It’s always nice to get swings from the television broadcasts that employ fixed cameras. As we know, any hand held camera precludes the use of drawing lines to see where the movement occurs in the swing because It is impossible to hold a camera perfectly still while filming. Usually at a Tour event the fixed cameras are on tee boxes for obvious reasons, and in this case we have both Scott and Mcilroy teeing it up on a par 3. The extra good news is that they tee off from almost exactly the same spot, which means we can do a side by side comparison of their swings and have some faith that we are comparing apples to apples. Both of these guys are great players: in looking closely at their swings we are not trying to criticize or find things we think could be improved, but rather we are observing so that we can see why they hit the ball so well. Every player has their own quirks and tendencies, and here we see that both these guys, especially Rory, have some interesting things going on.
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Thank you Wayne
Loved the side-by-side! One observation: It looks to me like Rory’s hand “drop” at the top is mostly attributable to his second lowering. If you put a dot on the grip and a line on his head at the top of the backswing, I’d bet you would see the grip move down the same amount as his head and shoulders lower. In other words, his hands appear to be dropping because his entire upper torso lowers so dynamically
There are lots of players who drop like that and still get the hands to go out. I’d say it’s probably more to do with the way his legs and arms function. I think he’d be more consistent if he fixed it but there’s always the chance he’d get worse too.
Rusty is right. Rory’s hands still move outward, it’s disguised by his lowering. That’s an insane observation. Nice!
Did you listen to Wayne’s video? They go backwards. “Insane” is right.
Wayne describes Rory’s back swing as “out and around” with the right arm pulling back at the top. That is true. And there is a very slight backward move of the butt of the grip as Rory’s arms come to a stop. The point I was making is that from that point forward the downward move of the handle from the top matches precisely with Rory’s dynamic lowering. While he’s lowering (really, he’s squatting) there is no independent movement of his arms and hands. If you consider the position Rory is in after the squat as the “end” of his back swing, then Rory moves the handle precisely the way Wayne prefers. Personally, i think the around move to complete the back swing could be tweaked, but the “drop” is an illusion.