Golf’s Greatest Misconceptions

When people ask how it is that I can stand out on the practice tee and teach for eight or nine hours without getting bored, frustrated, or exhausted, I give them an answer that comes straight from the heart: teaching is interesting, challenging, and fascinating, and a full day of lessons simply flies by. The key is variety. Each student brings his or her own unique set of physical attributes, preconceived ideas, and ingrained tendencies, and I need to deal with each individual personality in order to build a trusting relationship and find the best way to impart the information that will produce the best results in the shortest period of time. In short, I’m busy from the moment the student says “hello”, trying to assess, analyze, and formulate a plan of attack to get the student thinking correctly and moving in the right direction with regards to their overall game.

After 15 years of teaching, and thousands of lessons, I have found that within the infinite variety that people represent there are definite patterns that emerge, especially as I find myself giving the same few basic lessons over and over. These patterns are for the most part conceptual in nature, and have often been fueled by direct or written instruction. I call these “Golf’s Greatest Misconceptions”, and here are my top 10.

1. “Try not to think”. Now, let’s pretend that you don’t have a perfect swing. We may even go as far as to say that you make quite a few mistakes during your swing motion, too many to pay attention to while you swing. You know you need to change the way you execute the movements, but the mistakes have accrued over time and happen somewhat automatically, without “thinking”. This, then, is your “natural”, unthinking swing. What makes you think that you will swing differently if you don’t think? Well, you won’t. Turn your conscious mind off and you will continue to make the same mistakes over and over. There is no magic to it. You must address your problems by learning what they are, understanding what you need to do instead, getting a picture in your mind of what the changes look like and a feel to go along with that, and practicing enough to put the changes into your motion so that you have a chance to take your improved technique out onto the course. Without conscious swing keys you have no chance. And with the amount of time you have to play you will most likely forevermore need to use one or two swing keys that address the most stubborn of your mechanical errors. If you keep your self-instruction to a minimum, and try your best to replace words with mental images, you will be able to avoid over-thinking, or trying too hard to make sure you do everything right in every swing. You can only address a couple of items in any one swing, preferably one backswing thought or image and one in the forward swing, taking you through the strike of the ball. When you practice, you can think about as many things as you wish: just be sure to prepare for playing by organizing and paring down your thoughts into a usable few that you can accomplish within your routine and a comfortable time standing over the ball. If too many things pop into your head, simply back off and start over.

2. “Golf is 90% mental”. Sure. Maybe for Jack Nicklaus, who hit the ball as well as anyone who ever lived. Or Fred Couples, who found his swing when he was a kid and hasn’t had more than a passing thought about his technique since. But for the average guy? When you top the ball 90 yards into the lake with a 7 iron the sport psychologists may want you to think that you didn’t trust your swing or that you weren’t focused enough on the target, but do you know what I think? I think you probably just have a bad swing, and you’re more lucky when you do get it over the water than mentally impaired when you don’t. Most of the people I teach would be silly to have a whole lot of trust in their golf swings. Golf is a very objective game. Neither the ball or the club particularly care how you “feel” about the shot you are facing. The question is, can you execute the movements necessary to hit the shot? Once you achieve improvement in your technique, a better mental attitude is not far behind, because success breeds confidence. Why in the world should anyone be confident when their swing is as likely to shank the ball out-of-bounds as it is to hit a passable shot somewhere in play? Figure out how to hit the ball first, then go see a shrink if that’s what turns you on.

3. “One magic move”. Too many people seem to think that they are one short step away from “getting it”. “When I get this, I’ll really have it”. Golf magazines and golf instructors intent on tantalizing their readers tend to hype their latest article or theory by suggesting that “if you do this, you are guaranteed that everything else will follow”. Unfortunately, this is never the case. The golf swing, no matter what you may hear or read, is complicated. There is no getting around the difficulty of the game and the techniques required to perform it adequately. The admonition to “keep it simple” is no more than an invitation to frustration and disappointment. Golf is an intricate, challenging sport. Anyone who attempts to teach the game by making it somehow “simple” simply leaves out basic material which is essential if the student is ever to grasp what it takes to be a decent player. And it irritates me to no end when I am accused of being “too complicated” by individuals who either don’t know enough to be more detailed or who are too lazy to try to relay necessary information to students whom they have given up on before they even get started. One move guarantees nothing. It may give the student a chance to get to the next position, or to make a better motion, but only if the relationship between positions is explained fully, and the reasons for doing one thing as opposed to something else is clear. The golf swing is a continuous motion wherein every position one passes through either allows for or makes more difficult the next position. In order to get the whole thing to work one must understand why they are trying to do whatever it is they are trying to do, and how that helps the end goal, which is to strike the ball with power and control.

