Coincidences are funny, aren’t they? During my daily foray through Instagram and YouTube looking at current players’ golf swings, I ran across Jake Knapp, a 30 year old PGA Tour pro who stands around 180 cm (a shade less than 6’0″), who is a pretty long driver.
I was looking at his action and thought to myself, “A lot of power there, but I doubt very consistent, with what I see,” and immediately went to his profile on PGATour.com, which confirmed what I thought.
I also saw that he was at -12 in the Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches Tour Event, and it didn’t even register to me that it was Thursday, making this a first-round score – Knapp shot 59!
Now, that is also funny, because it shows how talented these guys are, and that they can always catch lightning in a bottle for a round, tournament or even weeks at a time despite their swing flaws.
Knapp is all power, and I saw some silly things being said about his swing in comments, like his power comes from his making his arc wider (ridiculous, because the club shaft and the leading arm don’t stretch, so the club head will always be the same distance from the leading shoulder – if the arm is straight – no matter how one swings), or because he is swinging with his arms and hands and not his body… and other nonsense.
I will show you what gives Jake his power in two pictures:
In that first face-on pic, look at the vertical leading femur (thigh bone) and how big a shoulder turn he has created.
When you look down the line, that classic sign of a full hip turn where the trailing leg is completely or nearly straightened, combined with the leading leg flex to the extent that you can see a good patch of daylight between his knees – this is massive power about to be unleashed on the down swing.
Impact position is awesome, with the only issue being that leading foot instability through the bottom due to the nature of his swing, which I’ll discuss, but this is a powerful impact position:
When you get yourself locked into the top position and begin to shift that weight back to the leading foot, the action of that leading leg pulling back to the target will leverage the hands and club down with the leading arm, and this is where the Classic Golf Swing pivot gets its natural leveraging power.
Jake isn’t Classic however, he’s swinging in the Modern method of keeping the feet flat on the ground – swinging from a centered stance and squaring his leading foot allow him to create that much hip turn, along with a very flexible lower back that hyper-twists getting to the top that accounts for the huge shoulder turn.
These two things are troubling from a mechanically-correct view – the centered pivot makes Jake’s head move all over the place during the swing (consistency issues) and the actual pivot method places huge torque strain on the lower back.
As you will see with a glance at his stats, he is a long driver (7th last season in avg club speed and 24th in avg driving distance) but horrifically inconsistent with these mechanics – a shade over 52% fairways, ranking 162nd, and the other stats are shocking (186th in Total Driving Efficiency), for a player with 1 Tour win and having just booked a 59 score.
But as I say, these are the most talented players in the world and, even with dodgy mechanics, they can light it up when everything is firing on all cylinders.
The average person couldn’t hope to swing in this way, both due to the reduced mobility in the lower back as well as the hand-eye coordination required to pull this off swing after swing.
Unless you do this for a living and have all the time in the world to work on it, you’re not going to replicate this action successfully.
I would leave this swing action to Jake, however, and we’ll see where his back is in a few years.
Wishing him luck in the tournament!
WAX Golf 