Count Yogi, like his counterpart Mike Austin in the same era, was a great showman, no doubt – but anyone taking lessons from him wouldn’t have been able to learn a proper golf swing from him – especially the way he did it.

In this video I am going to link (the YouTube page doesn’t allow embedding), you can see the showman doing his thing, but there is something fundamentally wrong with how he claimed to teach the golf swing.

In the clip, he says at the beginning, more or less:

When I was a young man, people came from all over… and I practiced “Health,” not “Golf.”  I taught them XYZ, and they acquired perfect golf at the same time…

I laughed out loud at the “perfect golf” line, because I haven’t yet seen one person swinging the way Yogi did, just some very poor imitations which are fundamentally flawed in the same way he claimed to teach the swing.

Here’s the problem:

Count Yogi’s Swing Drill

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And my reaction immediately upon watching that clip:

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Did you see the glaring issue with what he said he taught his students?  And I agree with him, he certainly didn’t teach them a golf swing – tai chi, perhaps, but not a golf swing.

Such are the hazards of taking golf lessons from carnival barkers and trick-shot artists, I guess.

All I have to do is take this:

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We’re looking at an extremely left-biased position right off the bat, and then he performs what I assume to be the back swing pivot action, followed by the down swing into the balanced finish, right?

There’s only one problem, and it’s as bad as Mike Austin and Mike Dunaway teaching people to get into a center-balanced address stance and then to pivot by shifting the hips back and forth like a swinging bell with the head remaining stable – we both know from my analyses of both swingers that neither of them did anything of the sort.

They both shifted into the right-biased “Leaning A” position at the top of the back pivot, or they actually started from there, which makes all of their instruction pretty useless.

Great swings, terrible teachers.

Add Count Yogi to that list, because here he is actually swinging a club with side-by-side comparisons of what he taught:

Setup Bias

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I don’t know what to say, except that he taught the complete 180 of what he did – teaching an extremely left-biased setup and balance when he was in the “Leaning A” right bias and:

Top Of The Back Pivot

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… more of the same with the top position in his actual swing vs the drill he used to teach whatever it is he was teaching.

He’d have made a heck of a Stack & Tilt instructor, though!

The golf swing isn’t granola, vibes and capes, my friends, or fancy-sounding terms that mean nothing – there are mechanics involved that virtually every swinger of note did before the Modern Golf Swing era, and getting over the right side or trailing side at the top of the back pivot if you didn’t start there was one of them.

Even the great Byron Nelson aka Lord Byron, although he started from an iffy bias in his setup, made sure to get where he needed to be for the down swing into impact:

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So, Yogi would have taught people “health,” as he said, and they wouldn’t have been able to swing like him and would have gone away shaking their heads and smiling and saying, “No one can do it like Count Yogi.”

At least we know why.

And I don’t want to embarrass people but the Count Yogi Universe on YouTube is wild – like “did someone put magic mushrooms in my cereal?” kind of wild.

I say that because what they think they’re talking about with regards to Count Yogi’s swing are as far from what he did as New York is from Los Angeles, and if you go looking for people swinging like him or talking about how he did – don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As for me, I think I’ve had about enough of Count Yogi for now.