mdl

Looking good! Hand path from the top has also been a long time challenge for me as well. Feels and such are different for everyone, even on different days. But figure it can't hurt to throw mine out there in case it's useful. Along with width, one thing that's really helped me is going for the feel of slowly increasing speed and effort from the top. Lots of people advocate going slowly or no effort or letting the hands drop. For me that always just left me making sloppy swings that were impossible to sequence right and keep good form. But my natural instinct from years of baseball was to jam hard from the top so I needed to change. Thus for me a key feel has been to go for slow and and very light effort from the top with the feel of it being the start of a slow build into A6 -> A7 (club parallel to ground to impact). So like the muscle tension/readiness is still there in the transition to prevent sloppiness, but I also don't go all out with my upper body from A3.5 or the like!

One benefit of golf being for backwards old white guys is that the Senate might disallow the PIF takeover 😆 US Senate opens investigation into new partnership between PGA Tour and LIV Golf | CNN The US Senate opened an investigation into the proposed partnership between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf’s owners, the Saudi Arabian Public...

Team with Tiger to take all the non LIV players (assume they stay since they’ve shown they just follow the most guaranteed money) and start their own tour?

This is such a bummer. The Saudis won. They own all pro golf now. The whole investor/owner distinction is BS. The money gets to make the calls at the end of the day. I wish Rory and Tiger would go start a player-owned tour. Let the PGA be LIV: a few greedy top 20 guys, some has-beens, and a bunch of minor leaguers.

Ha. Fair enough. I often do the same when playing for like $5 a side with friends or the like. I just mean this sounds more like the dad is annoying and overbearing rather than something I'd even notice as breaking/stretching a rule I don't want broken in my league (unlike what I'd consider "real" cheating, like improving lies or worse). If I knew them fairly well I might have fun harassing them about how they're breaking the rules every time the dad gave advice 😆

It's a recreational, "laid back", "local weekly beer" golf league with permanent winter rules. This feels like a total non-issue. IMO, friends/families who enjoy the competition and play by the league rules but have a relaxed attitude and enjoy helping each with advice or opinions are exactly the kind of people you want in the kind of league you describe. I'd join in helping the kid get better at course management and reading greens.

It looks like, like me, your flow would bring you across the line if you go too far? Does learning to simply stop earlier fully solve the problem? I'm asking because I've gone back and forth over the years trying to change my arc so it's "parallel" to the target line versus simply stopping earlier. Presumably the answer is partially player/swing specific (I've got my first call with my new coach tonight that I'm pumped about! Already got the intro full catalog video of what's good and what are my challenges prior to prioritization of work). Just wondering if there's a usually or most cases answer. Also, I know the struggle and it sounds like you're in a phase focusing on issues which for me always comes with some impatience or frustration about the pace of change. But overall your swing looks good!

What is a balooka!?! 🤣

Ha. Good point about how lots of amateurs take it back under plane and then across the line and none of them hit it like Jones

Right. My thought is what I tried to say above. My impression is that for most beginners the natural transition move is to get more steep and rotate the hands out towards the ball, setting up an OTT or super steep down swing if you learn the modern back swing. Jones' back swing made it correct to get steeper and rotate towards the ball in the transition, because he went back under plane and came to the top across the line. So to me it seems like the trade off isn't between more or less movement. It's more movement with an easier transition versus less movement with a – for most people – significantly harder to learn transition.

That was the one liner I saw when I searched! I can imagine how the different weight distribution and flex of the old club made the modern swing not work as well. But why does no one swing that way now?! Bennett makes a version of it work. It's not like you can't swing that way with modern clubs!

Love it. I practice in low 40s rain and often wind all winter, every winter!! I'm in Portland.

A bit of a search here and on the web didn't turn anything up, so I figured I'd ask here. Why does no one advocate the under plane and then across the line Bobby Jones back swing? Sam Bennett does it a bit but he's self taught. Feels like most people's natural swing is to get steeper and hands closer to the ball on the transition. So why not teach being too shallow and too far from the ball on the backswing rather than more on plane and having to drop the hands and shallow on the way down?

Ha. Yeah that's probably part of it too. Weirdly, this is probably because people do actually know that the most important and hardest skill in golf is full shots. So they can pretend their real golf skill is higher than it is if they pretend they score badly only because they're too cool to be bothered to practice putting.

Sounds like he's got some natural talent and should get some lessons

One reason I think people have such a hard time rejecting the old school wisdom of drive for show, putt for dough is personal experience. It takes a long time and lots of work to make significant improvement in the long game. And if you've got a fundamentally bad or mediocre swing, you just aren't going to have any days where your long game is indistinguishable from a low handicapper's. But you can make quick improvements in the short game and putting that are big enough to notice in how you score. And especially in putting, form matters less so for folks with decent to good general athleticism and hand-eye coordination, there can be random days where you're just feeling it and also getting lucky and sink a bunch of 8-20 footers and score 5 shots better than you expect to given how you struck the ball that day. Which means on a random day you can beat someone who's better than you having an average day all around when you have an average ball striking day and an exceptional day with the putter. All this adds up to the feeling that putting matters more because you experience it as changing your score more round to round and over shorter periods of practice. I LOVE the graphic in this post!

