I came across a Tweet this morning showing Bryson DeChambeau’s stock distances with his club lofts.
This has nothing to do with him specifically however as I’m just remarking on the club specs.
To put it mildly, I’ve always been aware of the clubmaker scam where they kept lowering the lofts to make the same number iron hit the ball greater distances, but I was absolutely blown away by how far they’ve gone.
You’ll all know, those of you from the early days of WAXGolf.com (after I mothballed the DJ Watts Golf blog) that I didn’t really BUILD the MCS Classic Golf Swing model.
All I did was aggregate the best elements of the greatest Classic era swingers and remove their personal idiosyncratic parts, leaving the distilled model we’ve been working with for the last few years.
Update At Bottom
Let me preface this latest BDC offering by saying that anyone with a modicum of understanding of how the body works (which should include anyone who has played sports at a reasonable level, we’re talking high school varsity here) could have seen what was coming.
Even a layman in sports experience (those who participate mainly from a seated observational position) could see what was going to happen.
Someone needs to pull the Mad Scientist aside and tell him he’s going to completely wreck himself if he keeps on his current track.
Someone, anyone – do him that favor and stop him going the way of Tiger Woods.
His impact & follow-through phase are truly, truly nightmarish. Follow me over the break for some scary stuff.
Update: WOW – It looks as though I was absolutely on the money with my speculation, because you’ll find at bottom a clip I found just before hitting “publish” on this post.
Rather than re-write it, I’ve inserted it at bottom, but I’d love if you’d read the post from beginning to end instead of jumping to the evidence.
If it isn’t, it should be, because you will see these triggers everywhere in athletics for a reason.
In track & field, you see it in athletes before they begin their run down the pit runways (long, triple jumps, pole vault), or their discus/shot put throws, etc.
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).
I have to conclude that the real reason no one has ever mastered the true intricacies of the swing model known as the “Austin/Dunaway” is not because it’s too complicated or difficult to learn.
It is simply, in my view, that it wasn’t explained in a way that people could relate to it.
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.
WAX Golf 