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Dick stopped by Lakewood a few weeks ago after not seeing me for some time due to various injuries that had him concocting swings to avoid the pain he was feeling in his hips and back. As we do most of the time we get together we spent most of our time working on his set up, especially his posture. Dick has a tendency (and I know what this is like) to get a little lazy at address due to his back issues, and we usually work on getting him out onto the balls of his feet with more angle in his waist. This helps him feel his upper trunk rotation better and also tilts his hips, which helps them stay deep. In this lesson we also spent a lot of time on his grip, which tends to get weak. While we were going over how he placed his hands on the club he mentioned that he was having a hard time finding a comfortable place for his right pinky to overlap the left, so I showed him how I like to “trigger” the index finger on both hands. Everyone pretty much knows how important it is to have that right hand index finger triggered as that is the “lag pressure point”, but Dick had never heard of doing the same thing with his left. Hogan talks about this in “Power Golf”, writing that he liked to pop the knuckle of the index finger of the left hand up so that he could hook the right pinky on the middle knuckle. That was a revelation for Dick, and as soon as he felt his hands solid on the club again he started to flush it. He took those thoughts out to the Champions event and 4 spotted with a 66, then had himself right near the lead before making double on the last hole and finishing 7th, his best tourney of the year.
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