Menu
A couple weeks ago Kevin Streelman called Brad to ask him for some help with his putting, and Brad, knowing that I had done a swing analysis on Kevin, gave me a call to see if I had spent any time with him. I hadn’t, but we began to discuss teaching in general and eventually I asked Brad how his game was going. We had worked together for a day back in 2010 up in New York, but subsequently Brad decided to work with Mike Bennett and Andy Plummer and has been doing so up until last month. He remembered some of the things we had worked on and when I mentioned that I still thought I could help him swing better he agreed and sent me a few swings to look at just before the tournament in Montreal last week. I saw most of what I had seen in the past, so I still had a good idea of the direction in which I wanted to go.
The first thing I noticed was the overall pace of the swing, which was, I thought, quite slow. I suggested being more “dynamic” (especially in transition) when we traded swings over internet, and we continued to work on this when we got together. Brad had been doing a lot of slow motion drill work, and this had crept into his overall swing tempo. He related to me that he had not “felt the ground” under him in his swing for quite a while, so we worked on loading pressure into his right heel and getting the right hip deeper going back. He had also been lining up a bit on his heels and with his lower body quite closed, so we addressed posture and alignment, both of which should help him cure what I consider his biggest flaw, the tendency to cross the line late at the top and to work from a steep position early in the downswing to a late shallowing of the shaft, the opposite progression that Hogan uses in his swing. Forcing yourself to flatten the club late in the downswing leads to a high approach and the tendency to get the club “stuck” behind the hands on the approach to impact, and usually ends up with a release action that features a lot of hand, wrist and forearm rotation in the follow through. I think that by focusing on right arm action, more specifically lessening the movement of the right elbow after left arm parallel in the backswing, Brad can point to club more left at the top and then flatten the club early from there, which would allow him to steepen the shaft all the way down through impact and swing more left with less crossover. Having the face release more gradually will hopefully lead to more consistent impact, while increasing the right loading and the tempo will make the entire swing feel more athletic and reactive.
Join the forum discussion on this post