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Janzen getting in the groove

Orlando resident overhauls his putting stroke in an attempt to develop more consistency. The results are slow in coming but the optimism is in full swing.

By DARRELL FRY

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 21, 2000

PALM HARBOR -- Lee Janzen didn't have a clue. As he likes to say, he hit the worst shots in golf, bad strokes that you have no idea how to correct. And he hit them for years -- like around the time he was winning the 1993 and 1998 U.S. Opens.

"I was winning, but I still never felt like my game was as good as it could be," he said.

What's more startling than Janzen's two-year title drought since that last U.S. Open crown is that he thinks he is playing better now than back then. The results haven't always confirmed it -- he shot par 71 Friday and was six strokes behind the leaders at the Tampa Bay Classic -- but Janzen, 36, is convinced he has found his groove.

"I'm hitting the ball better than I ever have, and I'm capable of hitting more shots," he said. "It's just a matter of confidence."

It's not often that a guy who has won two majors and a Players Championship title feels compelled to revamp major portions of his game. After all, Janzen had to be doing something right to rack up eight titles, 45 top-10 finishes and more than $7-million in career prize money before this season.

But by this year's Masters in April, Janzen had had enough. He had slipped out of the top 40 on the money list the year before for the first time in five seasons, and his start to the 2000 season gave him little reason to believe he was going to reverse his direction.

Before the Masters, he had missed two cuts and posted just one top-10 finish, a ninth-place tie at the Players Championship. Shooting consecutive 76s to miss the cut at Augusta pushed Janzen's patience and frustration over the top.

He needed help, and playing poorly at the Masters convinced him to finally get it.

His swing was fine. He said it was his putting that was dragging him down. Even though he ranked seventh on the tour in putting average, he had little confidence on the green.

"It really got bad there for a while," he said. "I always relied on just feel. I never really learned the proper mechanics of turning your shoulders and everything else that goes into making a good putt. I really had to learn how to putt all over again."

His re-education started with going home to Orlando and temporarily switching to a cross-handed grip, his left hand lower on the club than his right. He played nine PGA Tour events during that time, missing three more cuts and never finishing better than 15th.

At the PGA Championships in August, he went back to his normal putting grip, encouraged that he had formulated a new and, more importantly, better motion.

Since then, he has missed only one cut, but he is still looking for a top-10 result. Last weekend at the Las Vegas tour stop, he tied for 15th.

"I don't want to dwell on the negatives," said Janzen, who was paired with Brad Faxon and Fred Funk during the opening two rounds at the Westin Innisbrook Resort's Copperhead Course. "But I realize I haven't had the results that I did a few years ago. It doesn't bother me. You adjust to it, and I guess I've learned how to adjust and be more accepting of stuff like that."

Janzen, though, is quick to point out that he still has the same insatiable desire to win. And he believes he now has the game to do it, too.

"I'm still interested in winning," said Janzen, in contention for the weekend after totaling 138. "I'll win again. I don't know if it'll be this week or this year, but I'll win again."

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Gary Shelton