This is just the latest post that you can file away in the “Why I Had To Delay The Video” folder and it’s not going to be the last.
In going over things, I discovered that I could prove – if I hadn’t already thoroughly done so using their own words and video clips – with the pivot drills how they weren’t doing what they said they were doing, and couldn’t have.
I may also have solved a personal mystery (for me) on why Mike Austin created a golf swing model with a shifting head on the back pivot.
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.
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.
Whatever one may think of Mike Austin, he got pretty close to figuring out the optimal golf swing model – he didn’t by any means build the “perfect golf swing” model because, as I have written, his swing didn’t even match the model he taught.
Mike Dunaway, with Mike Austin, nearly got there – but the optimal golf swing model wouldn’t have a shifting head, because as we all know, the admonition has been there forever not to let the head move during the swing, so the rightward head shift is something that wouldn’t be in an optimal golf swing.
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.
Before I proceed – this is not a slam on Mike Dunaway, whose golf swing I think was awesome. I will be talking about theory vs execution here, just to be clear.
I spent years looking at, discussing and trying to replicate Mike Austin’s swing from the years 2009-13.
I tried to be very diplomatic when I left the camp, because most of my readers had come to my blog out of interest in Mike Austin and Mike Dunaway, but to my surprise, when I broke with the Austin school and went my own way, most of you stayed with me, which was great.
When I was working on the “Basics Of The MCS Golf Swing” video, a good part of my time thinking about how to present the principles was how to explain the late Ben Hogan pivot action.
While I was going over the pivot action, I began to get a familiar feeling – “I’ve been here before,” I kept thinking, and I remembered what it was yesterday when answering colorful47’s question about hip turn vs hip rotation.
You’ll all remember my dive into Jack Nicklaus’ stance and grip in recent times, and if someone were to ask me right this moment what the “optimal setup” to which I referred yesterday, I’d say, “It’s Jack Nicklaus’ 1963’s stance, adjusted for width.”
I’ve been going over the 3 swing models performed from the same setup, and other than the head cock in Nicklaus’ picture below, this is how I’m setting, with perhaps a slightly stronger right hand grip.
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.
