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Watching Tyler’s swing you get the feeling that you’ve seen this before: it’s fluid and powerful, and at full speed would seem as good as any Tour player. But Tyler has not been getting the results he wants and needs to be able to make a living playing the game, and the slow motion analysis tells us why. It is a pattern that has been showcased on this website many times in the past, and both his friends (Jason Gandy and David Holmes) exhibit the exact same tendencies. It starts with the tight and straight right arm at address. As the swing moves into the backswing the upper right arm stays well in front of the body, and this lack of depth in the right side movement of the upper trunk makes the player feel as though there is not enough coiling by the time the left arm gets to parallel to the ground. Wanting to feel that good turn and load the player then turns the right shoulder to finish the backswing and that takes the right upper arm and elbow upward and behind the body. This late right side turn causes the shaft to cross the line right at the key moment of transition, and when the lower body movement catches the upper and pulls the left arm into the downswing the shaft, because it is moving in the wrong direction, is momentarily quite steep in the first few clicks of the downswing. The shaft can’t stay steep (if it did the player would be a hack) so it flattens late, which causes all sorts of problems, most notably being the hands coming into impact too high and away from the body along with the added attraction of the clubhead usually being “stuck” behind the hands when the shaft is parallel to the ground prior to impact.
The cure for these issues starts with the set-up, where I want the right arm to be bent and firm so that the upper right arm will travel more with the shoulder turn as the upper trunk initiates the swing. With earlier right side depth the hands can then twist the clubhead to open the face, which in turn stops the right elbow and points the club more to the left and less across the line. From here the “catch” of the lower body movement will flatten the shaft well above the swing plane, which leaves the rest of the downswing to steepen the shaft as the club lags on the index and third finger of the right hand. Delivering the club properly then depends on the hips staying deep and the head staying out over the ball as the player drives forward and around in the sidearm throwing motion that Hogan talked about so succinctly in The Five Lessons.
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