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’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.
In looking through my Mike Dunaway archives, I found an iron swing from his video “World’s Best Driver,” and one of his swings gives you the idea of how he’d have looked swinging with no head shift on the back pivot.
I also found an iron swing from the rear with him shifting into a bias before swinging, which then stabilized the head on the back pivot.
Why he didn’t just set up like this to begin with, I’ll never know.
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.
Between doing more rehab on the shoulder and the pivot action upon which I’ve been working, I may be trying a swing session on Friday.
I’ve been extra-careful in making sure the shoulder muscles are strong enough to withstand the forces generated by full swinging, and since I’m able to swing the Momentus Heavy Iron now with full swings, I believe it’s time to test out the Post-Modern Golf Swing model.
WAX Golf 