Those of you who were around between 2009-13 will remember that I left the Mike Austin school of golf swing around early 2013 after deciding that my golf swing wasn’t working the way I wanted it to, and that I had grown disenchanted with the notion that Austin was infallible and had the “perfect” golf swing model.

I like to question things, always have, and I have never accepted “you’re not allowed to question this” as a valid answer to a question.

People question me all the time in my comments section, or disagree with something I have said, and I give them my response in good faith – running away from a question or comment sort of confirms that there is something wrong with what you’re presenting.

So, I couldn’t articulate fully why I lost faith in the school, because I had yet to start building what eventually became the MCS Classic Golf Swing model with the “Leaning A” setup (that would come in the winter of 2014-15), but I knew something was off in the whole thing.

Going through old videos in my archive as I like to do, I came across my Mike Austin folder and, sure enough, I wasn’t watching one of the clips for more than a minute when I saw instantly what I’ve been saying lately – the model didn’t match what Austin himself did in his swing.

Here is a short gif. I made out of the clip where he is at the Studio City Driving Range describing the stationary head and the “ringing the bell” motion the hips make on the back pivot and down swing, and for those of you unfamiliar with the “ringing the bell” term, Austin described the swing as the hips shifting back and forth while the head remained in place, like a ringing bell:

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But that’s not how he swung.

That’s not even close to how he swung. What you’re seeing above is a reverse-pivot action where the weight either moves or stays over the leading foot, which is the Stack & Tilt model.

He (and I went over this a couple of weeks back) either set up with a rightward “Leaning A” and shifted to his right, or he set up in a centered bias and then shifted even more to his right, both of which times were to set himself up in the proper position from which to swing down from the top to the “Leaning A” impact position.

The problem with this is that he insisted that the model was built with a centered bias and that the head didn’t move on the back pivot – he even said that if the hips turned instead of shifting, the head would sway, and that his didn’t.

A pretty bold statement when your swing goes like this:

Mike Austin – Studio City Driving Range

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His head didn’t just move, it changed area codes on the back pivot.

And it’s not because of his advancing age and lack of flexibility because I can show you one at a much younger age:

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OK, so the head moved – so did Mike Dunaway’s right?

Sure – except they both insisted that the head didn’t move, as Dunaway claimed in the “Austinology” video clip I showed you from YouTube.

So I spent about three years studying and blogging about Mike Austin’s swing, and my first two videos ever on the golf swing were my attempt to decipher and translate his swing model and actual golf swing, but I was stuck where everyone else gets stuck trying to explain the Austin swing model – in between what he said and what he actually did.

As I’ve said, his theoretical model, if he had had the “Leaning A” setup with the same action he described but with a stable head, during the back pivot and down swing, would have been pretty much the optimal Classic Golf Swing action.

Unfortunately, he didn’t.