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You’ve got to love a game where two players in the hunt to win a big event are so amazingly different when it comes to what golf people would call a “fundamental”, that being tempo. The other interesting thing here is that both golfers could be much closer in utilizing the same rhythm, which makes it crucial that we understand the difference between the two terms, which most of the time are used (incorrectly) interchangeably. When we speak of tempo, we are measuring the rate, or speed of the movement. Fitzpatrick’s tempo is fast, Wallace’s tempo is slow. In fact, I would conjecture that Fitzpatrick has perhaps the fastest swing on any tour, while Wallace’s is right up there with the slowest. However, when it comes to rhythm the two players might be somewhat closer, as we are then measuring the RATIO of the backswing movement (the time it takes from the first movement of the clubhead to the change of direction) to the forward swing (the time it takes from the first move forward to impact). The best ball strikers rarely take more than 9 clicks (at 30 frames per second) to get to impact from the top, and my guess is that Fitzpatrick’s swing would time out at about 18 back and 6 forward (Hogan was around 21/7, a 3/1 ratio that John Novosel, in his book Tour Tempo, defined as the magic ratio), while Wallace, with about a 40 count backswing, would more than likely be more in the 4.5/1 range, an outlier for successful tour professionals. If you ask most people to watch these swings and choose the best “tempo”, my guess is that 90% would go with Wallace, because “good tempo” is often correlated with “slow”. The point here is that the average player has a wide berth in how fast or slow they swing, but it has been proven that poorer players generally swing slower and lose distance accordingly, as they are unable to time their swing like Wallace does and can’t avoid the tendency to rush from the top to try to gain speed.
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