I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable New Year – but I’ve just watched a Youtube video from a channel that purports to be about “Athletic Motion” in the golf swing – and all they’re doing is superimposing a modern pro swing model onto a screen and comparing it to the struggling student’s action.

At this point, I switched the video off in disgust and said aloud to no one but myself, “Golf is the ONLY sport…!!!”

I didn’t even finish the lament, because there are so many ways in which one could finish that exclamation.

If you want a list that I could compile right this moment as I sit hunched over my keyboard (I swear I just walked to the computer and sat down after switching off the video, believe me or don’t), here we go in real time:

Golf Is The ONLY Sport:

• in which you have television analysts praising unsound mechanics rather than people who actually know, understand and can explain proper mechanics,
• in which you have a virtual wasteland in amateur, junior and professional levels of the sport when it comes to mechanically-sound techniqe,
• where you can have “gurus” teaching horrific, back-breaking and athletically absurd swing models and making millions doing it (I would put any modern golf instructor of note in this category),
• where the mechanically-sound principles in the swings of yesteryear have been jettisoned in favor of increasingly harmful junk methods, while ALL other sports have achieved and are now maintaining proper techniques for the requisite motion,
• where the best players in the world are using the same training-wheel equipment that was designed to try to assist the most hackish weekend player in getting the ball from one spot to another (which is like having pro basketball players going at it with the smaller, junior-sized basketballs and 8-foot rims found in grade school gyms),
• in which the duration of viability (let’s say the “window of playing years) is actually declining generation after generation instead of increasing – pros used to play from the age they were taught the game all the way well into their sixties and even seventies on the Senior Tour, and we’re now into the age where pros won’t even be able to still play golf into their late 40’s never mind the Champions Tour,
• in which if you do swing the way the industry dictates, you will actually cause physical and likely permanent injury to yourself, while the industry shrugs and says, “Hey, swinging properly is going to damage your body.”

If you want to know why Phil Mickelson is now the record-holder for the oldest major champion in professional golf, it’s because (in my worthless opinion) he has swung with the Classic Golf Swing model for most of his career (there were a few foolish experiments with restricting his hip turn and leading heel lift), so he hasn’t ground his body down to a nub swinging a golf club.

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In that regard, he was much better suited to win a major at the age of 50 than he might have been 40 years ago playing against a field who were all swinging in the mechanically-sound model of the Classic Golf Swing.

Tiger Woods’ last major win was a fluke (again, my opinion) after he’d gone 11 years without (largely due to his not being able to even play proper golf for most of that time due to his physical ailments), and the only reason he was able to do that, again falls to the Modern Golf Swing.

“How’s that, DJ?” you immediately ask, pouncing on a sure contradiction.

“Because,” I respond, “TW is the greatest ever golfer to play with the Modern Golf Swing and likely will remain so, due to his obsession with practicing and commitment to the grind of sacrificing one’s body upon the altar of Modern Golf.  You will likely never again see the combination of talent, athleticism, determination and absolute stubborn mule-headedness that Tiger brought to playing golf and wrecking one’s body with mechanically-unsound model after mechanically-unsound model.

“So, even with half a body, Tiger was able to squeeze one more major victory against a field in which virtually everyone else was swinging as well with damaging, hard to maintain Modern Golf Swing models.”

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Tiger Woods’ career was shortened by all of the damage he has visited upon his body long before the devastating car wreck that basically ended his playing career outside of novelty cameos, but nearly everyone else is swinging in the same idiotic fashion (apologies, but who continues to do something that is causing permanent damage to one’s body knowing they are doing so, when a mechanically-sound model exists to be tried), so if he can hobble from tee to green, he can actually compete – due to modern equipment.

Trust me, if Tiger had been taught the same Modern Golf Swings he’s used during his career in, say, the generation before the Modern Golf Swing took root in the game, he’d likely have flamed out in his 20’s or early 30’s and been passed by – you would not have seen him playing into his late 30’s and early 40’s swinging a persimmon driver and forged blade irons with balata balls.

He would have completely wrecked himself doing so, much more quickly than he did playing modern equipment as a pro.

If you don’t believe me, I offer you one Fred Couples, one of the first players in the Modern fixed-foot swinging method, who injured his back at the age of 34 right around the time golf was transitioning to stainless steel drivers.

Straight out of his Wiki page:

Since March 1994,^[16] back injuries have affected Couples’s career.^[17] His swing features an extreme shoulder turn at the top, which, combined with the fact that he keeps his left foot flat on the ground throughout the backswing, puts a lot of pressure on his lower back. However, with an abbreviated schedule, Couples is still one of the best players on Tour.

Funny enough, you could change the name to Tiger Woods and that above excerpt would be indistinguishable from what has been Tiger’s career since 2013 – he has won exactly 2 official Tour events since then.

So here we are, friends – a new year is upon us, and the game of golf has never been in worse shape.

Let’s see if we can change that in the next 12 months, or if we can’t save the game, perhaps a few backs and sundry body parts?

More to come.