For Today’s PGA Pros, the 19th Hole Is a Fitness Trailer

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/sports/golf/todays-golfers-work-out-like-serious-athletes.html

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DUBLIN, Ohio — In golf, a waist has seldom been a terrible thing to mind.

Professional players of a certain fleshiness have long been embraced, sultans of Sansabelt with nicknames like the Golden Bear, the Walrus and Lumpy, who brought an Everyman appeal to what can be an elitist sport.

But where golfers once headed from the 18th hole to the watering hole, today they are more likely headed for a workout.

Many of the world’s top players, who will compete in the United States Open next week at Merion in suburban Philadelphia, are now as committed to fitness as pros in other sports. As drivers and putters have grown fatter, the golfers themselves have grown leaner.

Some remain hefty and fearful that losing weight or lifting weights will harm their finely calibrated swings. And because drug testing is so limited, it is impossible to know whether doping is widespread.

But many golfers are clearly serious about being in shape, persuaded to a large extent by the success of Tiger Woods, who has always made conditioning a focus of his training and whose popularity has increased the extravagant prize money and endorsements available in the sport.

Swing coaches and sports psychologists in golfing entourages are increasingly accompanied by athletic trainers and massage therapists. Rickie Fowler, the 2010 rookie of the year on the PGA Tour, said he scheduled several sessions on tournament weeks with his “deep-tissue guy.”

Two trailers follow the golfers on tour, one a mobile gym, the other a physical therapy center. Workout clothes are provided along with weight-lifting equipment, treadmills, elliptical machines, bikes, trainers, therapists, chiropractors and nutritionists.

Such dedicated training helps to validate golf as a sport, players say, belying the stereotype that it is a social activity with scant health pursuits beyond celery in a Bloody Mary.

“The average fan thinks we go to school for three hours and have recess the rest of the day,” Fowler said. “But that’s not how it works.”

At least half of the pros use the gym or rehab trailer at a given tour stop, officials said. Some train for 60 to 90 minutes, as often as five days a week, to enhance strength, flexibility and stamina and to minimize injuries from repetitive swing motions and muscle imbalance.

Ten or 15 years ago, the treatment for tendinitis might have been “a tumbler of Scotch put over the elbow to get it to calm down a little bit,” said Dr. Thomas Hospel, the medical director of the PGA Tour.

“Now,” he said, “as soon as something starts to come up, they are in here getting treatment.”

Some golfers still smoke on the course, an activity most closely associated with the portly John Daly. But as golf has become more businesslike and lucrative, with purses routinely topping $5 million at tournaments, the PGA Tour has attracted more athletic players who are skilled at multiple sports.

Gary Woodland played his freshman year of college on a basketball scholarship. Camilo Villegas has done 100-mile rides on his bike. Adam Scott, the Masters champion, is a surfer. Matt Kuchar and his spouse won the consolation bracket of the 2009 national husband-wife clay-court tennis tournament; he played doubles the morning that he won the 2012 Players Championship.

If some golfers appear fit enough to run a marathon under four hours, at least one of them has — Justin Leonard, winner of the 1997 British Open.

“You definitely see more guys going for a workout than sitting around the clubhouse,” Leonard said. “You don’t see guys having a beer or a cocktail or a glass of wine. You might see that at dinner, but rarely in the clubhouse.”

In his younger days, Woods played baseball and ran track and cross-country, lifting weights to get stronger and faster. He customized his workout regimen for golf, whose players walk four-plus miles during a round in a sport that puts stress on their legs, backs, shoulders and other joints.

“You have to train to be an athlete,” Woods said. “Unfortunately, I think some of the guys missed the boat on that. I want to be able to be fit and not feel winded, heart rate low all the way” from the first hole through the 72nd hole in a tournament.

Dave Stockton, who won 10 tour events in the 1960s and ’70s and is the putting coach for Rory McIlroy, the world’s second-ranked player, said, “Today, the caddies are in better shape than we were.”

Gary Player, who won nine majors between 1959 and 1978, was a friend of the fitness expert Jack LaLanne. Player was pioneering, as fastidious about his diet and his situps as he was about his black wardrobe. Still, for many golfers of that era and beyond, conditioning was merely something that followed shampooing.

Jack Nicklaus was heckled as “Fat Jack” by some fans of Arnold Palmer as Nicklaus bulled toward a playoff victory at the 1962 United States Open. Later, Nicklaus said, he shed 15 pounds in two weeks after growing tired at the 1969 Ryder Cup; he dieted and ran from shot to shot on the practice course.

All told, he trimmed from 210 pounds to 185 and became celebrated as the Golden Bear, winner of 18 major championships. Still, Nicklaus said, “We didn’t know what we were doing” regarding fitness. “Not even the football players lifted weights when I played,” he said.

When a mobile gym first appeared on the PGA Tour in the mid-1980s, Davis Love III said, confused players would walk in with a beer and ask, “What’s going on in here?”

“Now guys are saying we need a massage and acupuncture truck,” he said.

Before his practice round last week at the Memorial Tournament, where a new workout room was used instead of a trailer, McIlroy arrived at 5:30 a.m. for a 90-minute workout.

When he won his first tournament on the PGA Tour, in 2010, McIlroy called himself chubby. The next year, he could not finish a half-hour jog with his girlfriend, the tennis star Caroline Wozniacki. As he grew fitter, McIlroy said, his body fat shrank to 11 or 12 percent from about 20 percent.

“I feel I could do like a Tour de France stage,” McIlroy said, laughing, “but I don’t know if I could do a marathon.”

While fitness can improve a golfer’s health, it is not guaranteed to improve his game. Carl Pettersson, a winner of five tournaments on the PGA Tour, said he believed his swing was adversely affected by a 30-pound weight loss over three months in 2008-9. He now appears closer to his original 225 pounds than his formerly svelte 195.

“It changed everything,” Pettersson said of his swing and weight loss. “My body was faster. I did it too quickly. I should have done it over a longer period of time, and it would have worked. I just went back to my old ways.”