4. “Just swing the clubhead”. I recently watched a segment on the Golf Channel where the instructor repeatedly answered the viewers specific questions regarding problems they were having with their swings or their ball flight by suggesting that they simply “swing the clubhead’, and that by concentrating on a ‘swinging motion” all their problems would magically disappear. What a crock! This guy stands up and makes some pathetic looking motion that could never hit a quality golf shot and has the chutzpah to say that all that anyone has to do is swing the club back and forth and everything will be hunky-dory. Watching this I can only shake my head in disappointment, especially knowing that that viewing audience is so starved for decent information and so desperate to improve that they actually listen to this and waste their time trying to put it into practice. Feeling the weight of the clubhead is definitely essential in swinging a golf club. I use the phrase “feel the weight of the head’ in many of my lessons. But to suggest that this one element is the end-all answer to a multitude of problems and has enough substance on which to base an entire teaching philosophy is ludicrous. It just ain’t that easy; if it were, there would be a whole bunch more good players, and the range at a tour event would be full of a bunch of happy tour pros just “swinging the clubhead” and not worrying about too much else. Not.

5. “ The swing is one big circle.” “Back and through the same.” “ Return to your address position when you hit the ball.” If you hear any of these phrases, run in the other direction. How many of you own a “Sam 2000”? Chumps! You’ve all made some inventor 20 million dollars, and the thing doesn’t even work! Worse than that, it’s actually detrimental to anyone’s swing: it is guaranteed to make you worse! I hope some Sam 2000 salesman or spokesperson reads this and wants to challenge me on my opinion. I would be more than happy to go on national TV and educate the viewing public as to why this apparatus is ill-designed to teach the proper strike of the golf ball.. Never has more money been wasted on any one alleged “swing improvement “ item. Have you seen the commercial for the thing? (How could you have missed it? It’s on every 20 minutes, or so it seems.) Watch the way the “perfect swing trainer” has it’s users finish. They all look ridiculous. There isn’t a decent player in the world who could get on that thing and feel like they would when they made a normal swing. A golf swing goes around the body. In order to swing the club on plane past the ball the hands swing to the left as the hips get much deeper to the left than when they started at address. If you swing on a Sam 2000 you can’t do anything except flip your hands at the ball at impact and finish with your weight on your toes and the club coming straight up in front of you. The problem here is that the golf swing does not operate on one plane. Once the club gets to waist high it shifts from a shaft plane to a shoulder plane. Then, the arc of the downswing narrows as the club, in a correct motion, floats back to just slightly above the shaft plane heading to impact. The Sam 2000 takes into account exactly none of this. It functions to promote the idea and feeling that the swing feels the same and follows the same path back and down. This is simply not the case. When any good player strikes the ball off the ground the ball is hit before the ground with the club leaning forward; impact and address are not at all the same. Once students learn and understand this basic concept they are on their way to better golf. And, hopefully, if they’ve only had their Sam 2000 for 30 days they can return it and get their money back.

6. “Swing Easy, Hit it Further”. O.K. Let me get this straight. If I try not to hit it far, it will go far? By magic? Way too often I see students who have heard and listened to advice that implores them not to try to “Kill” the ball. “Nice and easy, back and through, don’t rush it, that’s it, nice, smooth tempo. Don’t be too aggressive. Swing within your limitations. Swing through the ball. Don’t “hit” it. Keep that right hand out of it. Keep your hands out of it.” Rubbish! These advice givers do nothing but harm to anyone who cares to hit the ball solidly and for a decent distance. “But the pros look so effortless”, you might say. And that is generally true, they do look graceful and balanced as they produce prodigious amounts of clubhead speed; however, they are not swinging “easy”. They are applying clubhead speed by using the pivot (the body) to drive the arms and then the hands through the impact area in a free, aggressive release of energy. The “effortlessness” of the action is an illusion. There is a great deal of effort, it’s just that it’s focused correctly and efficiently and thus takes on the appearance of smoothness and ease. The rhythm of the swing is smooth back, smooth starting down, then downright violent through the ball for a full shot. The pros may even describe their action as “easy”, but that is only because they may be able (especially the big guys) to swing at 75 or 80% and still hit the ball great distances. I spend most of my time teaching the average player to go ahead and hit the damn thing. Relax the hands and let the energy we have worked to store up fly through the ball as hard as you can without falling over. For a beginner, it is essential to build up a feel for speed and distance first, with an aggressive body motion and an unhindered hand release, before worrying about contact and direction. Over concern with accuracy keeps the beginner from applying his or her athletic ability to the compression of the golf ball. “Swing easy” is great for someone who can hit the ball 290 yards and needs to learn to keep it on the course. We should all be so lucky as to have such problems. The average guy needs more distance to enjoy the game. You’re not going to find it by waving through the ball “nice and easy”.

