Game versus Sport, the eternal balancing act of golf, dictates that even mechanically-iffy swings can be successful given good impact conditions and an overall great short game.

But there is a reason you don’t see anyone anywhere swinging like Moe Norman, the man who could hit the ball practically dead straight – and we’re talking so little side-spin that the first time Moe was ever analyzed on a launch monitor, it was thought to be malfunctioning.

So, why wouldn’t you swing like Moe?

Because, for one, Moe was a very, very short hitter.  Even in his video from the mid-90’s, “Pipeline Moe,” he is blissfully bashing balls with a stainless steel driver and while the sound is a pure as a hammer hitting an anvil, he tells his awed observers that one drive went “250 yards.”

Granted he was a senior by then, but he wasn’t John Daly, not even close, ever.

And, like Ben Hogan, Moe had to hit balls virtually all day, every day, to be able to do what he did with a ball. Which was to hit it dead straight, or with a fade or draw, directly to and nearly within the inch of his targets.

Not very efficient at the end of the day.

So, we know that virtually anyone can play golf if they can create good enough impact conditions, but do you really see people in other sports saying, such as in track & field, “Well, you know, there are a million ways you can jump over a bar or run the hurdles, so it doesn’t really matter what technique they’re using as long as they win…”

That would get you shown out of any other sports’ training facilities, because training facilities are all about training… with proper technique!

The Perfect Technique

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Especially today, golf is a distance game.  You can drive it long and sideways and still have an advantage over guys hitting it in the fairway, but with very short distances.

Bryson DeChambeau has put that issue to rest forever, I’d imagine.

Now, you don’t want to actually swing like Bryson if you value your physical well-being, but golf is reaching a place where players are only going to be able to compete by hitting it long, and many of them will fall by the wayside either for periods of time or permanently, ending their careers, because of wholly preventable injuries caused by how they swing.

So, if you’re just a pleasure golfer who enjoys plunking it down the fairway 250 yards, you’re likely not my target audience here, because you don’t want nor crave the maximum distance you can hit balls with very little risk of injury.

If you’re looking for more distance however, or to reduce the chances of an injury (or further injury, having already suffered one or more), or to straighten out your already pretty long ball, or to gain consistency in your ball-striking – if any one or more of these issues relate to you, then you’re in the correct place after all, because you will be able to do all of the above simply by improving your technique.

Now, you will never have “perfect technique,” because that would require a level of performance that only a machine like the Iron Byron up above can accomplish.

However, you can perform extraordinarily well for a human, with optimal technique and requisite talent.

I am not Usain Bolt, nor will anyone ever mistake me for him when I run, but was able to absolutely blow away my own prior self and many formerly faster competitors after joining a track & field club one autumn and training through the next spring.

Given more talent, I’d have done even better, but it all came down to technique over talent until I ran into runners who had both in spades.

With the golf swing, you want a swing model that lets you swing back and then down and through to the finish without:

• any places where a flaw in your setup or technique make you perform compensations or manipulations to get through impact,
• any dangerous technical flaws that put you at risk of injury, the higher the chance the faster you swing and,
• with the maximum degree of performance, meaning you combine power, speed and distance with accuracy and consistency.

It’s really that simple.

Even the motion should be simple – if you think I’ve spent 15 years plus working on the golf swing and modeling in order to make it complicated, then you’d be very mistaken.

I’ve spent this much time (and I’ll admit it’s taken longer than I anticipated or feel should have taken, due to my own personal foibles interfering with my research and personal modeling) because I’m looking for that most basic of techniques, which is what everyone else calls “optimal.”

There is no simpler way to perform a motion than in the optimal way, and that goes for throwing, walking, running, jumping, and swinging an object.

It should be so simple that one could take a child (preferably one who has participated in sports so that they are receptive to being taught athletic motion) and teach them the entire swing in a morning or afternoon.

I would think that in three days, you could have someone swinging a wedge, mid-iron and driver very competently, taking one day for each club and of course letting all the other clubs fall into place between wedge and driver.

So, it takes a long time to break things down to their most basic elements, but the great thing, once that model has been established and proven, it will be very basic and very quick on the uptake – depending of course upon the skill level of the person teaching the motion.

Skill level would mean, to me, both the proficiency in performing the motion and in explaining it so that it’s understood.

What’s taken so long is finding the optimal setup, not just a good or great one.  I’ve inched closer to it over the past months, and looking at the setup part of the “E = MCS” swing video from 2017, I believe I’ve found the culprit in the setup that made it very good but not optimal.

Once I’ve settled on the setup and have borne it out with the expected results, I know I’ll be able to explain the setup and swing motion very simply, even more simply than the EMCS videos thus far.