For those of you who have grown accustomed to the “throw release” concept of the power or trailing arm action, here’s one for you in order to really get the Mike Dunaway in your down swing – think “straight down” with your throw.
You all know that I’ve been pursuing Dunaway’s down swing action for my own particular MCS Golf Swing model, and let’s keep in mind that there can be many variations of the MCS swing action.
Not much to say today as I pretty much laid it out in yesterday’s posting, so here is the Driver swing shown from the same two angles.
This is as extreme as I can go, swinging with the right arm and hand only with the hips & legs, but in doing so, I also proved that the swing is indeed a whole-boy motion.
I’ve told you all about the challenges of swinging right-handed while being left-handed, the biggest one for me being the ability to swing with a right-dominant motion.
Today was an auspicious day for me, as I finally got a years-long flaw in my setup fixed this week, and right after that – bang – I was able to make right-dominant swings.
I had a hunch, I wrote a couple of weeks back, about something I had been looking at 12 years back with regards to the relationship between the back pivot and the down swing involving the concepts of “push” and “pull.”
Seems I was right on the money back then, and it took looking at Mike Dunaway’s “Peace River” video demonstration of his own back pivot concept to spur me to check it out once more.
That sounds very counter-intuitive, I know, and it’s a little like the conundrum of the chicken versus the egg, but it’s been my experience.
Do you want to know why so few people understand or even get Ben Hogan’s pivot action?
I can tell that I’m getting closer because my down swing plane is shallowing out even more, and I can show some visual proof in the form of one of my better swings last year vs the last time I was at the range.
I went from a very steep plane that appeared at some point in my swing research years, to a fairly neutral plane, to one that is actually getting “under” the plane that is my shaft angle at impact.
Have you noticed that so many athletes who excel or who have excelled in other sports tend to have much more athletic-looking swings than the ones who play the game for a living?
I saw a swing of Tony Romo’s on the PGA Tour’s Twitter feed, and there is some good stuff to look at there.
I sometimes struggle with finding ways to prove things about Mike Dunaway, because he never played competitive golf and his long drive days (of the sort that inspired Art Sellinger, founder of Long Drivers Of America) were long before the advent of YouTube.
Therefore, you don’t see a lot of “proof” of how powerful and long Dunaway was other than things like LDOA naming him the Father of Modern Long Drive and awarding him a lifetime achievement prize for his pioneering work.
Responding to longtime WAX Nation citizen Goose’s comment yesterday on the concept, here is the “Figure 7” that Mike Austin and Mike Dunaway used to explain the nature of the leading arm and leading side leverage.
I have said before that, even after I stopped trying to model the MCS Golf Swing after Mike Austin’s model, that there is still probably 90% commonality between his and Dunaway’s and the MCS models.
I’ve been talking about the difference between a “flippy” or “casting” release and a proper, powerful and mechanically-correct release action.
Let’s take a look at the late great Mike Dunaway, the “Father of Modern Long Drive,” demonstrate and and explain what I’ve been saying about the release action, more specifically with the left or leading head release.
