For all of the analysis that has gone into Jack Nicklaus’ golf swing – that is, before the Modern Golf Swing madness took over the instruction world and all of the swings from Bobby Jones’ to Nicklaus’ disappeared forever from The Golf Channel – the engine driving his power was not properly looked into.

You hear about his power fade and how Nicklaus had the “flying elbow,” but what about his actual pivot action?

I’ve heard things like “very upright back swing,” as if it was contrary to proper mechanics, but the swing is a vertical action, so once again, something Nicklaus did that was considered “different” was actually the way to swing a club.

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I created a gif. sometime back where I attempted to visually convey the method of swinging around the C7 vertebra (something Jack did superbly) as if suspended from a structure:

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… and the taller one stands, the better one is able to pivot in this manner.

I’ve also shown that all of the Classic greats swung with a relaxed, upright stance as well:

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… and from there, you could employ the pivot action that Nicklaus used to generate all of that power using his hips and legs:

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Those of you who are around during my days looking at Mike Austin’s and Dunaway’s swings (circa 2010-13) will remember the phrase that I coined at the time to describe the transition from the top as “the left foot stomp,” assuming of course the swing is being performed right-handed.

I will stand on my critique of Nicklaus’ stance being too wide in this particular swing model but virtually everything else about his stance and swing being exactly how you’d want to go about it.

If you look at Jack’s left side during the pivot and transition, you will see that vigorous leg action taking it back as well as that “left foot stomp” action to leverage the swing:

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This pivot action is so good, let me tell you – if Jack had narrowed that stance to an optimal width, in the style of the MCS model:

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… it’s possible that he would have won every tournament in which he played while using this particular swing.

In fact, if you doubt my assertion, look at how Jack describes the setup should be done at the end of his Tour days, compared to my adjustment of his 1960s setup:

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The lesson to take from Jack’s 1960s swing is in the pivot action – there was another player a few years back who, while not a Jack Nicklaus clone, used the same vigorous hip & leg action to drive the ball impossible distances.

You may remember Bubba Watson:

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If you wonder why I’m mentioning this now, it’s because I’ve just changed my pivot action to more emulate Jack’s, and it came about during my last session at Tracer Golf this week.

I’ve been working on the shift-and-post swing model but I switched back over to the standard MCS Classic Golf Swing for a change, and discovered that working on the shift-and-post enabled me to make a tighter back-swing pivot with the arms.

I took this home with me to analyze and noticed that it required an increased hip and leg action from what I’d been doing before to really get that tighter action to work.

Over the past couple of days, I confirmed that I have not only improved my execution of the MCS Classic Swing model, the change I made to my pivot action increased my power – the swing aid confirmed that!

So, I’m going to let this ferment for a day or two more while I work on the swing aid, and then back to get some numbers and video to see how things look now with my Classic Swing.

More to come!