Rumford comes out of the rough
SHARP words from his new caddie were necessary to sting Brett Rumford into lifting his game from a state he described as stagnant.
It was just over a year ago, and Rumford’s bagman, Max Cunningham, had taken a look at his new boss’s game and delivered a damning verdict.
“Max told me ‘you’ve got to do something about this, you don’t drive the ball good enough, your irons aren’t close enough’ and just had a pretty realistic view on my game,” Rumford recalled.
As a result, the 29-year-old West Australian switched to a new coach at the start of this year, ditching one English coach, Denis Pugh for another, Pete Cowan.
Rumford’s goal with Cowan is to get his game to a level where he can compete against the best on the US Tour, which he intends to do after one more season in Europe, where he has played for the past six seasons.
“Statistics don’t lie,” Rumford said.
“Denis is a great coach but perhaps he just wasn’t for me at the end of the day.
“I gave it two or three years, I was staying patient but my driving stats were on the decline in the years I was working with Denis and none of my statistics or game was actually improving.
“It was just fairly stagnant golf and it just wasn’t working for me.”
Rumford shot to prominence in 1999, winning the Australasian Tour’s Players Championship while still an amateur. He turned professional in January 2000, entered the European Tour qualifying school at the end of that year and earned his playing rights for Europe for 2001.
He won his first European Tour event in 2003, the St Omer Open, and added a second the next year, the Irish Open. Since then, his game has shown flashes of good form but nothing consistent and the winner’s circle has remained closed since his victory in Ireland.
This year he finished 51st on the European order of merit but only managed two top-10 finishes and earned almost half his season’s winnings of E491,907 ($830,446) with his best tournament of the year, fourth place at the lucrative BMW Championship, which netted him a cheque for E212,500.
“I put that bit of inconsistency down to a few swing changes, and maybe some of it was to do with that, that is just the game of golf,” Rumford said.
“You’re not always going to be playing at your best. I know that my best is a lot better than it has been previously, just through working with Pete.”
The inconsistency has shown itself all too clearly in the past two weeks.
At the Australian Open, Rumford played some of his best golf to start the final day a shot out of the lead at Royal Sydney before finishing in a tie for seventh.
But last week at Huntingdale for the Masters, his ball striking deserted him and a last round of 79 for a tie for 52nd included two double bogeys and a triple bogey.
There is still work to be done and Rumford is going to stay in Europe until he feels completely ready to take on the US.
“I’m going to play in Europe for one more year because I really like the work I’ve been doing with Pete and I think it’s going to take me probably another year or two just to really cement and get in to my head and my game what Pete is trying to get me to do,” he said.
“Years previously I just wouldn’t have driven it good enough to play in the States, simple as that. And you’ve got to drive it pretty straight over there.
“I just don’t want to be a player that gets over there and finds himself losing his card one year and regaining it the next. I want to go across there ready to play and ready to win.”
