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Imagine my surprise when as a mini-tour rookie the first two tournaments I enter I get waxed by two guys named Walter Zembriski and Dick Mast. My surprise was that I had never heard of either one. I saw Walt in the pro shop at Cypress Creek in Orlando (1981) and thought he was the maintenance man. The next time I saw him he was accepting the winner’s check. That was my first event- the second was at West Orange Country Club, a shortish, fairly tight little track with grainy Florida greens that wasn’t as easy as the yardage might have suggested. I remember shooting 69 and feeling pretty good about myself, until looking at the leader board and finding that I was 7 shots out of the lead. Seems Dick Mast had fashioned himself a tidy 62, and when he followed that up with a 63 he had a nice 8 stroke win. I made my first check, and finished 14 shots behind. Welcome to the Space Coast mini-tour.
In the 30 years that have passed since that time Dick Mast has been and done just about everything a touring golf professional can do. He has been full time on both the PGA Tour and the Champions Tour, and, trust me, has played on just about every other tour that ever offered prize money. Dick has also been an inveterate searcher, working on his swing technique and taking lessons from pretty much every teaching pro you might have heard of. I was quite surprised when one day last fall I got a phone call from Dick, the message being that he had seen my website and wanted to discuss some of my ideas on the swing and how they might relate to his recent struggles. Dick sent me a couple swings that I took a look at, and when I sent back my analysis he decided to take the trip from Lynchburg up to Maryland to get together. In our one-on-one sessions we spent most of our time on the subject Dick was most interested in, lower body movement and use of ground forces (pivot compression) in the transition and forward swing. It was the first time he had been encouraged to incorporate aggressive lateral movement into his swing, and he found it liberating (and powerful). He won his first stage of Champions Tour Qualifying in October, and while he missed at the finals, he is excited about his improved ball striking. You might note that while I favor a shaft plane approach and release, Dick is nowhere near this. It was my choice to leave that alone and concentrate on his pivot movement, and you can see by the impact alignments he produces that he knows how to get the club on the ball. I might have tried to at least experiment with a younger player, but as Dick approaches 60, he doesn’t have the time or inclination to make such a profound change that may or may not be an improvement. It really goes to show you that everyone is different, and that is one of the things that keep teaching all day totally interesting.
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