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 have a driver swing shown down the line, again with the Late Hogan Pivot I was performing back in the summer of 2022, and it will look slightly different from this angle when I get new video, I’m predicting.
The differences will probably manifest, from the work I’ve been doing on this model, in a more vertical arm position in the setup and a flatter leading arm plane at the top of the back pivot.
I have a face-on view of one of my Late Hogan pivot swings from 2022, and I think I’m going to look a good deal different swinging in this model when I get back into things.
Incidentally, I still haven’t been to hit balls – I felt some soreness in the shoulder joint and surrounding muscles Friday morning, probably just over-did the rehabbing, and decided to err on the side of caution – I don’t want my first time out in a year to be the last time out for a year!
Those of you who were around between 2009-13 will remember that I left the Mike Austin school of golf swing around early 2013 after deciding that my golf swing wasn’t working the way I wanted it to, and that I had grown disenchanted with the notion that Austin was infallible and had the “perfect” golf swing model.
I like to question things, always have, and I have never accepted “you’re not allowed to question this” as a valid answer to a question.
Sunday thoughts.
One thing that has struck me, since I began to unravel the mystery of the pivot action and since I have figured out the optimal grip (Classic neutral), has been how unnecessary and literally obsolete “tips” and “drills” have become.
This is, I suppose, because proper technique eliminates the need for little special things that you find all over YouTube and in magazines.
Most people who began playing golf in the 90’s or 00’s probably only know Johnny Miller from his days as an announcer on television.
On his best day in the 70’s, he was one of the best golfers on the planet, hands down.
He was the first tour player to shoot 63 in any round of a major, and he did it in the final round to win the ’73 US Open.
There was no post yesterday because I was working on something that came to fruition today.
It shouldn’t be a surprise what I said in the title because, let’s face it, the pivot is about how you move the hips and legs to make a back pivot.
I solved the pivot mystery without having hit a ball since May of last year.
What mystery is there to the pivot?
Those of you who are still here from the Mike Austin/Dunaway era of the blog (2009-13) may remember that, when I built the MCS Golf Swing model and had it essentially finished around 2015, I said that it was simply the Mike Austin swing model but with a stable head on the back pivot.
Here is the proof of that statement, because I am now doing what I didn’t have the technical insight to do 15 years ago – you’ll all recall that my blog began as the documentation of my search for the perfect golf swing (let’s say optimal now), and I was still learning even as we all discussed golf swing mechanics.
I deal with my title statement about other peoples’ swings, here is the thing about models.
From my experience in other sports like hockey, baseball, track & field, basketball etc., I know (outside of the golf world, apparently not so much inside it) that there is such a thing as kinesiology.
There is also a reason I am so harsh on the Modern Golf Swing and its proponents – they violate the principal tenets of kinesiology.
WAX Golf 