Playing for Money: Clayton Rotz Part 2

By Wayne | Videos: Playing For Money

I think you will enjoy this 2 hour session with Clayton. He has been a bit unlucky on the physical side of things lately, having contracted Lyme’s Disease and then breaking a bone in his thumb, but he is on the mend and back playing. His ball striking has been erratic, and looking at some of his old swings before he got to this lesson, I decided that it was time to tighten up his action and get his swing under control. His first couple of swings just reinforced what I was already thinking, so I started with the idea that more trunk movement earlier in the backswing would allow him to shorten his arm swing without feeling like he was losing his wind up. Getting to the top he needed to feel wider with his arms and firmer with his wrists. Our image was Steve Stricker, who appears to have little or no wrist cock and an extra wide and short arm swing. Clayton hits it so far already that even if he lost a couple of yards it wouldn’t be a big deal, although I don’t think that is going to happen.
 
As for the transition and forward swing I thought that the extra length of his backswing caused him to continue to twist his legs and trunk as he was trying to start down, causing his right knee to get caught underneath him as he tried to move forward and around, retarding the around part of the equation. His legs were squaring late, and with the club coming from a less outside path after some work we did previously, he was hitting some major blocks to the left due to his lack of openness at impact. He had also tended to drop his hands more straight down in transition than we wanted, and the more I watched it the more I thought that the twisting in transition was causing the vertical move from the top. With a tighter action at the top he could then focus on opening the right leg and knee more immediately in transition and get his hands to come out at the ball. It was nice to see him firm everything up and make a more controlled move at the ball, and by the end of the session he was hitting the ball nicely, and even more importantly felt like we had done some breakthrough work.