ABS & the modern proffesional

Im fairly new to the site and have not had the time to rummage through all the posts to see if this had been covered before. and by no means is this an attempt to offend. my question is more about my ignorance of the golf swing.

i have no aspiration to earn money from golf, however i would like to become proficient enough to play golf courses the way the architect invisaged them to be played, rather than beat the ball as far and straight as i can time and time again. So far i think that what im working on with Two can get me there.

but lets say i was a teenager and did have aspirations of playing on a proffesional tour. could i base my game around ABS and still be long enough to compete on the current world stage? from what ive read so far, ABS will help me more with accuracy than anything else.

Lag, i have read a few times where you challenge any current day pro to take you on with old gear, but would your technique allow you to compete if the the tides were turned and you had to take them on a modern course with modern gear?

Bradley and Kim Felton played a pro event over in Perth, and they both played persimmon. Of course both have been working on ABS concepts. Kim won the event using persimmon against a field of guys playing modern gear. True story. So pretty much dispels any myths that you could not win with persimmon. Mac O Grady finished 5th a couple years back playing persimmon and 1970’s Hogan Apex blades against a field of guys using modern gear. Mac can’t putt either. Pretty good stuff.

This has more to do with the course and how it is set up. A top persimmon player could have won the US Open this year at Merion. It was 6850 on Sunday. The course was not impossible if you drove the ball in the fairway.

Driving the ball long is beneficial if you can also drive it straight. If a golf course is properly set up so that angles are critical as any great course should be, then position and accuracy off the tee will offer great advantage. There are still a lot of golf courses that require accuracy. If a course is a wide open pasture like most of the PGA Tour courses, then one would be better to use the gear that is best suited for those courses. You wouldn’t enter a long drive contest using a 1 iron.

Personally, if the majority of holes on a golf course don’t ask me a specific question off the tee, requiring shape, trajectory and distance control, I find the course to be a bit uninspiring or even boring.

All the great courses of the world were designed based upon a deeper articulation of strategy and options. That’s why they are great. Any course can be long by just mowing a patch or grass 50 yards back from where the tee is now. That’s not a pillar of greatness. Never has been and never will be.

thanks Lag,

i definately understand that both accuracy and distance have their appropriate time and place. i suppose the thing that is still unclear to me is that if a pga tour player had built his swing on ABS and he was given the latest super flash missilebladez iron to play with. would his technicque allow him to hit the ball as long as the others? or is there some inherent distance benefit to the modern power dump/hand slap way of swinging?

the reason i ask is that im sure i remember Two stating somewhere that he was once one of the longest hitter on tour with a persimmon but when the metal heads came in and started to get bigger, guys started to hit it further than him.

I don’t know that they would be one of the longest hitters on tour, but a pro whose swing was textbook ABS wouldn’t be short by any means with a modern driver. The thing is, the modern lightweight equipment allows speed to be generated with an armsy flip move pretty easily, so there isn’t as much of an incentive to learn a more pivot driven move. It’s not that the pivot driven move wouldn’t produce more than enough speed to hit the ball at least as long as the average tour player though, given the same equipment.

The one area where an ABS pro would probably be a bit shorter than tour average is in iron distances, but this would be by choice. Naturally, irons that are heavier, stiffer, and flatter won’t go as far as their upright, lightweight counterparts. This distance gap wouldn’t be relevant though if the ABS pro was more accurate with his 6 iron than the rest of the field was with their 8 iron.

Players could be long enough to compete on modern PGA with ABS swing cox11. I got longer with ABS and swing with better tempo. The thing is that it takes training to get the pivot speed up and continuous. To get an idea of how long they could be think of the dumpers combined with Hogans, Normans, Sneads pivot. They would no longer be dumpers, the orbit pull created by a pivot like that would not allow the club to fly off even with a flick of the wrist. Now change the flick of the wrist to a rotation of the forearms and you have a swing.

Modern swings create linear(straight line) speed by being upright, swinging the arms up and down in front of the body adding the wrist flick straight at the target. Two will change your wrist flick to forearm rotation with module 1, most starting ABS hit it shorter because they create linear speed with wrist flick now. You will lose the linear speed of the wrist break to gain the rotational speed of the forearm rotation, this results in shorter hits because it is combined with the pivot stalling arm swing. Two will build you an anchor to handle the body rotation speed(pivot) you will develop in module 3 by training module 2. Then post impact pivot speed is developed in module 3, this is the body rotation speed you need to develop to go with the forearm rotation speed you have trained and distance will be back.

No more arm controlled pivot stalling wrist slapping swing. You will develop a continuous pivot controlled arm following forearm rotating swing. Modern game and vintage game, 10 under is 10 under no matter what era they say. True, the actual physical number is the same. Lets use that logic here. If 2 students are solving a math problem that takes 27 formulas to figure out and both get the same correct answer, are they equally smart. The correct answer is the correct answer no matter what era. True again, but would you still think they are equal if 1 used a calculator. Add to that if I told you that the 1 using the calculator could not do the formulas on paper and come to the same correct answer. Now its interesting, kids can use calculators in multiples of millions that can’t do multiplication tables past 12 x 12 on paper. I am not arguing the fact that they got the same correct answer or the fact that 62 is the same as 62, and I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing that the steps taken, knowledge used, persistence required, training needed, hours invested to get that same result are not equal. 1 is smarter at math and 1 is better at golf, and if your still not with me here you go. If I take a street car around an indy car track in the same time as an indy car then who is a better driver, would anyone say the indy car driver. No, because I did what he did with less power, less tires, less traction, you get the point. The greats shot what modern players shoot with less distance clubs, less forgiving clubs, less forgiving courses, longer courses(compared by approach shot distance percentage related to hole yardage), longer iron shots by club, inferior greens that forced close hits to make putts, a ball that curved and went short on a bad shot like it deserved to, and MUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCH more pressure with smaller purses combined with all that is listed means they had to have nerves of steel. Nerves now, hitting a low spin prov1 with a cavity back velocity slot 6 iron with super shaft compared to a high spin balata with a flat soled no bounce plain steel sharp knife half the size of the 6 iron is laughable. Not arguing these guys are good, but those guys were great. Not in the same league, and thats why Tiger mopped the floor with them until technology made up for that lack of comparable skill and let them in his untouchable league.

Sergio is good to look at in late 90s early 2000s, not a short hitter.

Thanks guys. I find this all both interesting and exciting. Can’t wait for my next session with two

The most common remark I hear from students is that they are hitting the ball farther…this happens after/around Mod 3 for most
Initialy they may lose distance with module 1 (unless they are chronic over the toppers who add loft and spin the heck out of the ball to begin with)… but that is only because they stop throwing it from the top in a quest for speed by working on the mod 1 430 entry…and they dont have the ability to quicken the club up into the strike yet… but that all disappears as time progresses.
Robert Allenby commented to me a couple of weeks back when we chatted that he is now hitting the ball farther…as we have worked hard on mod 3… no surprises there… so I could not see the same thing happening for most pros if they were diligent and utilized pressures in the correct sequence and manner

Thanks two. As you know, last time we met I was swinging OTT. Module 1 has definitely changed this. My divots now are either dead straight or slightly to the right, my ball flight is straight or with a slight draw and surprise surprise I’m 1 club longer. This is all being done using big bad scary musclebacks that a 15hc shouldn’t even dream about using.

It’s a shame your Pro am at boxhill meant our next session won’t be till next month. I’m anxious to advance my journey