I caught sight of a great Sam Snead swing on Twitter today, and I have to tell you all, I could watch this man swing all day long and some nights to boot.
I’d say that Sam Snead has the best self-taught swing of all time. It would be hard to argue, because I would actually rate his swing as on par with Jack Nicklaus’ swing, just that Nicklaus had a better over-all game to go with the swing.
File this under “it was going to happen sooner or later,” although I’m a little surprised by how quickly it has occurred – in his first season as a pro and at age 23, Cameron Champ has WD’d from the Players Championship with a back injury.
I was following his progress yesterday during the second round to see if he could improve on his 78 from Thursday when I glanced at the Leaderboard shortly after posting my piece, to see a WD beside his name.
Injury woes are hitting the usual suspects who have major issues with their swings when it comes to the Modern Golf way of doing it.
First, of course, no one can have missed Tiger Woods and his “strained neck,” which is fairly odd – to be suffering from a strained neck for weeks, that is.
I’m sure it’s nothing.
Actually, I don’t have a clue what is going on with Tiger Woods’ latest withdrawal from an event due to an injury, but this is different – I can’t remember the last time he withdrew from a scheduled event before hitting his 1st tee shot.
This is the thing that really aggravates me whenever I hear about a kinesiology or biomechanics specialist who is working in the field of golf – they are always looking at golfers’ swings and telling you what the swinger is doing, but they never tell you what the golfer should be doing better or what the optimal mechanical action is or should be.
Thanks to David D. for sending this to me – more bad news for the Modern Golf Swing industry, as it seems more medical researchers are catching up with the snake-oil and bad science of restricted-hip back-torquing.
Well, I had just told Mr. McJohn in a comment yesterday not to hold his breath on any major golf publications or channels discussing the results of the so-called “X-Factor” study we read about in the BBC…
And lookie here, friends – Golf Digest through GolfWorld courtesy of Joe Beall has just published a piece online doing exactly that:
Thanks to everyone who emailed/messaged about the following news piece, as I hadn’t yet seen it when I began getting your forwards! Once again, WAX Golf readers are on the ball.
While the title actually says, “X-Factor Golf Swing Linked To Back Pain,” you can’t have pain without damage, and if you’re damaging your back doing something repeatedly over a period of years – you’re going to destroy it.
If you are a Tiger Woods fan, better to skip this posting, because watching golf today had me shaking my head.
By now, I’ve probably said it a million times – how does Tiger Woods wonder why he’s always hitting the ball left when he has a “swing left” move and also takes the club back with a closed face?
If I’ve learned anything about models and motion in my near-14 years of research and analysis on the golf swing, it’s that the simpler, the better, with one caveat – retaining mechanical soundness or correctness.
Which means, the less moving parts you have in the model, the better it will function, until you remove too much and make it mechanically-unsound.
