You’ll all remember my saying that Jack Knapp was “so close” to having a perfect swing? 

Well, I haven’t looked at his swing in a year, and it was before I noticed that I had swung with the same pivot as the one Ben Hogan used late in his career, and something made me go back to what I’d posted about him and how easy he generated power.

Yes, he still “so close,” but not perfect – the planted heel isn’t so much a problem since he’s swinging with that pivot action that produces little to no leading heel lift, and he’s still super-torqueing his lower back (injury risk) and a squared leading foot (injury risk), so I don’t like to see these things.

However, he gets such a long back swing with that huge shoulder turn not so much because of the lower back torque and squared leading foot (yes, they allow him to get even more at the cost of increasing injury risk), but it’s that pivot action where he’s getting his power.

The second I looked at his swing again down the line, I could see it – if you watch for the action that I describe in “Basics,” you’ll see it:

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Lower body action, check.  Upper body motion with the shoulder action, check.

Take a look at this swing:

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When you look for exactly the actions that I describe in order to perform this pivot, you can see it as clear as day, can’t you?

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Look at the shoulders and the hips – there is your power source.

Jake has a steeper top position than you would expect from this, but remember that when I was performing the same pivot years ago, I was steeper at the top because I deliberately lifted my arms at the top of the back swing:

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… and that’s all Jake is doing – you can disconnect the arms from the pivot to get them higher, but you’ll also recall that for his power, Jake’s accuracy off the tee is awful.

I said back then:

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.

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I would bet you that if Jake were swinging with the MCS Golf Swing model using the “Late Hogan” pivot aka the Mike Dunaway pivot, he’d be just as long if not longer, with much better ball-striking metrics.

Let’s just hope that lower back holds out, because that’s a lot of twist there, and you hate to see it catch up to them..