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Club pros play in a different league than do touring pros, but the demands of the game do not change. The shots still have to be hit, the course navigated, and the only difference is that the players in the field as a whole are not quite as good overall as the players in a tour event. That said, you can only beat the people you are playing against, so the fact that your winning score might have finished 30th if it were a Tour event is meaningless. I won this very tournament on this course, and I played in this tournament (missing the cut), so believe me when I tell you that 10 under par is some great golf. Rod came into the tournament having been crowned as the PGA Professional Player of the Year for the 2012 season, and he certainly proved that to be no fluke as he pulled away at the finish for a 3 shot victory.
The swing you see here is certainly not a model swing, although I would argue that the impact position and sustained line of compression you will see from the face on view is as good as any tour player I have film of. From down the line we see a bunch of things that I would view as items to work on and change in order to make the swing better. If Rod came to me and told me that his game was in the tank and he couldn’t hit the ball, the first thing I’d do would be to get rid of that lift in his backswing. I would try to get his arms less lifted and then would attempt to get his lower body more involved in the transition and downswing. Of course, he’s not going to do any of this because he’s playing great golf with the swing as is, so it is just interesting to watch it at work. The quietness of his leg movement and the outward hand path (and shallowing shaft) all combine to bring him into a workable impact, where he moves through the ball as well as any tour player I have seen. The “sustain” of the left wrist bend past impact is nothing short of phenomenal. I don’t think I would have guessed that it looked anything like that if it wasn’t captured on camera. I teach that every day, and it is very cool to see an odd looking swing that seemingly makes all the mistakes turn into something great at impact. As a teaching pro it serves as a reminder that what we all teach are preferences. Players like Rod continually show us that there are many ways to hit the ball and play the game, and it doesn’t have to be perfect or even conventional. However, since most people don’t come anywhere near the forward lean that Rod gets at impact you can be sure that it’s one item that has to be high up on the agenda. And if it seems that the other quirks are getting in the way of achieving that impact, then changes would be in order.
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