Easygoing Lietzke finds just right balance of golf and life
By Lauren Deason, PGATOUR.com Editorial Coordinator
BOCA RATON, Fla. -- He's been called lazy and unmotivated. Some have even suggested that, if he had just practiced harder, he would have been a much better player.
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Bruce Lietzke has heard it all. Here's a guy who won 13 events on the PGA TOUR and has seven Champions Tour victories yet he barely touches a club when he's not competing in a professional event.
Naturally, his fellow competitors and skeptics have questioned his practice habits. Or, should we say, lack of practice habits.
Take his recent offseason, when Lietzke literally hit a golf ball just one time from Oct. 21 until Jan. 16. That's 87 days without touching a club.
"My main motivation behind doing it is my mental outlook. If I were to go home and beat balls in November and December or if I were to go home last week during my week off and hit balls even a couple of days, that's a beating to me. That's a mental beating.
"Physically, it is easy to go out and hit balls for an hour and a half, but I just have to get away completely from the game," Lietzke added.
Two weeks ago, he suffered a neck injury hitting a 3-wood from a divot at the Turtle Bay Championship, but that was a rare health issue for him. Despite his recent neck woes, which affect his tee and long iron shots, Lietzke will head into the final round of the Allianz Championship just two strokes off brother-in-law Jerry Pate's lead. No bogeys and seven birdies gave him a 65 in the second round on Saturday, when the wind constantly changed directions but didn't throw him off course.
Staying off the range has kept him relatively healthy and is a strategy that has worked for him for the past 30-something years. While the concept might sound odd to most players who constantly tinker with their swings and spend hours hitting balls, Lietzke said his swing hasn't changed since 1974.
"I still play my fade 99 percent of the time ... the only club in my bag I try to hit a hook with is my 3-wood. Every other swing is either going to be a little fade or a big fade," Lietzke said. He has some emergency swings just in case but, for the most part, nothing has changed in his golf life.
"I don't want my swing to be any better tomorrow. I want it to be exactly like it was yesterday," he said. "I want it to be exactly like it was at Hualalai three weeks ago. And, in my case, I want it to be exactly like it was 30 years ago."
Off the course, his life has changed significantly over the past 30 years. For the first few years on the PGA TOUR, Lietzke drove to each golf event and packed fishing tackle in the trunk. He'd spend time with the rod and reel in the middle of a golf week.
Lietzke eventually gave that up because he learned that he needed to focus completely on golf. Never one to play more than two or three weeks in a row, Lietzke gave it his all when he was on the course and proceeded to leave golf behind during the off weeks.
"Jack Nicklaus didn't practice a lot. I can give you a long list ... [and] Jack played a very limited schedule. If you are going to tell me that I could get a whole lot better if I played more tournaments, then you are going to have to face Jack Nicklaus and tell him that [he] would have been a better player if [he] had just played more golf," Lietzke said.
Nicklaus, a devoted family man, was one of Lietzke's idols when he first joined the PGA TOUR, so he thinks some of the Nicklausian philosophy rubbed off on him.
Once Lietzke himself got married and had children, he cut his schedule back even more. Even when his kids were school-aged and the purses got much bigger on the PGA TOUR in the 1990s, Lietzke played less than 20 weeks a year.
Lietzke recently bought a 630-acre ranch and has devoted much of his off-the-course time to fixing it up. That means driving off the wild hogs, alligators and beavers that dam the streams. He's got bales of hay to dispense of and a house building to oversee.
But, of course, he's still got some time for one of his favorite hobbies: fishing.
"The whole motivation behind buying this property was the three real big fishing lakes that are all on it. I'm really happy you brought [my off-season hobbies] up because I just caught the largest bass of my life on Monday this week before I flew here. I caught an 11-pound, 4-ounce largemouth bass out of one of those lakes. That's what has kept me busy."
Since he's not busy hitting balls, he will have plenty of time to get back to fishing and one of his other passions -- sports car collecting -- over the next few weeks. There is a slight chance, however, that Lietzke will soon alter those set-in-stone practice habits.
"It has crept into my head the last couple of years. Usually, for the last 30-something years, with just two days of practice my swing has been exactly what it was three weeks ago or 15 weeks ago. It took me only two days for my muscles to get back in tone," the 56-year-old Lietzke explained. "But for about a year and a half, it has taken me more than two days."
When he tried several times over the years to practice during his off weeks, his results weren't any different. Lietzke has no regrets about his choice to limit his practice time and, quite frankly, doesn't know if it would have made him any better. In fact, he thinks it would have burned him out quickly.
"If I had had the motivation and the work ethic of Tom Kite, I could have been unbelievable or maybe you would never have heard of me," he said. "Everybody has to make those decisions on their own."
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