Yes! This is the final, correct answer 😉 Perfect Putter to eliminate the effects of putting skill and narrow in only on green reading is genius. The analysis of results from folks with similar SG:P on the course would be super interesting. It seems like it could go either way. I've done the Villegas spiderman move on those greens. I'm 100% certain that I've hit putts that had (granted, slight) side to side slope that either stayed straight or broke slightly uphill.

Well... That's not actually true! Go play the Plantation course and tell me putts never break uphill (Really, any course with heavy grain on the greens, living on the west coast the Plantation is the just the course I've played with by far the most intense grain effects on the green, and putts literally break uphill sometimes there)

Yeah fair enough. The more I think about it the harder it seems it would be to confidently test AimPoint's effectiveness without a prospective test. And even there it would be tricky.

I've never done AimPoint but generally buy into how it would make you a better reader of greens. I've just never invested the time to learn it. Point being, I'm not anti-AimPoint partisan... ...just a statistician who can't let this point go You're right that if you take, as Alfonso pointed to, a bunch of 5 cappers, half who use AimPoint and half who don't, and test them on a bunch of angles and distances to a hole on a slope that AimPoint won't be the only factor that affects performance. It's even true that there could be confounding in that even if you only take folks who use fancy trackers like Arccos and have the ~same strokes gained putting, things like components of a person's skill and mindset might affect both their performance on the test and how likely they are to take up AimPoint. In which case you could attribute to AimPoint an effect really caused by some unmeasured factor. But if you assume no meaningful confounding factors, the proposed test is absolutely a legit test of AimPoint, at least for the putting context covered by the test. The other relevant factors will vary similarly among the AimPoint and non groups. More other factors will just increase the variance of performance and increase the sample size (number of different players) needed.

If you're hitting it straight 275 yards, hit it until you can't! Though my driver story is relevant here. I had a Taylormade R7 from about the same time. I loved that club. I snapped the shaft, hit other drivers worse for 6 months, then just got it reshafted. Meaning I hit that club for at least 10 years. But... When I finally did get a new driver, I gained 15-20 yards, and hit it if anything a bit tighter. I gained another 10 yards with the new driver I got a year or so ago. My point being, if you can afford doing it sooner than later, you're going to easily be clearing 300 yards if you go get fit for a new driver. Then you get to (in a good hearted way) mock the other retirees you play with where the "long" guy hits it 250y

Erik can't resist being a bit pedantic Yes I understand that in the large majority of cases getting closer is the winner in terms of expected shots. Let's say this hole has a rock hard peninsula green where you have a 3 yard window to land a 5W or else you're dropping in the water short or bouncing through into the water long...

No no. That just makes him... kinda annoying? He's a Lilliputian man who is a colossal douche His aura of douchebaggery covers the whole golf course.

1) Yeah. But people are irrational and egotistical and no pro with a 5W into a really tough green complex on a par 4 is willing to think to themselves they'll average 4.8 with a 5W and 4.65 with a layup to a 70 yard wedge. So we don't get to see guys thinking strategically and making interesting decisions. 2) Of course not! I very unclearly meant this is a general potential support of limited flight balls, not a specific potential support of 15 yard reduction. For the examples I gave of course we'd need way more reduction than that.

It seems I'm in the minority, but in principle I like the idea of rolling back distance. Maybe a lot! I disagree with Erik's take on less distance not making watching pros more fun or exciting. For one, as Erik noted, risk/reward is one of the most fun parts of golf (watching and playing!). The pros play so many par 70s and 71s because they hit it too long to fit four par 5s onto the course! But Par 5s are the most consistent source of risk/reward. I'd love watching tournaments with characteristics like: Three or four par 5s where, say, 80% of the field was hitting 3w or 5w to get there in two (so like 10% couldn't get there and 10% hitting an iron approach). IOW, 3-4 holes where the specifics of the architecture are dramatically accentuated and players are forced into a really tough decision with a good drive A par 72 where on the 10 par 4s where the average tour player is hitting seven different clubs on the approach, including at least one, say, 5i or longer. This without gimmicky forced irons off the tee or the like. Current courses just aren't long enough for that! I dislike, however, the bifurcation. I'm not sure I read it right, but I also dislike the idea of using the ball regs to compress the distance distribution. I get that's one way to prevent bifurcation. But I hate the idea of artificially lessening the advantage to players who learn how to hit it really far while staying accurate (enough). Which is to say, I would hate it if instead of the longest and shortest hitters on tour both seeing 15% drops in distance, the longest hitter saw a 20% drop and the shortest hitter saw a 10% drop.