The point I am making here is not coming from any kind of arrogance. The modern golf swings are designed for distance only.
Not accuracy. The swings from the past were generally designed for accuracy, because there was an absolute premium placed on putting the ball in play and being much more precise with the iron play than what is going on today.
I was fortunate to play a few times with Corey Pavin in competitions, and it was just incredible that a guy who drove the ball about 225 off the tee could go out and shoot 66 on a very difficult golf course. I witnessed this twice with Corey when we played the Stanford Golf Course with thick wet rough, and again at North Ranch which is a very tough tight course just north of LA.
He did not miss one single fairway in either of those rounds… and the greens he missed were only the long par 4 greens he simply could not reach in two shots with a driver and 3 wood. But he would calculate where to miss short so his pitch shot would be positioned easiest to get up and down… which he would 90% of the time. He would hit a lot of 4 woods into greens and routinely hit them inside 20 feet from the hole. His golf swing was designed for accuracy. He rotated very level and worked the shaft through impact very much the same way Hogan did, Faldo did, Curtis Strange, even Cal Peete. With these swings, there is a rock solid connection between the core of the rotation and the clubhead. The lower torso moves in unison with the club through the impact arena even with the driver. This is the body pressuring the shaft with the big muscles in a very tangible way that is much more repeatable and is the proper way to swing the club for an accuracy based golf swing.
I don’t see many on tour these days swinging this way. The ones that do are actually the better ball strikers like Furyk and Joe Durant… but their advantage of accuracy has been taken away by the modern game. If a player like B Watson can hook the ball 50 yards left and have a wide open shot with a short iron then what is the point in learning to swing the club properly?
Well, a guy like Styles here might likely argue that this bomb and gouge swing is the proper swing to learn in today’s game…
and if a guy can hit only 39% of his fairways for the week and take home $800K as a reward for his fine golf… then one could argue that point… sure.
However, if you give a guy like this a small headed persimmon driver, some blade irons… a high spinning ball and force him to put the ball in play or else he makes triple bogey, then I say that the golf swing he is using currently is so far from what it would take to play real golf that he would have a big wake up call coming… and a guy like myself, just a washed up touring pro who plays just a handful of rounds a month, would not have much trouble beating him under such polarized conditions to what he has been accustomed to.
The Snedecker experiment I believe to be very accurate. He shot 80 when handed persimmon, blades and balata on tight course. He didn’t shoot 68, and hand the clubs back and say…"what’s the big deal here?
I agree that with a bit of practice he could get his scores down into the low 70’s but he would be a long way from going out and shooting 66 with that stuff. It would almost be like starting over.
In the first TRGA event, there was a mini tour pro from Nevada who had won recently, and obviously one of the better players in the area. When handed persimmon and blades he shot 88. Not 78… 88. I don’t think he even finished the second round. I beat him by 15 shots the first round. Not because I am a great player… I shot a 73… a decent round. Had Sam Randolph been in the field when he was playing his best, I would likely have been 6 shots back with a 73.
In the modern game… all you have to do is hit it a mile, have a phenomenal short game… putt the lights out, and just be a mediocre short iron player and you can play the tour. The guys that are the best at those qualities win events.
The way pro golf was set up before required a level of refinement far beyond what is going on today. One of the problems is that most of the quality strikers from the persimmon age have damaged their golf swings slowly over time using the modern lightweight clubs. Their muscle tone has been compromised and the receptors in the brain are not getting the precision feedback from the smaller sweetspots. I like feeling my misses. If I hit a thin shot off the toe with a long iron it’s like being electrocuted with 4000 volts going through my body. I really tend to avoid doing that again on the next shot.