7. ”Swing out to the target”. No, no, no. A golf swing is not “straight back and straight through”. Trying to swing the clubhead down the target line after the ball is struck causes more serious problems than almost any “swing thought” I have come across. What is especially frightening is the fact that a large majority of the people I teach attempt to do exactly that. Once you try to adjust the circular nature of the hitting motion to a straight line you take away any chance for the swing to find its natural athleticism. Instead of an unbroken, free-wheeling release of stored up energy allowing for maximum club head speed, the motion is interrupted and slowed down by the attempt to “steer” the clubhead, and, most likely the clubface, toward the target, ostensibly to guarantee a straight shot. What results is anything but straight, as the clubface stays open through impact fairly regularly, (the number one reason people shank is their hands pushing straight to the target), and certainly is not powerful. The clubhead must swing in an arc. The target line is straight, but the swing is a circle. Simple geometry tells us that a circle will touch a straight line only once, at a point called a tangent. In the case of the golf swing, the tangent is impact. In order for the body to be encouraged to rotate aggressively through the ball the conception of impact must be one of arcing the clubhead and closing the face. I have seen almost unbelievable increases in clubhead speed, and thus distance, when this concept is first understood. The clubhead goes left and closes after impact. The hands begin to go left even before the ball is struck.

8. “Hold the club like a bird”. I hear this one all the time. It seems that everyone I teach has at some point been told to hold the club as lightly as possible. And everyone who holds the club with that little pressure ends up with a terrible grip. A grip is measured by its ability to allow the club to be swung efficiently, which means applying whatever clubhead speed is need and squaring the clubface. A hard swing, such as you would make when hitting a full shot, requires a firm hold of the club. A soft shot around the green needs far less pressure, so at this point holding it like a bird, whatever that means, might be a decent idea. But everyone seems to want to barely hold on to the club when they are trying to hit their drivers. The hands either snatch the club away to start the swing, fall apart at the top of the swing, or desperately grab in the middle of the downswing or at impact, causing a whole raft of bad things to happen. The problem most people have in the first place is that the club is misplaced in the hands, and the only way they can feel a secure hold is to squeeze the life out of it. I suppose all these people who insist that the grip should always be light are reacting to the legion of golfers with horrendous grips who death grip it to keep from losing the club during the swing. The grip, when placed properly in the hands, can, and should be, held securely by the fingers, while the wrists, elbows, and shoulders remain free of tension.

9. “Pause at the top”. Sorry, there is no pause at the top of a golf swing. There really isn’t even a top at all, at least not in the vast majority of top quality players. Even if the hands and arms have the appearance of stopping at the apex of the backswing, it is an illusion, much like a child on a swing set seems to stop as the swing makes its transition from going up to coming back down. Gravity is exerting a constant pull on the swing. Its motion is continuous. There is no way the child will ever be suspended in midair, unless the moment is frozen by a camera or a video. So it is with the golf swing. As the movement of the body changes from back to forward, the arms, hands, and club are all pulled along in order and never come to a complete stop. it can be said that the arms are still going back as the lower body starts forward. The movement blends together seamlessly, and the flowing nature of this transition is the cornerstone of the rhythmic sequencing of a good golf swing. Again, the advice-givers seem to be reacting to the mass of players who, not understanding this concept of continuous motion, overpower the swing by starting down too violently with the arms and hands. When proper lower body movement is understood, and one feels how this movement affects the arms and hands, the question of “pausing at the top” never arises again.

10. “I got it, I lost it.” Please, stop saying this. You haven’t “got it”, and you haven’t “lost it”. There are days, and there are days. Tomorrow is another day. The better you get, the more the chance that tomorrow might be something like today. But that level is way beyond the average person reading this article. No matter what you might think, your next round could be the best you ever played, or the worst you ever played. Instead of waiting 30 years to learn this from experience, just accept it now and save all of your friends, family, and relatives the tedious dissertations on how great or how lousy you are. First of all, no one cares. Second, people who know you know that tomorrow the story will be completely different, and that at that point they will have to sit through another of your mind-numbing monologues. Try to take things as they come and look at the whole thing as a process, and a long process at that. A healthy attitude toward the game focuses on the journey, not the destination. When you feel up, act humble. The game doesn’t take kindly to gloating. When you feel down, hang in there, avoid whining about it, and do whatever it takes to get yourself back where you want to be.

To learn and improve in the game of golf one must first have the proper ideas, or conceptions, regarding the nature of the motion involved. Misconceptions present a huge obstacle in the path of all golfers. I deal with these misconceptions on a daily basis. The journey to golfing mastery is all about finding the right concepts, then learning to physically execute what those concepts entail. Golf is a thinking man’s or woman’s game, and if I can get you thinking in the right direction then I am doing my job as a teacher of the game.