This is just the latest post that you can file away in the “Why I Had To Delay The Video” folder and it’s not going to be the last.

In going over things, I discovered that I could prove – if I hadn’t already thoroughly done so using their own words and video clips – with the pivot drills how they weren’t doing what they said they were doing, and couldn’t have.

I may also have solved a personal mystery (for me) on why Mike Austin created a golf swing model with a shifting head on the back pivot.

We have the two pivot types that I’ve already laid out, which are the traditional high-heel lift Classic Golf Swing pivot, and then the one I have been calling the Late Hogan or lower-heel lift pivot action.

I have also stated that you can’t perform a Late Hogan pivot if you set up in the Classic Golf Swing method without something going wrong – namely, the head will shift to the trailing side on the back pivot, and nothing you do can prevent it.  The drills bear that out.

Now, Mike Dunaway performed the 3rd type of pivot that I’ve mentioned, a Shift & Post pivot action, not the Late Hogan, but the same thing applies – Dunaway couldn’t swing the way he did with a stable head on the back pivot because his setup was that of the Classic Golf Swing model.

It had to move:

This also applies to Mike Austin, who swung in a Shift & Post manner as well, and his pivot was similar to Dunaway’s even though Austin had a heel-lift where Dunaway didn’t.

Again, Austin was set up in a Classic Golf Swing and his head moved because of that:

This is why setup is key to performing an optimal swing or at least trying to swing in an optimal manner – how you set up will determine how successful you are in performing said swing.

If you want to swing like this, you will actually be able to using the pivot drills, but I can’t think of any reason on earth anyone would want to other than “because Austin and Dunaway did.”

I can think of only one great golfer in modern history whose head moved on the back pivot the man credited with being one of the first to master the golf swing with the modern steel-shafted golf clubs (the era that followed the end of the hickory shaft era), and that is Byron Nelson:

Now that I think about it, Mike Austin could very well have been influenced by Lord Byron when he was building his own swing model.

Austin notoriously shoe-horned every golf and other assorted celebrity he could into his mythical life story – he claimed that he used to hit balls at the East Lake Golf Club where Stewart Maiden (Bobby Jones’ instructor) worked and taught, he claimed to have given Ben Hogan the key to how to fade the ball, that he’d given tycoon Howard Hughes a private lesson, and so on.

They were all tall tales – he was born and raised in Alabama, he wasn’t born on Jersey Island in the English Channel and didn’t grow up in Atlanta where East Lake GC was, and he of course never gave Ben Hogan instruction after Hogan’s car wreck.

So in retrospect, this may solve the mystery of how Austin knew so much about how the human body moves and swings and yet built a model with a shifting head on the back pivot – perhaps because the best golfer on the planet during Austin’s younger years until 1946 was Byron Nelson – who had a shifting head on the back pivot.

Ben Hogan didn’t become a great winner until after Nelson retired in ’46, and he wouldn’t become a legend until the 50s when Austin would have already been in his 40s.

It’s possible he passed that on to Mike Dunaway as well.