hawg,
I thought it was Steve Davis who used to do that. ??
I reckon Trevino delivered the club more like a Snooker player than anyone else.
Thanks for the comment, NRG
Steve Davis, for sure. Actually, anyone who ever had any aspirations of turning pro did this drill for hours. It’s a totally B.S. proof way to test your stroke. If you can do it five in a row on a snooker table, your stroke is true and error free. It’s not close, it’s right. It’s not 99 per cent there, it’s 100 per cent there. Cause 99 per cent is an obvious, detectable fail.
I just wish there was a similar test / drill for golf.
Interesting how you would like Trevino with a snooker player. To me, Lee Trevino = that big ol’ loopy swing. Snooker players, well, that’s more Moe Norman: on the line, down the line, in a line. Always. Or at least that’s how it looks from here.
On a non related note, NRG is a radio station (or at least it used to be) in France. Is that the source of your handle.
hawg1 wrote
[bInteresting how you would like Trevino with a snooker player. To me, Lee Trevino = that big ol’ loopy swing. Snooker players, well, that’s more Moe Norman: on the line, down the line, in a line. Always. Or at least that’s how it looks from here.[/b]
But if you ignore the loop, which was his way of getting on line and doesn’t hit the ball anyway, Trevino is a good example isn’t he?..isn’t that what he said he tried to do…keep it on line as long as he could?
eagle, thats right, Trevino looped it out for a reason. He believed he could keep the club moving down the flightpath for longer than anyone, also the club pointing at the target for longer and level with the ground for longer. I am not sure if Moe could compete with Trevino at this??
hawg, Thats it French radio station, you sussed me. 
Sorry to crib the line from James Burke but it IS apropos here.
A theme of my posts recently has been transference of athletic skill from one venue to another, and how golf seemed to fall off the cart somehow; not just for me, but for 99 per cent of all athletes I’ve ever known.
Just watched Lag’s Module 1.
That was truly world changin’ stuff.
Lightbulb moment isn’t quite strong enough.
Seriously, Lag, if you were to get that module under the nose of an NHL hockey player, you could sell the whole league. Everyone would grok it. Instantly.
It’s always bugged me why so many of us could blast slapshots past a goalie, or fire a snap shot into a five hole, but still shoot golf in the hundreds. Even the guys who can put shoot high.
Now I know why.
Kinda guessin’ that the long drive guy from St. Paul (Sadlwosky, methinks) would knock Lag’s bag WAY into the canyon. Swingin’ right or left handed.
And here is a tidbit for those of you who know a fair bit about golf, but have little idea about hockey. After encountering Lag’s module1, I can be 100 per cent certain about the following: If you watch a hockey game, at any level much above peewee (12 year olds) and marvel at the speed of a slap shot, think about this: If that was a golfer, he/ she would be taking the biggest beaver pelt divot in the history of golf. Big honkin five pounders. True wrist-breaking, shaft-snapping divots.
This is obviously an epic fail in golf, but the kinda thing that makes the crowd go “ahh” in hockey.
Any wonder why so many of us take them? A beaver pelt is a slapshot. Plain and simple.
Oh, and yeah. That thought from a few posts back about T-ball? If you have passed lags module 1, we could cut the time from two hours to 10 minutes.
So, in a nutshell, if you are a golf nut, hoping to fix yer game (ESPECIALLY a jock or former jock), and are hummin’ and hawin about takin’ the plunge on Lag’s modules, do yerself a solid and sign up.
You Will get it. It Will resonate. Life will be good.
Anyway, gotta jet. There are 25 years of bad golf thoughts needing to be undone, and there is an impact bag three feet from me, soooooo.
Cheers,
hawg1
Hawg1,
I’m starting to think you sound like someone i know…
Just a thought…
Bom,
Unless you’ve spent the last decade hangin’ out in dens of inequity in the GTA, it’s not likely. Butcha never know…
Curious though, what makes ya think that I sound like somone ya know?
Cheers,
hawg
Hawg1,
I don’t know what the GTA is, but I’ve spent some time in one or two dens of iniquity, so we may have crossed paths…
No worries, you’re style of writing sounds like someone who used to post here and that I got to know a little bit- I wondered if maybe he was going “Guy Incognito”…
No offense intended… I’ve enjoyed your thoughts for sure…
BOM
In my opinion, the differences between T-Ball and golf, while significant, don’t undermine the value that you can transfer over. But you need some understanding of the structure.
The bottom line is the height of the ball. The higher it is, the easier it is to react to in an instinctive rotational manner. Hitters like when pitchers leave pithes up in the strike zone because of this. They can then just go at it.
With golf, it’s still a rotational game, but because the ball is on the ground, below the perpendicular line of energy coming off the spine, the shoulders energy and or force, where the arms are connected to the body, flies out of the spine perpendicularly. Reacting, or accelerating from the top with full gusto, is then disastrous for golfers because they then are actually too flat to begin with, which sends them outside the line, and the only recourse is a late, steep dive to the ball.
