Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Foot (or, more precisely, Heel) Work

Way back in the Snead era, I learned to raise my left heel on the backswing, then "trigger" the downswing by planting that heel firmly on the ground and rotating around it. I've never been even moderately flexible, nothing like Snead, but the two-inch lift probably gave me an extra foot or so of clubhead travel back, and through, which meant that I had more time to generate head speed on the downswing.
Then I read Hogan, and started keeping the heel down more and more, until I stopped lifting it altogether.
Now, pushing 69 years of age, I'm working to re-establish the heel lifting. Not easy, by any means, but rewarding me with more headspeed, which means more distance with every club.
More important, it reduces the strain on my oft-injured lower back.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Long-time problem solved.

Since I started playing golf, in my 20s, when lateral epicondylitis ended my tennis career, my main problem has been getting too much height and spin on my shots. Seen pros, read countless books and articles, and now, finally, at age 68, I diagnosed and cured the problem. Now my drives run out, but I can still put enough spin with the wedges to stop the ball after one bounce (on the hard greens) or spin it back on the softer ones.
The problem was coming in to the ball too steeply. The solution was to reverse engineer my swing. I recognized that all that talk about hitting down on the ball to take a divot might work for someone else, but I had been unconsciously letting my left arm bend early in the downswing -- actually, letting it bend a lot in the backswing. The bend was caused by too quick a backswing for my relatively unmuscular arms to manage. Slowing down the backswing allowed me to pay more attention to the transition, which now consists of three consecutive feels (to use Percy Boomer's term): 
1. the left shoulder hitting my chin (a result of rotating my torso, not just moving my left shoulder independent of the right)
2. rotating my right hip clockwise to complete the turn (Hogan's term was 'like a mechanic giving that last little pull with the wrench' or something similar). 
3. contracting the left tricep as the forward swing starts. I should mention that the whole transition leads into the hitting area, or what I think of as the delivery phase of the swing.
Yeah, golf sure is simple! 

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Hogan

I don't understand. Ben Hogan is still acknowledged to be the most accurate ball-striker of all time. Not the longest hitter, but a master of controlled power.
He wrote the book, Modern Fundamentals of Golf, in the mid-50s, when he had virtually retired. It's a complete guide to swinging the club as he did. And yet, it's not recognized as the ultimate method. Instead, we hear about "The Plane Truth", "Tour Tempo", "Stack and Tilt" (or is that shake and bake)?
Oh wait, I DO UNDERSTAND. If Hogan's method is the best, then no one could expect to write a golf book that would sell.

Two-day experiment

Killed two birds with one stone. I've been told by pros, golfing buddies, etc., how wrong it is for me to play with blades [aka musclebacks] (Currently, Mizuno MP29s) and with stiff shafts to boot. Well, long story short, I played two rounds with a set of Ping Eye2 BeCu (Super-Game Improvement, according to the Maltby Playability index) irons with a senior shaft.
They are now back at the consignment shelf. Cost me a total of $30 to "rent" them for two days. Only two problems with them: with the soft shaft, the head sometimes came swooping in looking left, sometimes lagging back looking right. Occasionally, I'd hit one dead straight (I never play for that) that might go either a little shorter than I expected or a LOT SHORTER. My normal carry distance with a 7-iron is about 135 yards. The PingEye2 was good for a carry of about ten yards less (when struck low on the face). Probably due to more loft and more bottom-weight. BUT I tend to hit down and through, in the middle of the face, on my good swings. And hitting on the middle or higher with those things I couldn't get more than 95-100 with the 7-iron.
Sure are pretty, though.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

