I will admit to being a little bit, er, myopic, when it comes to what other people are doing.
If I were a song-writer, my response to others asking if I wanted to hear their music would be, “Not really, doing my own thing here.”
Game versus Sport, the eternal balancing act of golf, dictates that even mechanically-iffy swings can be successful given good impact conditions and an overall great short game.
But there is a reason you don’t see anyone anywhere swinging like Moe Norman, the man who could hit the ball practically dead straight – and we’re talking so little side-spin that the first time Moe was ever analyzed on a launch monitor, it was thought to be malfunctioning.
I’ve compared the leverage of a proper golf swing in years past to that of a judo throw – you can throw someone bigger and heavier than yourself to the ground with relative ease if you know how to leverage the move.
In the same vein, I can affirm that, just as with a judo throw, you can be much more effective swinging your golf club with natural leverage than with brute muscle force.
It looks with the forecasts that I will likely be able to get out to do some swing work either this coming week or at latest the next week, so I have a driver swing here I’ve gone back to inspect.
I’ve said that I can’t bear to look at any of my swing clips since I’ve made significant improvements to my MCS swing mechanics – the model itself hasn’t changed since my “E = MCS” video in 2017, but my swing sure has changed for the better since then.
This Classic Golf Swing driver below was a few weeks before my trip to the TXG facility to get some numbers and doesn’t actually make my eyes bleed.
Just as the 3 most important things in real estate or property are Location, Location & Location, you will always hear my belief that the 3 most important parts of the golf swing are Setup, Setup and Setup.
Here is a driver swing from a young Tiger Woods, if you’ll allow me to point out things that would have concerned me at the time.
Right at the outset, I’m going to give the gentleman doing the analysis and explanation of Bryson DeChambeau’s “pull up, pull down” approach to the swing a break – he’s a PhD but not in the field of Kinesiology or anything else sports related, so he’s a layman here.
That’s important – they really try to pull a fast one here on the viewer by introducing “Dr. XYZ, PhD“ for the segment, when he essentially wouldn’t be any more of an expert in the discussion than anyone else.
I’ve broken that long iron swing of Jack Nicklaus’ from yesterday’s post down into the 2 separate components of the back pivot (loading the trebuchet) and the down swing weight shift (leveraging the trebuchet).
This weekend, you’ll be able to watch all you want of today’s pro players contorting themselves trying to generate power from every wrong way, and you can compare them to Nicklaus’ weight shift leveraging his power effortlessly.
Once you see the “vertical” nature of the swing, as I said I only see “up” or “down” with the swing action, you will spot it in technically superb swing actions.
Jack Nicklaus, at times, came so close to the optimal swing action, it’s why he was able to win 18 majors and snag 19 runner-up finishes (that’s 37 Top 2 finishes in majors, something you’ll never see again).
Shot on July 20th, 2018 – I’d give this swing a C+ grade, as I have since fixed the grip (it wasn’t standard neutral here) and of course I’ve done yeoman’s work in optimizing my stance, back pivot and downswing.
I was chagrined at the time that I was only able to shoot video that day at 30 fps – my up-to-400 fps camera had broken and I hadn’t yet sprung for an iPhone to make the need of a camera obsolete going forward.