The Goofy Game of Golf Searching for the Answer

The blog is back as the Burgh got it’s first real snow fall of the year, around 7 inches. Today I am going to look at the golfers who are closed or shut faced half way and closed at the top of their swing. There were 10 out of 61 pros who were both although 3 of those you could argue were close to square at the top. I am going to list the 7 who were definitely shut at the top. As you will see it is quite a diverse group.

The seven, in no particular order, are David Duval, Nancy Lopez, Arnold Palmer, Lexi Thompson, Paul Azinger, Lee Trevino, and Dustin Johnson. Do these players have any common denominator, other than they were all at one time or right now great players. Certainly they all don’t have a common ball flight. Azinger and Trevino were faders or the golf ball and Palmer and Thompson draw the ball. I not too sure about the ball flight pattern of the other 3 but those 4 were opposite. One thing you can say is, that Duval, Lopez, Palmer and Trevino had pretty unique swings. The only comment that I could find any of them make about their shut faced position at the top was by Palmer who said that he felt that this position helped keep him from hooking the ball too much. He must have felt that the clockwise rotation of the club head to get to square accomplished this. I do find this to be a unique way to fade the ball, but this obviously worked for Trevino, one of the all time greats. You will find the same diversity in any of the other 9 combinations that are possible, half way back, and at the top of the back swing. One of the other interesting things is that a lot of the so called classic swingers are not square at both positions. That could be the reason that even though their swing is very technically correct, they don’t play as well, as some people think they should. I am not sure this is a correct conclusion, but the more correct your swing is, maybe its more important for you to be in the square and square position.

I haven’t been able to draw many conclusions from this study of wrist movement in the golf swing, because I haven’t been able to take much to the course. I still believe that wrist action is misunderstood or totally ignored in golf instruction. It will take care of itself syndrome is definitely wrong. Do I have any ideas? Of course I do. Speaking of ideas, that’s what the future blogs are going to be about. A synopsis of the ideas I have had about the golf swing, over the last 5 and 1/2 years of this blog, that were mostly wrong, but that I have refined to get to the pathetic state that I am in today.