The Power of the Cock

That would be wrist-cock, of course. 
Discover your inner slugger. Learn to use whatever body composition and condition you have to stabilize your hands, so that they can release and square up the clubface with minimal effort and maximum effect.
If you've seen pix of Ben Hogan or Sergio Garcia as they began their downswings you will note that the clubhead is still visible behind and on the target side of the body when their arms are parallel to the ground. That's called "lag", and they maximized it. Decades earlier, almost 100 years ago, Bobby Jones did the same thing. 
The difference is that Jones let the club lag by releasing the grip with the last three fingers of his left hand a bit at the top, then regripping on the way down. But what they all did was cock their wrists fully -- meaning they brought their left thumbs as close to, and IN LINE WITH, their left forearms -- at the top of the swing, or the end of the backswing.
The next step is critical. Every top golfer does exactly the same thing: he (or she) begins the downswing, or more properly the forward swing, by relaxing the hands while rotating the torso counterclockwise (if right-handed). Some start the torso rotation by turning the hips first, some slide the hips, some just rotate the upper chest and use the hips and legs to stabilize the upper body. Those are stylistic, not functional, differences. The important thing is the relaxation of the hands.
As one rotates the upper body, one pulls the arms and hands around and down. The left thumb, which supported the club's weight at the top, being directly under the shaft, stays under the shaft until the weight of the club (and the eccentric clubhead) start rotating, and the thumb is passively rotated from below the shaft to above it. 
The function of the right hand in this movement is to SUPPORT the left hand. Hogan's phrase was "one corporate hand." I find it indispensable to think of ONE CORPORATE HAND, rotating through impact, as if there was a giant, ten-fingered, two-wristed golf glove into which I'd inserted my hands. 
If this is done properly, there is very little effort involved. The legs turn the hips, the hips turn the chest, the shoulders follow, then the arms, then the hands rotate through the ball. My intention is to keep on turning the chest through the ball at a constant rate; everything else follows. And I stay balanced throughout. There's no sensation of diving forward (like Tiger Woods) or falling backward (Like Jack Nicklaus). Those individuals play a different game, Power Golf, because their body composition -- lots of well-developed fast-twitch muscle -- lets them generate much higher clubhead speed than ordinary, middle-of-the-normal-curve individuals. The tradeoff works for them. Tiger's long drives are around 350 yards; mine is 100 yards less.
But what we have in common -- all good golfers have in common -- is ONE CORPORATE HAND that pours and rotates smoothly through the hitting area.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Backswing basics that are virtually unknown

The most important difference between a swing machine, like Iron Byron, swinging a golfclub and a human being doing the same thing, is that the machine starts from the top and has only to swing the club down and through the ball. We humans utilize a backswing.
When you swing a club, you hold it at one end (with your hands, part of your nnn pound body). At the other end, there's a weighted clubhead. Even though you can't readily see it, the shaft bends a bit, from a tiny fraction of an inch to several inches, because of the twirling of the clubhead around your hands.
When you swing the club back, the faster you swing it, and the more abruptly you stop the backswing, the more the shaft will bend. If you can start the forward stroke immediately after the backswing ends, the shaft will retain, even increase, the bend, or flex, into the downswing. As the club approaches the ball, the shaft will be convex forward (bent away from the target side of the ball).
But inevitably, as the clubhead catches up with the hands, the shaft will kick forward and move through the straight position, so that it is concave forward. As it does this, the face of the club moves from open (toe back) to closed (toe forward). 
The greater the bend is initially, and the longer it is retained, the more clubhead speed will be generated, and the more rotation of the clubface will occur. That means longer, less accurate, shots.
I call this "working the shaft." As I've stated many times on this blog, I'm not a very strong, or even moderately strong, person. Small muscles on a large frame do not make for 300 yard drives, and at almost 69 years old, those muscles have not gotten bigger or faster. So it goes.
But.
I've learned to take the club back BRISKLY, and brake the rearward action with a braced right side -- from the ground up: my right (back) lower leg retains its position, and pushes forward as the club moves back. My right arm is braced, and I push it forward, retaining a low elbow flex. This "loads" the club, producing a maximum bend, and I push forward as fast and as hard as I can (again, I'm not that strong) which gives me my maximum accelerating clubhead speed.
It's a feel thing. I try to feel the retention of the shaft bend. Most of the time, I can.
I know most golfers think the backswing should be slow, and the forward swing should be long a fluid, but watch the two best ballstrikers of the 20th century pro ranks in their primes -- Ben Hogan and Lee Trevino -- and their backswings are twice as fast as Phil Mickelson. 
They were/are both several inches shorter than I, so I don't take the club back as far as Hogan with the driver (neither of them took the shorter clubs back very far). Also, I'm not very flexible, so a long swing is always going to be "hit or miss" with miss more likely than hit, for me.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Your swing and mine.

The best swing you can make is uniquely yours. It will resemble other golfers' actions to an extent, but you can't really expect to copy any other golfer exactly.
Great golfers -- and I'm not one of them -- have swings that they have built up over years of experimentation and practice. Every great golfer has made all the compensations to produce reliable shots: shots that are reliable in how fast the clubhead moves, the trajectory of each club, and the tendency to move to the right or left. All great golfers can hit shots with more or less than normal clubhead speed, high, low, or in between, straight, draw, hook, fade, slice, and any combination. They may have a preference for one sort of trajectory, but the great ones can hit any shot.
The real unspoken secret of golf is this: the better one gets, the harder it is to play the game! The reason this is true is that getting better means you become more aware of each little facet of the golf stroke, and that awareness can unbalance the complex action of the swing. So, if you want to have fun playing golf, great! But don't try to score, because then golf becomes work, and the lower you want to score, the harder you have to work.