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What can you say about a player who was one of only three 4-time Division 1 1st Team All-Americans? Could you say he was one of the most talented players to come out of college in history? Sure you could, because the record would back you up. I can vouch for that statement because I was on Gary’s team at Wake Forest when he was a freshman. The first college tournament he played in he won by 8 shots. His first round was a 67 with 33 putts. He hit every green in regulation and three par-5’s in two. He was the real deal, and he was the first player to gain his Tour card without having to go to Q-School. He won 4 Tour events, but it is obvious that he never really approached his apparent potential. He is now on the Champions Tour, and managed to gain a full exemption by finishing 2nd at this year’s Q-School. He already had status after winning in 2010 (he shot 61 in the final round of an event toward the end of that year to beat Fred Couples by a shot), but last year finished just inside the top 50 money winners.
If you ask anyone who knows Gary you will hear tales of how much he would tinker with his swing, how many teachers he would see, and how often he would be changing things trying to “find” something that would work consistently. You would also hear about his awesome swing, with its wonderful, syrupy tempo and rhythm, and there would inevitably be a whisper of how his struggles must have been due to his being a “head case”. What is obvious to me, having been friends with Gary for 25 years, is that he had one fundamental flaw with his approach to the game: when he would hit a bad shot, instead of saying to himself “I just didn’t do what I was trying to do” (which would mean that on the next shot he would try to do the same thing, only better), he would instead question what he was trying to do, and would look for something different to try.
I ended up in Florida with Gary for 4 days as a result of our work online during his recent Q-School play in Arizona. He had stumbled upon my website and sent me a couple of swings, and when I sent back a quick voice over with a couple of suggestions we talked about some things and he went on to shoot 16-under par and finish 2nd, securing his fully-exempt status for the coming year. I knew that whatever I did with him it had to be easily retainable, so I was ready to focus on a combination of pivot compression, dynamic rhythm and tempo, and swinging left through impact. With a swing as accomplished as Gary’s these are all tweaks, and they have to be presented as small changes. At 52 years old you are not going to get far with any sort of major reworking of swing mechanics, and I know better than to get into that sort of thing with Gary anyway. I knew that if I really wanted to help him be more successful I had to give him something he could feel and repeat, and he had to want to “just keep doing it”. If I could get him to clear his mind a bit and focus on a few things such as a triggering move and then a flowing, dynamic action that he could repeat more by feel than by conscious verbal instruction then I felt it would be possible for him to go out and play without thinking about a million things during any given round.
As we worked and as Gary picked up on the value of using a more dynamic motion to free his mind of conscious swing thoughts it occurred to me that we were moving from a more Sam Snead-like motion to a more Hogan-like motion, which I thought fit Gary’s brain much better than Snead’s. Anything that just felt back and forth and repeatable was a good thing, especially when the mechanics of it were so good. When Gary reported in a couple days after I left that he was almost “bored” with just hitting shot after shot with the same motion I knew we had broken through to some kind of different level. I don’t know if it will hold, but I am of course hopeful, and I truly believe that Gary could contend for one of the top spots on the Tour. As always, we will see, and it will certainly be interesting.