The sun was shining in Portugal as usual for the Portuguese Masters at Vilamoura. I always enjoy coming to this event as the weather and practice facilities are always great.
I arrived Monday and met up with Edoardo Molinari who was there early after missing the cut in St Andrews, which was mainly down to mental exhaustion after his Ryder Cup exploits. We worked on some set up fundamentals which had just slipped out of a little.
Tuesday was a pretty quite day as a lot of the guys were travelling in. However I was busy looking after some of the guys with Yes Putters. One of the jobs included building putter up to 680 grams for Ignacio Garrido who prefers really heavy putters. In the end he didn't like the putter, but Joost Luiten picked it up and really liked the feel as it helped him smoothen out his tempo which he has been working on. A big thanks to Andy and Ricky, on the Mizuno truck, in helping me build up the putter. They really are great guys and technicians. Hopefully it will help Joost sneak a few in this week.
I also had some new prototype heads for the new 2011 range with me this week. They went down well with the players. With Michael Lundberg taking the 'Elizabeth' which is a new mallet design and David Horsey picking up the 'Anne' which is a classic blade style design.
On Wednesday I met up with Michael Hoey, Chris Wood and Rob Coles. Chris was really looking good technically and is much improving. With Rob we spent some time working on green reading. After struggling with his technique over the mid part of the season it is looking a lot better so we looked a little bit more at his green reading and speed control which will produce better dividends for him now he is rolling his ball considerably better.
For the first time this week I also spent some time with Alejandro Canizares at the request of his long game coach Mike Walker. We spent some time on the SAM system to give Alejandro some feedback on what was happening with his stroke and how he could structure his practice better.
Hopefully the sun will keep shining for the guys over the rest of the week.