The club needs to come down behind you to about mid to lower back level before the real active acceleration kicks in. Ideally, I’d say the belt line that wraps around your back- Hogan, Garcia, Doyle. The shoulders are connected to your back, not your chest. The golf swing happens behind your face and head. We see the ball with our eyes, and relate to it from there for the most part, but the reality is that the hub of the action is behind our heads, at the base of the back of our necks/the top of the back of our spines below shoulder level. Develop some awareness in that area if you want to be a good golfer. The golf swing is always rotational because of this.
Hi Bom,
No offense taken; quite the opposite in fact.
The GTA is the Greater Toronto Area, that’s where I hung my hat for most of the past 13 years.
And I like the way you described the golf swing in your post above. I can’t over emphasize how much the 4:30 line changed everything in golf for me. Now I understand how the occasional good shot would creep in, and exactly what I was fighting and why. As the man said, I can “feel” it now.
It was ironic, really, when I posted about T-ball. One of the moves I would have shown is INCREDIBLY similar to the set up position of the 4:30 line drill. Only difference is the impact zone would be to the left of the left leg, instead of under the left armpit; more towards the pitcher.
For nearly 40 years I’ve been swinging a golf club with some sorta notion that club, coming down from the top of the backswing, had to stay more or less parallel to the target line, so that when I got to P4, it felt like I was pulling a rope (isn’t that the Freddy Couples sensation?) that was also parallel to the target line.
Learning that I was SUPPOSED to pronate the left forearm that much literally was a jaw dropper. As you said, it puts one into a position where it feels like the swing is “behind” us. If you’ve seen Sevam1’s vidoes, he mentions “keep the work in front of you.” For decades, that was a swing thought of mine. Now, how it all slots together makes sense, very much in the way you described above.
Cheers,
hawg1
I’m doing a little catching up on some of the threads around here…
NRG, I couldn’t agree more with this call about Trevino! In my mind he’d actually the model for this…
Cheers…
Thanks for sharing Bom… excellent
Cheers, man… no worries.
I just saw this on Yahoo sports…
Hey BOM,
Once again there’s some good stuff over on GothamGolfBlog.blogspot.com.
http://gothamgolfblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/kelvin-miyahira-webinar-part-1.html#comments
It’s a webinar with Kelvin Miyahira and Rick Malm. They talk about a lot of things, but notably about movements that the more athletically gifted players like tiger and sadlowsky probably took from prior sports training.
Thanks a lot IOZ… I really like that Kelvin guy- I’ve read a few of his pieces on Sadlowski and one in Wie too. I like his thinking a lot. And he makes a lot of sense with Tiger too- it’s depressing to think what Haney did to him. If I was teaching him and trying to get him back on track, I’d give him a baseball bat, a tennis racket, a hockey stick, and fly fishing rod and tell him I’d see him in 10 months and he’s not allowed near a golf club in the meantime. He’s way too good to be doing what he’s doing and to think that it’s complicated. The better you are, the simpler it should seem.
Cheers,
BOM
Bom said:
Along those lines…I had a buddy in college whose dad was a friend of Bobby Jones, and related an interesting story( I will recite from decades old memory…not able to journalistically confirm). Apparently Jones did not play “year round golf”…but would take time off in the winter. He observed that often he played very good golf on his first round after a long layoff.
The winter before he won the Grand Slam, Jones stayed in shape by playing badminton on the stage of the Fox Theater in Atlanta. Wouldn’t that be some great footage?
So you might want to get Tiger a badminton racquet also!! And a “birdie”.
Badminton has to be one of the most underrated sports out there. I played it to a pretty decent level back in the day- it’s a great reaction and explosive speed sport, touch too. It might actually be a better sport than tennis in my book.
It would be kind of funny to see some footage of Jones in his all whites jumping around the stage. It would be hard to argue that he didn’t have a pretty decent handle on how to prepare. Cool story…
I’ve been studying the back for a while now, fascinating stuff. A lot of links to Hogan’s ‘do the opposite’ idea…
Don’t know much about back muscles Bom…would be good to hear your thoughts on this. In the meantime, I’ll share something from my rat files…it’s the backhoe!
Ever really pay attention to them at work digging trenches? The first thing they do is to extend the angular support legs out to each side and somewhat in front of the cabin. Next the hydraulic arm and bucket extends far outfront from the operator. From that position…in digging the trench the scoop goes into the ground and is “dragged” or “pulled” closer to the operator cabin. The dragging inward motion is like a centripetal action.
While dragging inward, there is a tremendous amount of vertical force applied downward into the ground through the angular support legs because although the motion appears almost entirely horizontal…it is actually going a little upward at the same time forcing the downward pressure into the angular support legs. It seems like the dragging motion, which could be seen as a linear pulling inward is really an attempt for the motion to go in two directions at the same time: inward and upward…in otherwords, it can’t drag forever…it has to get “up” at some point.
So the club, which has moved closer to us during transition, is dropping down and going incrementally up at the same time…just like the backhoe.
How do rats know this? …we are experts at digging and have always admired backhoes RR