Alright, WAX Nation – I’ve been thinking about the pivot exercise for a couple of days, because I made a rather bold statement that if one can’t learn a proper pivot from this exercise, perhaps golf wasn’t for one.
I immediately came up hard against that claim when I took my college aged kids and tried to prove that assertion with them – they literally brain-glitched when trying to follow along with me.
I am waiting to see if I have recovered enough from my Frozen Shoulder to shoot new video to include in my June video project, but the good news is that I really don’t have to.
I have swings in my archive where I performed the pivot action exactly the way I would today, with the exception that I was swinging left-dominant at the time (which I alone can probably spot apart from a neutral swing action since it’s my own swing action), and I had a stronger grip than I would use today, but the pivot is the pivot.
I don’t know quite how to say this, WAX Nation, so I’ll just get on with it.
While I’m still in the model stage and waiting to be be swing-fit for the proof, but it’s kind of that situation, “when you know, you know.”
On how I know, in a bit.
First…
The most common thing I see when I watch a golf “guru” trying to sell their particular argument or swing mechanics is the Strawman Fallacy.
I see it time and time again, and this is something you can watch for, to amuse yourself, if you happen to watch someone attacking something as “wrong,” and how their way is better or the correct one.
As the title states, there are Classic Golf Swings and there are Classic Golf Swings, when you are talking about models and technical acuity.
As you all know, I only ever really talk about swing mechanics here on the blog, with occasional side topics, but mostly swing mechanics.
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.
I’ve had the Count Yogi DVD since I was sent the Mike Austin and Mike Dunaway videos many years back by a now-departed WAX Nation citizen who knew MA, but I’ve never really discussed his golf swing because it was, well, very peculiar.
Wouldn’t you know that, the minute I decided to take another look at Count Yogi, I immediately noticed that he has a Dunaway-style pivot, the Shift & Post action.
Looking through some more Mike Austin and Mike Dunaway swing clips, I ran across two swings from Mike Austin sometime in the 80s (he suffered a stroke in 1989 which partially paralyzed him, so it was before that year), and you won’t believe what you’ll see when you look at his pivot action then.
I hadn’t seen these swings in over ten years, because although I continued to look at Mike Dunaway’s swing up until now, I would make mention of Austin after 2013 but didn’t really look back on his library of swings – until this spring.
In looking through my Mike Dunaway archives, I found an iron swing from his video “World’s Best Driver,” and one of his swings gives you the idea of how he’d have looked swinging with no head shift on the back pivot.
I also found an iron swing from the rear with him shifting into a bias before swinging, which then stabilized the head on the back pivot.
Why he didn’t just set up like this to begin with, I’ll never know.
There is a peculiar thing repeating itself with Mike Dunaway similar to Moe Norman when I looked into their particular swing models.
Moe Norman, you see, became famous for his superhuman accuracy long before he developed the short half-swing for which he is now remembered.
WAX Golf 