Mike Celizic

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Charles Barkley’s godawful golf swing isn’t going to be rebuilt in six months.

Just ask Hank Haney, the custodian of the greatest golf swing in the world — you know, the one belonging to that Tiger fellow. As an experiment suggested by Woods himself and sponsored by The Golf Channel, which knows great programming when it’s dropped in its lap, Haney spent the past six months trying to fix what Woods called the world’s worst golf swing.

“With Charles’ game they’re looking for some light switch you turn, and that’s not realistic. That’s not the way life works,” Haney told a group of reporters in a conference call Thursday.

Barkley, who was also on the call, which was arranged to publicize the American Century Championship, the granddaddy of celebrity golf tournaments. The tournament, played at Lake Tahoe on July 17-19 and broadcast on NBC, is in its 20th year, and Barkley has been in the last 13 of them, usually finishing dead last. Despite the presence of scores of superstars from Michael Jordan to Mario Lemieux to John Elway, Barkley remains a top drawing card.

He’s still in no danger of winning, but after hitting thousands of golf balls over 12-hour days, Barkley’s swing is better.

Haney was impressed, saying, “I’ve never had a student that worked as hard as Charles did. The only one that worked that hard is Tiger. He’s improved a lot. He hits it really good on the range now lots of times. He has flashes of brilliance on the course. I know it’s in there. I know he can do it.”

But Barkley is far from cured. One swing will look almost normal, the next will start with a hesitation. One shot will soar majestically down the fairway. The next will skitter around like a squirrel with a string of firecrackers tied to its tail.

“I think I’m going to play better. I have an idea of what I’m trying to do,” Barkley said, before getting realistic adding, “Can I do it? No.”

Barkley is incredibly open and good-natured about his swing. It’s not easy standing on a tee in front of large numbers of fans and looking like a total spaz. But Lord Charles does it with humor and grace and boundless optimism that things will get better.

And even if it doesn’t, it’s all about perspective, which Barkley has in greater abundance than most superstars.

“I have a great, great life,” he said. “Do I suck at golf? Yeah. The other 99.9 percent of my life is pretty darned good.”

Barkley was a self-taught, 10-handicap or better golfer nearly 15 years ago when he developed a hitch in his swing. The hitch became the worst example of swingus interruptus ever seen. His scores went from the 70s and 80s to triple digits.

There are a lot of bad golf swings out there, and Woods may be pushing things a bit to call Barkley’s the worst. But he is right in one respect: It is doubtless the worst swing that is regularly displayed on network television and the worst swing ever unleashed by an elite athlete.

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By the time Haney got to him last November for what became known as “The Haney Project,” the swing began with a backswing that ended with the club being held vertically. Then when it came time to start the downswing, Barkley froze. As the club hung up above his right shoulder waiting for further instructions, Barkley’s head and upper body dropped a couple of feet, and for a moment, you thought he was going to bite the ball off the tee.

Then the downswing resumed, but to get clearance for the club, Barkley shot upright and pivoted on his back foot as his lead foot waved in the air. Remarkably, he frequently managed to actually hit the ball, flinging the club at it with his wrists and sending it on a low-altitude flight that made up for its abbreviated distance with a total lack of accuracy. If he was playing in a celebrity tournament, odds were he’d hit more spectators than fairways before the round was done.

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