Golf: Swing change fillip for Turner

Greg Turner's strong finish in the Scandinavian Masters this week was more important than just a timely return to form for the New Zealand golfer.

Turner's last-round 66 in Sweden - the best round of the day - elbowed him into a share of 11th place behind England's Lee Westwood, the winner. Fellow New Zealander Michael Campbell was runner-up, his second such placing of the European season after a similar finish in the English Open.

Turner will line up in tomorrow's British Masters, an event he won three years ago.

The Scandinavian outcome confirmed Turner's decision to join Campbell in next week's United States PGA Championship in Louisville, Kentucky.

"If it had not been for this [Scandinavian] result, I was not going to the PGA," he said.

Turner had struggled before Sweden, finishing near the tail in the Irish Open and then missing the cut in his next two events, the European Open and Loch Lomond Invitational.

He forfeited the opportunity to play in the Millennium Open at St Andrews when he failed to qualify, and in the Dutch Open was a distant 50th behind Australian Stephen Leaney, who captured his second Dutch title.

Intensive training sessions with Denis Pugh, his coach, finally began to pay dividends in Sweden.

"The main change to my game has to do with the back-swing plane. It was just too steep, so we have flattened that off by what seems about 30 degrees," Turner said.

"It's a pretty major positional and feel change and it's also changed the way the rest of my body works, so it has been a major shift but I needed to do it.

"It was good then to have that nice last round in Sweden to show me that it works.

"It doesn't do your game good if you suffer bad patches in form like I did getting into these mechanical problems, so if you come through it you are better off for it, but the trick is to get through.

"When you do fix the mental problems you then have to repair the mental scars."

- NZPA