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Steve is an accomplished senior amateur player from Kentucky who contacted me last year for an online lesson.
In his email Steve said “I am having difficulty hitting my irons solid. Mostly fat contact, some thin, always off the heel…Looking forward to hearing from you.”
Steve also belongs to the beautiful Calusa Pines Golf Club in Ft. Myers, Fla. and when he saw that I was going to be in Boca he took the opportunity to drive over to see me in person. You might think that at 59 Steve’s habits and tendencies, whatever they are, might be hard to change, and you would be right. But Steve’s high level of play over the years and his interest in working on the changes I suggest give him a good chance to improve. And given that Vinny Giles won the U.S. Senior AM at 67 years of age gives everybody hope.
The first thing you will notice about Steve’s action is that it looks great. This is almost always the case when the rhythm is good and the club points nicely on plane at the top. But these are not the things that create a superior strike, which you will see clearly in this video. Steve sits and backs up and away from the ball with his takeaway triggering move, and he ends up with his legs slow to clear and his right shoulder too far back to get his hands forward and to sustain a good strike of the ball. You will see a big difference when I get him to load toward his right heel going back, which he couldn’t do before because with his sit-back trigger move he was already too far into his heels. The lowering produced by this better takeaway gives the swing much more of a dynamic look, and the results, at least in the drills, are substantially better. We will continue to work on getting that sidearm throwing feeling and clearing the left side so that the hands can get more forward approaching impact.
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