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.
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.
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.
In going over the Post-Modern Golf Swing pivot and swing action, it suddenly dawned on me what should be or perhaps should have been obvious with regards to stability and machine-like performance.
The Classic Golf Swing, for example, is mechanically-correct and sound, because the body is moving the way it is designed to move when swinging from a certain setup.
The main reason I said many years ago, when Tiger Woods officially hooked up with Sean Foley (he’d actually been seeing him on the sly for at least six months before breaking with Hank Haney) that he was going to break his back was because of his changed setup.
He changed from his right-to-center bias that you saw in his early years to what Foley was teaching, which was a Stack & Tilt type setup by any other name.
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.
I watched an analysis of 3rd World Ranked Cameron Young’s golf swing from a couple of years back and noticed that he’s performing the Late Hogan pivot (very good), but his down swing is all wrong (mechanically), as was the analysis of his whole swing model.
It’s amazing that, to today, they’re still going with the “using the ground” nonsense with the Flying Foot (Trevor Immelman calls it a “floating foot) and trying to call it a power-enhancing move when there are two reasons for Cameron’s Flying Foot.
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