunch over the steering wheel, my laptop, and my phone. I misuse my body constantly. But I give it a rest, thanks to what Pain-Free Pete taught me.

Over the years, Pete and I have talked about Tiger Woods, and Pete has always made the same point: If Woods (or anyone) would just do these stretching exercises, get their hips back in place, and get the weight bearing parts of the body to bear weight, surgery wouldn’t be necessary.

Physical therapy, chiropractors, massage therapy — it’s all helpful, but it doesn’t get at the root problem, which is the fact that we bear weight where we shouldn’t.

So next Sunday, when I’m swimming, biking, and running, I’ll be thinking of Pain-Free Pete and how grateful I am that I found him.

And if Tiger Woods has any intention of winning Augusta next spring, maybe he ought head out to Irving and meet Pain-Free Pete himself.

Free plug: It’s http://painfreepete.com.

I’d keep writing, but I’ve got to get to the gym. Time to stretch.