I really don’t know what has happened with Phil Mickelson’s golf swing.
He was one of the few players in the ’90s-’10s who had a Classic Golf Swing action, and then he began to tinker with planted-heel stuff, and even drank the Kool-Aid with the idiotic Flying Foot cult at one point.
Now, I just don’t know how a player who had such a solid golf swing looks… just awful.
Thanks to WAX Golf denizen MC for forwarding the following golf article.
One of the things that has bothered me in the years I’ve been blogging on the golf swing has been the overwhelming silence from the Classic Golf Swing era greats (those still with us) on the Modern Golf Swing.
Sure, Jack Nicklaus trashed the idea of the X-Factor swing in his book “Golf My Way” back in 1974, but that’s 50 years ago.
This video has over 300K views, so I’m sure there are a lot of confused golfers out there wondering why they’re blocking their ball dead right, banana-slicing it across three different fairways or pulling it clear out of the golf course.
Let me put this out there right now – I have played baseball, and I have played golf, and I struggled for so many years trying to swing a golf club properly because I had played baseball first.
One thing I have noticed with the Modern Golf Swing crowd is that they are either incredibly disingenuous when discussing proper swing fundamentals or incredibly dense.
I don’t believe so many people can be this stupid, so I have to conclude that there is a great deal of dishonesty required to be a Modern Golf Swing proponent.
We may be approaching Peak Internet with regards to idiotic golf “instruction,” and I really feel for innocent dupes of these charlatans if we’re not.
I feel it’s too harsh to blame people who follow them and go on to injure themselves, but really, did you ever find anything of worth online that you got absolutely free?
You get what you paid for, usually – I give out free advice but it’s mostly limited to telling people what not to do, given the current state of golf instruction.
The video clip I just watched should be titled “How to complicate a golf swing beyond belief and ensure years of expensive lessons,” because that’s all I can see in it.
I know that everyone thinks that this is the way Ben Hogan swung, but once again, no one pays attention to what he was doing, and so you get people who have no business being golf swing instructors because what they’re teaching is ridiculous and harmful.
I made a little swing gif. that easily shows how a mechanically-correct golf swing creates effortless leverage where the Modern Golf Swing fails miserably.
Swingers today are being taught the ridiculous reverse-pivot where the weight never really leaves the leading foot, followed by a “drop” with the arms and finally the turn and swipe action through the bottom.
Those of you who were around last winter will remember that I had been conducting research on the right-dominant swing model and that I had concluded around that time that I had already figured out the optimal golf swing model.
It is an ironic situation in which one may find oneself when realizing that one had actually accomplished one’s mission but lacked the knowledge or expertise at the time to actually recognize the accomplishment.
The answer is very simple – I don’t actually “squat” in my swing, as I’ve said for a long time that this position is merely a snapshot in a down swing where the weight is transferring from the trailing to the leading side.
It is useful to show positions in a swing, but useless to try to teach “swing by position,” because it occurs so quickly.
I didn’t even notice something in the text from Ben Hogan’s book until after I had already published my post yesterday, but as I was glancing over it, a word in that selected excerpt fairly leaped off the screen – I was amazed I hadn’t noticed it before.
Once again, Ben Hogan absolutely muddled something up in his description of the pivot, but even if he did, I have questions to ask of the Modern Golf Swing people trying to recreate his swing.
WAX Golf 