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This video pretty much speaks for itself. Rory McIlroy hits an awful shot into the water at the Honda Classic and his 3 iron follows with an effortless looking heave which travels at least 50 yards. The throwing motion has been a staple of my teaching ever since I read Hogan’s explanation of the motion of the right arm in the golf swing: “It has always seemed to me” writes Hogan, “that in its general character this motion is quite similar to the one an infielder makes when he throws half underhand, half sidearm to first after scooping up a ground ball. As he swings his arm forward, his right elbow is very close to his right hip. The elbow “leads” the – it is the part of the arm nearest the target as he begins to make the throw.” Here we see Rory step in and make a perfect sidearm throw, using the ground to shift from left to right before the right arm has completed its back motion, and then opening the body fully while leaning the weight of the club back on his right index finger, the upper right arm and elbow following the shift of the pivot. The result is that Rory’s right hand is still holding the club when it is well past the center of the body, storing up huge amounts of energy before he lets the club fling off his fingers. It looks like a leisurely toss, but it travels a long way in the air. The key thing to remember is that in an iron shot the ball would already have been struck before Rory’s club left his hand, which means that the right wrist would still be bent and the left wrist bowed forward. That gives the golfer a descending blow at impact and a forward leaning shaft, giving you the compression at impact that everybody is looking for. In a driver swing simply try to throw the club higher by releasing it sooner out of your hand. In both cases the right wrist ends up fully released, causing the left wrist to bend back (or move into extension), because you can’t throw something without releasing it. The driver release is earlier than the iron release, which makes sense as the ball is teed up and you need to use more of the loft of the club to get the ball up into the air.
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