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Daniel Summerhays has been a professional for 7 years, and actually won his only Tour event (on the Nationwide Tour) as an amateur. He turned pro 2 weeks later and has been grinding out there ever since, having his ups and downs but seemingly hitting his stride a bit in 2013 and the beginning of 2014. From the looks of his swing I would say that unless he is inept around the greens he should become a solid top 20 player with tremendous upside. There just aren’t many players with better action than this. He is another representative of the “you don’t have to be 6 feet something and 200+ pounds and carry the ball 300 to be a great player” brigade, which is making a strong statement this year with the early dominance of Zach Johnson. And if you saw Patrick Reed win you also know that you don’t have to be a gym rat either. Summerhays is 5’8” and 185 pounds, and he has all the power you need to win anywhere. It is a classy move from start to finish. The only deviation from my list of preferences is the rate of rotation of the lower body in the first half of the downswing, which finds his left knee in view from the down the line view almost until the shaft is parallel to the ground in the approach to impact. Interestingly enough that is exactly the case with Zach Johnson. I know Mike Bender teaches this but in my experience once the arms have outraced the hips early in the downswing, for the vast majority of people there is no way the hips are going to move out of the way along with the upper body through impact the way these two guys do. Another guy who looked like this and hit it great was Nick Price. I really can’t think of too many more, and that, plus the fact that average players never seem to recover from that type of transition, leads me to prefer having the knees and hips return to square when the left arm is much closer to parallel to the ground (significantly earlier in the downswing) and indicative of a more aggressive lower body thrust diagonally to the left.
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