Wonderful Things!

My golf schedule is fairly rigid.  Golf with pals on Monday and Friday.  Tuesdays were with Phil, when he was in town.  Wednesday a subset of the Monday group would play.  Usually Thursday off and I would usually go to the range to hit some balls and ponder the mystery of it all.

But Phil has left to go north and earn his yearly bread.  I wandered over to the home course and the ladies have the course early.  They don't play that quickly and if I get there at 9 or so, it's kind of a long day.  Not as long as getting behind the seniors, mind you.  They can stretch out a round with worst of them.  In fact they put their slowest players at the end and many times we've had to watch them totter slowly to the end.

A solution to this is to play the 9 hole "links" course.  I did this yesterday and then played 9 on the regular course and called it a day.

Now, as the scene is set, let's talk of wonderful things.

One of the many things I don't know is the correct hand path on the downswing.  Oh, I had a theory or two, but I chanced across a reference the other day that pushed me to try something.

My understanding of what happens with hands and then clubs in the downswing is that the path down with the hands was the same one used in the backswing.

However there are hints out there that this is not correct.  Jim McLean was selling a laser pointer that attached to the bottom of your club and a hitting mat.  The idea was to make the laser walk along a path that took the club out towards the ball and not down towards one's toes.

I also think that I ran across an instructor that stated that this was wrong.

My thinking is that if the angle between the arms and the club shaft are constant, then you have to come down under the club head plane to allow this angle to swing the club head into the ball.

What happens at speed may not match this understanding.  The centripetal acceleration may easily cause this angle to straighten thus requiring a hand path closer to the plane.

So in this model the hands move up closer to the body than they do on the downswing.  There are some nice things in this.  There is more room for the arms and hands to move to the ball.  Also a movement of the grip towards the ball will cause the club to fall backwards towards the body.  This is not bad as it tends to promote an inside to outside movement.  The opposite of this is a movement where the club comes from outside to in, and that promotes nasty slices.

Note that one can be too flat in the downswing and then one needs to do something to get the head of the club down to the ball.

Phil has a very flat swing.  I can't figure out how he manages to the hit the ball at all.  I think he has to slow down to do this and it's costing him distance.

To get back to the story, for some reason I was thinking about this when playing the links course yesterday.  And always willing to try things, I tried this.  It did feel strange, but I immediately found that the contact with the clubs was more solid.  The shots were going higher, which suggested the club face was more properly being presented to the ball. 

I didn't find the distance changing.  I also was tending to hit the ball to the right.  Note that there have to be a lot of lingering adjustments left over from being under the lane -- I'm not surprised that club faces are now no longer aligned with the swing. 

But I felt that this was an improvement. 

I blow around the links course with no waiting.  Nothing wonderful to report in re scoring, but I was hitting some solid shots.  They felt better and I was doing less work to get the job done.

As I've mentioned in prior posts the long clubs and especially the drive has been an issue for over a decade.  I also tear up my grips in a specific pattern.  An earlier three wood had the grip worn all the way down to the shaft.  A coach exclaimed that he'd never seen that before.  But sadly he was not curious enough to help me find out what was causing this.

It seemed to me that I've been fighting the clubs rather than swinging them.  An incorrect path down and late adjustments to hit the ball at all would explain this.

The is an old rule of thumb in the software world, "If you found an error that would produce all the bad symptoms, you're work is probably done."  So I am optimistic that perhaps, just maybe, with a coaxing from the old gods and the new, that I am on the path to enlightenment.

"Well, how did you play today, Mr. I've Finally Got It?" I hear you ask.  The answer to this is actually quite well.  The driver is quickly turning into a weapon.  It's straight, it's up in the air, and I'm not fearing to swing it.  I've not hit a horrible drive for 27 holes at this point.

Since my hands and arms are in a better place it shouldn't be difficult to start thinking about more club head speed. 

I've got rounds setup for the next couple of days.  I'll report back when the smoke has cleared!