BY JASON KERKMANS

No golfer is as bad as his worst swings. Of course, nobody swings quite like Charles Barkley. When Hank Haney and The Golf Channel set out to fix what has become the most notorious swing in the world, some might have said it was mission impossible. But for every golfer who’s ever shanked a tee shot into a cart barn, here’s hoping it works.

It hurts to watch. The pain—you feel it in your shoulders first—is so acute, you could swear that what you’re feeling is the same excruciating tension he’s experiencing. Then, after the hesitations, he makes contact and the ache moves to your gut. Doubts enter your mind as if this might be a joke, but you’ve seen it too many times before, and you know there is nothing comedic about Charles Barkley’s golf swing. Before long, like an onlooker to the proverbial train wreck, you watch it again on YouTube, or during one of the few televised celebrity tournaments Barkley gets talked into playing each year, and you commiserate with him all over again.

In 2008, Barkley was down to three rounds of golf. That’s it. For the entire year—despite being a retired NBA Hall-of-Famer with a Scottsdale home across from a golf course and plenty of five-hour blocks of time on his hands—Barkley played just three times. And all three rounds were for charity golf tournaments in which he didn’t really want to play to begin with. But he showed up each time because friends like Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky asked him to help them raise money for a good cause.

That’s what his swing does; it raises money. Seeing Barkley’s infamous swing has become as big—or bigger—of a draw as getting a picture with some of the other players at the charity tournaments, so it’s no wonder that they want Barkley to show up. But, what’s in it for him?

Since it’s not the satisfaction of hitting good shots in front of admiring crowds that got him to the first tee each time, it must just be that Barkley is one hell of a good friend. Why else would he put himself through the paces of a game he no longer can stand playing? Why else would he choose to approach any golf ball sitting on a tee, when he knows full well that he subsequently becomes terrified to the point that his movements look more like those of a broken and rusted-out machine? And why does he play golf in front of hundreds of people live, and hundreds of thousands more watching on TV, when he no longer even plays just for fun? As Barkley says, “Playing golf on TV doesn’t make it any easier to suck.”

But that may not be something Barkley has to worry about for too much longer. Over the winter, he took the first step in getting his game back, and he did it all in front of the cameras—The Golf Channel’s “Project Barkley” debuts March 2nd. For the show, The Golf Channel enlisted Hank Haney, the swing coach of Barkley’s good friend Tiger Woods, to do what many, including both Haney and Barkley, thought could only improve matters.

“It could only get better,” Haney admits of Barkley’s swing. So, the duo met for two- and three-day sessions every few weeks and began the process of remaking what Haney describes as ‘the most notorious swing in the world.’

“When we started,” Haney says, preparing to do his best Barkley imitation, “Charles told me that he had heard people say he has the worst swing in the world, but that, ‘they couldn’t have seen everyone in the world…there’s got to be someone worse than me,’ so now I just say it’s the most notable swing.”

Whatever they want to call it, a swing like that doesn’t get fixed easily. Haney knew that much going in. His only worry was whether or not Barkley would have the work ethic to do what it would take to improve.

Fortunately, Barkley’s work ethic showed up in stark contrast to the state of his swing. Some days he’d hit 1,200 balls on the range while Haney watched. In less than two months, Barkley had even lost 40 pounds as he also worked on improved his fitness, flexibility and conditioning. And it didn’t take long for Haney to admit, “I’ve never had a student work as hard as Charles does.” As Barkley continued working, the swing improvements would follow.

It also helped that they didn’t have to worry about his entire game. Barkley, who once shot in the low 80s, didn’t need any help around the greens. In fact, Haney proclaims that Barkley has a low-handicap short game and that he putts as if he’s a scratch golfer. But even with his focus set on just one component, Barkley’s full swing off the tee, Haney can’t say there was an easy fix.

“He’s a project,” the coach says before pausing. “That’s for sure.” Plus, trying to get better at golf is a tough enough task at the anonymous ends of driving ranges, much less in front of television cameras. The scary part is that Haney doesn’t see much different between Barkley’s notorious swing and that of most amateurs. “The most common mistake people make is they take it back low and inside, and then they are steep as they come down.”

That is exactly what Barkley did to the extreme. He would bring the club so far inside and lower his head so drastically that Haney’s first thought upon seeing it was that if Barkley didn’t hesitate, there would be no way he could even make contact with the ball. But whereas most viewers see the hesitation and the jerking stop-and-go to Barkley’s swing, Haney watched the shape of the swing and set about fixing that. “It was my hope,” Haney says, “that if we worked on the swing plane, the hesitation would go away on its own.”

So it was that on December 15, 2008, in front of TNT’s “Inside the NBA” cameras, with Hank Haney once again behind him, that Barkley gave us our first chance to see if Haney’s work was paying off. Though they had not finished working on his swing or finished filming the show, the new Barkley was about to make his national television debut.

As Barkley brought back the club head that night, his torso uncharacteristically loose, it’s very possible that Haney doubted whether taking this client was a good idea. Maybe he even thought for a moment of Woods, who joked to him early on that he was putting his entire reputation as a swing coach on the line when he set out to fix Barkley.

When Barkley reached the apex of his surprisingly smooth backswing, he too might have felt a small sense of terror, knowing the cameras were on him and what was about to take place would either be the reintroduction of his sideshow swing or the introduction of a new golfer altogether.

“Realistically, I’m the only person who has anything to lose with this,” Barkley says. But that’s only partially true. No one will doubt Haney’s ability if he can’t fix what looked to be a hopeless cause. The Golf Channel has what could be the makings of its first show that attracts a wide audience of sports fans, as opposed to just golf fans. And if his downswing were to stop abruptly, the golf world will continue to benefit—perhaps more so than ever—from Barkley’s tragic tee box performances.

But Barkley is wrong when he thinks he’s the only one with anything to lose. We will continue to see our swing flaws in his, and if Haney’s mission proves impossible, we will be the ones who continue to feel his pain.

As we watched him on TNT in December, his new downswing moving forward as smoothly as his new backswing had promised, we exhaled. Sure, it wasn’t a swing Haney will use as a model for future students. But, it just might be his best coaching job yet…and one we can all take some comfort in. For now, our mission looks more possible than ever.

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