I’ll be rattling off some current thoughts. One of the many things that drew me to ABS is Lag being smart enough to focus on those great ballstrikers with unorthodox looking golf swings and seeing what they had in common. That’s what amazes me about watching Moe, particularly from his younger years, if you really look at his swing it mostly has impeccable alignments and is an excellent motion. But most of the world calls it ‘unorthodox.’ Same with Peter Senior. Just a great and POWERFUL motion thru the ball and darn good alignment as well. So I wanted to look at this Jeev Milkha Singh guy and see what he’s doing with his ‘unorthodox swing.’ Here’s some videos, a good bit of ABS principles going on here.
While looking at guys like Hogan and Snead should be mandatory, I can’t help but think that I learn more from looking at the good ballstrikers with the unorthodox swings over the good ballstrikers with very pretty swings.
Although I should mention that Singh does use some Callaway FT game improvement irons. Not very ABS-like. But if they work for him, so be it.
3Jack
There was some discussion on JMS swing not very long ago and Lag approved of his swing as he gets it pretty deep into the slot. I was just reading someone’s blog last night about golf in Pakistan. The guy basically said that because fairways are not well maintained msot every body uses a sweeping motion (much like ABS). Intrestingly a disproprtionate number of good players of the past came from Texas with hard pan fairways.
I have my thoughts about the prettiness of the swing. For an ABS type swing to look pretty you have to have significant flexibility to make it look good through out the swing. Golfers with suboptimal flexibility can not stay on a very shallow plan throughout the swing so they have to have unorthodox backswing and exits to allow them to stay low between P3 to P4. To achieve this they will have to utilize either big loops or big sit downs at the knees or combinations of those.
All of that makes Hogans’s swing even a more remarkable combination of power and flexibility.
Yeah, the only thing I really don’t care for about JM Singh’s swing is the backswing. He gets that #4 PP a bit disconnected and that causes him to get a bit laid off. But the downswing is really, really good and you hit the ball with the downswing, not the backswing. Just most golfers would have big issues with that type of backswing.
Interesting thoughts on Texas golfers as I think about it. I know in upstate NY where there’s quite a bit of precipitation from rain and winter snow that golfers tend to get a bit sweepy because the ground is wet and you get some fear of taking a divot and hitting one fat. But I think of guys like Trevino, Justin Leonard, Byron, etc and they really lowered their COG to make sure they could get down and compress that golf ball. I’d like to think about this a bit more.
I think disconnecting the PP #4 (left arm-pit pressure) in the back swing is OK and necessary for some golfers. I think for this particular golfer it is exactly what allows him to get to the 4:30 line - his transition is key of course. From P3 this guy looks very ABS-like. Also, the angle of the camera in the DTL view is not favourable to looking for the elbow plane, as it’s a little left - and yet even with that angle he is right on the elbow plane - so he’s coming in very deep.
Richie,
If you aren’t on Mod 2 yet, Lag will get you to drop your CG and compress. I’m still trying to get used to it but its awesome stuff.
As for Jeev, I have nice high res stills of his swing. I’ll try to find the files and post them soon. What I can see from DTL is that he has his shoulders almost dead square to the target line at impact. I get the impression that he has to make a very independent hand roll into impact because his clubface is way way open going back.