I have never been able to figure out how people get fooled by listening to and watching someone say something that can easily be checked and debunked. I mean, how gullible are we as a species?
I am no different from anyone else – for years, I ignored Ben Hogan’s swing mechanics because he was the “Father of The Modern Golf Swing” and I wanted nothing to do with planted-heel swings that made you twist your lower back to get a shoulder turn.
If my Late Hogan or Transition Pivot and Post-Modern Swing people will bear with me for a few weeks, I am going to be focusing my posting primarily on the topic of the upcoming video on the first of the three pivot models in MCS – that is the Classic Golf Swing model.
I went back to look at my posting history from before the Frozen Shoulder injury, going past the point where I was branching off from the Classic Golf Swing model in search of the Dunaway-esqe Shift & Post action, and I found a nice post from December ’23.
It illustrates what I had figured out with regards to refining the Classic Golf Swing before I shifted gears to another model, and the principles are as relevant now as then.
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.
I am beginning work on the first golf swing video of what will be the three swing models of the Mechanically-Correct Swing family, and that video will be called “Introduction To MCS – The Classic Golf Swing.”
As I said earlier, this is the easiest and most basic of the mechanically-correct swing models and is the type of swing model used by modern PGA Tour (and former) players Bryson DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson, Bubba Watson, Vijay Singh and going back to Jack Nicklaus and Bobby Jones.
I have seen this gentleman’s YouTube page here and here in the past couple of weeks, and I believe from clicking on one of them that he’s a former high-level golfer trying to get back into golf shape to qualify for the Champions Tour.
I don’t know anything about his swing philosophy so I can’t and won’t vouch for anything else on his channel, other than the rant he delivers about Ben Hogan’s “Five Lessons” book.
His rant essentially lays out why I keep insisting that you want to pivot like Hogan, but not try to swing like Ben Hogan.
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.
WAX Golf 