Kruger goes back to go forward
GARY Player said change is the price of survival. But the secret for every professional golfer is to know when to change – or, in the case of multiple Sunshine Tour and Asian Tour champion Jbe’ Kruger, whether you should even change at all.
For Kruger, the search for change to his swing has brought him full circle to the realisation that his old swing is exactly what he needs to get back to.
It’s a process he’ll continue with at this week’s Kit Kat Group Pro-Am at Royal Johannesburg and Kensington Golf Club, which begins on Friday and marks the start of the Sunshine Tour’s 2021 schedule.
“I want to get my swing natural again and go back to the root of how I used to play,” says Kruger, who has endured a frustrating few years of trying to change that foundation in the pursuit of improvement.
“My strength was always my ball-striking. I was good because I hit the ball really well. I always said I just need to make putts to score well, because I knew I never had to worry about my ball striking.
“But the last few years that hasn’t been the case. In my desire to improve, I lost that strong point to my game.”
At 1.6 metres tall, Kruger has long been used to punching above his weight in world golf. He’s won six times in his career, and climbed to a world ranking high of 109. But he’s since slipped to 480th in the world.
“The problem is that you spend a few years working on something that just isn’t working out for you. It’s almost like I’ve gone 10 000 hours in the wrong way, so there are a lot of things I now have to unlearn with my swing. It’s unnatural, and I need to get my swing back to being natural,” he explained.
Kruger points out that he is certainly not the first professional golfer to have made the mistake of trying to fix what isn’t broken.
“Take a look at Francesco Molinari. In 2018 he won his first Major and won the European Tour’s Race to Dubai. Then he decided he needed to change his swing.
“In 2011 Luke Donald became the first golfer in history to win both the PGA Tour and European Tour Order of Merits, but he decided that because he’d never won a Major yet, he needed to change his swing.
“It’s almost like you don’t trust your own process that got you there in the first place.
“I can’t understand why as golfers we all follow the same pattern.
“The lesson for me is that you can only get better by practising harder. If your basics are good, then practice is the only thing to get better.
“For me it took at least a year to change my swing, and it felt like two years to get confident with it. Now I have to unlearn that. It’s all about coming to the realisation that what brought you here will keep you here. You forget that. You feel you need to change to get better. But just practising more will make you better.”