My feeling and I think Moe would have agreed, is that the standard address position most people use is not correlated to how we should be striking a golf ball.
These images of two time US Open Champion and hall of famer Curtis Strange show the importance of getting spine tilt over the 4:30 line and as Curtis shows us… he does this VERY quickly… moving off the ball and establishing this. Notice the tree in the background and how far he moves off it to his right. These captures are from a post Bradley put up in our Vault, and these are taken from the same swing. Also, you can really get a feeling of how much weight he was shifting around from address to the top and then pressuring down and into the right leg and then working weight laterally through the strike. Great stuff.
Moe started with the club well back of the ball and to the inside, and often VERY well back and inside. This eliminated the awkward movement of getting from a “standard” address position and into a P3 striking position. Moe also set up with his shoulders very closed and he told me personally that he did all of this to eliminate the first move away from the ball. He basically set up where Curtis is a P1.
I love what Curtis does here, and it really shows the fallacy of “keep the head still” that has been falsely ingrained into so many of us.
I feel Curtis used this move off the ball as part of his rhythm to get things moving also… much like some would use a big forward press to initiate the movement of the club.
There are a lot of ways to grip the club, take the backswing and transition the club into a flatter plane. What Curtis does here is excellent in it’s intentions… however much he “moves off the ball”. Curtis was one of the games straightest hitters statistically every year, along with Calvin Peete.