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Ben is a New Yorker who does some business in Phoenix and L.A. so when he saw on the website that I was going to be in Phoenix he contacted me for a lesson. He usually works with a fellow former LSU Tiger Jason Magee, and Jason was nice enough to let me work with Ben at the back of the range at McCormick Ranch where Jason teaches. As I watched Ben hit some I noted that he was a very sizable guy and had a huge backswing turn with a pinched right arm, which usually means that the right side will get stuck on the downswing as the left side struggles to get out of the way. The video showed this assessment to be correct, so I quickly went to some stop-and-goes from left arm parallel to try to get Ben to feel the club progress more up the plane in the takeaway while creating more width by getting his upper right arm not to attach itself to his side and by feeling the hands push away from the head at the top of the swing. With the right side so overturned the leg movement was definitely out from under him, and the combination of an in-to-out path with the hips driving out of the box was producing some very fat shots and otherwise erratic contact. When I put the shaft in between Ben’s feet to remind him to drive his right leg parallel to the target line and to rotate his left leg much earlier and more aggressively we began to see some really different and better action. This amounted to an entire pattern change for Ben so it will be interesting to see how he is doing the next time we get together.
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