My Perspective: What It Takes To Get Good Golf
In the Winter 2011 edition of Golf Teaching Pro, I authored an article titled “My Quest for Excellence and What You Can Learn from It.” That article contained some general information about what needs to be done to get to the plus-handicap level, such as being good from tee to green, being good around the greens, playing and/or practicing almost every day, and being confident. This article expands upon those items with some more specific swing information.
It’s a common belief among many golf teachers and players that there are many ways to get the job done, and they point to the wildly varying styles of Lee Trevino, Jim Furyk, John Daly, etc., as “proof” that there is no one-size-fits-all swing. They are right in the sense that all of these golfers have their own mannerisms and swings with their unique individual characteristics. But, are these swings really that different from each other? No. The fact is that these swings have many more similarities than differences. All excellent golfers follow the same general fundamentals that cannot be compromised if one wants to be a high-level player.
SETUP. It’s true that you see some weird grips among touring professionals, but such grips aren’t the norm. Nevertheless, since highlevel golf has been played with such grips, exact positioning of the hands cannot be taken as absolutely necessary. However, even among such individuals, you will never see certain kinds of grips that many amateurs use, such as the top-hand grip being held in the lifeline or the bottom-hand grip perpendicular in the palm. What we can say about the grip is that grip pressure is light at address, and is light enough during the swing to allow the clubhead to move freely, even though through impact the player is holding on with virtually 100% of his grip strength. The key is to let the wrists and arms be fluid, even with such a tight hold at impact.
Alignment varies from slightly open to slightly closed, but you never see way open or way closed. Trevino was thought to be way open, but a quick look on YouTube shows this not to be the case. Ball position is forward of center, although Paul Azinger did play with the ball back in his stance for short irons. Posture is athletic and balanced without exception – and this also applies to golfers as distinct as Fuzzy Zoeller or Hubert Green.
BACKSWING. Taking the club back, all expert golfers swing the club with their hands and arms, with the body responding. Bob Toski and Jim Flick have been saying this for years, but their message seems to have gotten lost in today’s mindset of the big-muscle-theory swing. David Leadbetter, in his book The Golf Swing, was most influential in promoting this, saying the arm swing and the body turn are together on the backswing. Undoubtedly some players feel as if they are doing this, and in fact they may be starting their backswings in this manner. But, if this was reality for the entire backswing, their hands would never get any higher than where they started. At some point the arms must swing.
By the time the hands pass the back thigh on the backswing, the wrists are cocking upwards, on their way to being fully cocked at the top. There is no restriction of this movement. As for balance, excellent golfers brace their backswings with a firm rear leg. There is no swaying to the outside of the foot. While the hips may move slightly laterally for a few players, it’s only very slight, and many players appear to have no lateral movement at all. To sum it up, the lower body on the backswing responds to what the upper body is doing.
TRANSITION. No area of the swing separates players of different skill levels more than the transition from backswing to downswing. Excellent players’ lower bodies, without exception, start the downswing slightly before the upper body has completed its backswing turn.
DOWNSWING. The torso responds to the lower body, the shoulders respond to the torso, the arms respond to the shoulders, and the hands respond to the arms. The first time the shaft and lead arm form a straight line is at impact or slightly after. The weight is predominantly on the lead foot.
FOLLOW-THROUGH. When the club is horizontal and pointing towards the target on the followthrough, the player’s trail arm is fully extended, and the lead upper arm is still well-connected to the torso. There is no “chicken-winging” of the lead elbow. The player finishes the swing in a balanced position.
In thinking about it and in researching YouTube videos online, I could not find a single professional player who did not strictly follow all of the above fundamentals. Of course, there is a wide variety in how the professionals execute these fundamentals, and this is what leads to the notion that there are many ways to get the job done. Again, this is true in a sense, but the bottom line is that all great strikers have certain common movements that cannot be compromised if one wants to be a great player.
If you are coaching someone who has professional aspirations and they deviate from these fundamentals, the fact is that, while they can become a very good player, playing to a plus-handicap or professional level is virtually out of the question. The dilemma for teachers is that often, moving someone towards these professional fundamentals permanently sets their game back. This might not make sense, but these golfers have deeply ingrained subconscious compensations in order to make up for flawed fundamentals. These compensations do not fit in with a professional-quality swing, the student simply cannot get rid of then, and thus we see a regression in the student’s game as a result.
Only through hard work potentially taking several years can this be worked out. Most players aren’t willing to commit to this, so realistically they will have to put aside their dreams of playing professionally. For the few willing to stick it out, there are no guarantees, but in all likelihood, they will at least reach their potential as a player, whatever it may be.
