Yes, the entire Modern Golf Swing world would follow him, it unfortunately seems.

I didn’t even go looking for this – I was watching all of this ridiculous modern swing instruction that tells everyone that it’s not proper mechanics to shift one’s hips on the down swing, and it eventually fell from the sky as these things do.

First, I don’t remember seeing this trend until recently, and I have been wondering how the “Squat & Dump” turned into the “Swipe & Turn,” but of course, I am pretty sure now of the source.

We know that Jim McLean advised against a healthy hip shift in his X-Factor:

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… going so far as to tell people to use a stick to stop the hips shifting “too far,” which evidently means not at all, but how did this appear suddenly in the Modern Golf Swing religion?

You’ll find this nonsense everywhere:

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And I mean everywhere:

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And it is absolute nonsense.  Look at this fellow right above, a complete reverse-pivot with the hips, so of course, he has nowhere to go to begin the down swing and his hips will swivel in place.

But it’s nonsense, and that pivot is rubbish.

Here’s why.

We know that proper mechanics have the hips shifting toward the target on the down swing for one simple reason – it’s biomechanics.

If you are standing with your legs apart, wider than shoulder-width, there is only one way to transfer your weight into the leading foot (the one closer to the target), and that is for the leading hip to shift over that foot – and there is your hip shift.

It’s not rocket science, but it is kinesiology.

The greatest major winner of all time did it:

Jack Nicklaus’ Hip Shift

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If you’re looking for Ben Hogan to have done something different, then you’ll be disappointed, because the man whose golf swing everyone is obsessed with mimicking certainly had a hip shift:

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Even Tiger Woods, before he absolutely wrecked his left knee with his Modern Golf Swing mechanics, had a hip shift to transition to his down swing.

I don’t know long ago this was, but it was when he was still able to pivot over his right side and then shift to the target on the down swing:

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If you look closely at Hogan’s swing gif. above Tiger’s sequence, and if you look closely enough, you can see that TW was trying to model that exact swing, but he wasn’t going to get there because of the planted leading foot.

His stance was far too wide for a planted leading foot, and he paid the price for it, but there it is, even TW had a healthy hip shift at one point before he had to left-bias his golf swing and narrow his stance (due to the now-unstable left knee).

So, what happened?

What happened, apparently, is that Tiger Woods had to change his golf swing model to accommodate all of the damage he’d done to his knees and lower back:

Tiger 2014

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… and he began to get ever more left-biased in his stance and pivot action.

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Fast-forward to the present, and Tiger can no longer put much weight or pressure on his right leg due to the 2021 car crash, and now he swings on one leg:

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… and you get the ridiculous comments like “perfect golf swing,” and remember – this is a man turning 50 this year, who can’t swing close to a shadow of what he was doing when he was winning all of those majors, and now swings standing on one leg.

Since his hey-day was 20 years ago, most of these people don’t even remember how Tiger Woods swung between the late 90s and 2010, so they look at how he’s swinging now and conclude, “this is a perfect golf swing,” when a 25 year old Tiger Woods would have looked at his today swing and laughed.

But because the Modern Golf Swing world is apparently populated by sheep, they are all now transitioning to swinging like a barely-mobile 50 year old with major left knee, lower back and lower right leg trauma:

“I’ve Got Two Working Legs, But I Only Need The One!”

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And here I thought that the reason everyone was stacking and tilting was to save their lower backs from the X-Factor torque that is necessary to turn the shoulders with a center or right-biased golf swing with a planted leading heel.

No, it seems to be that whatever Tiger Woods does, everyone else is going to copy, and I really don’t know what it’s going to take to restore sanity to the golf swing world.