Just my two cents…the Dante book is one of my all time favorites and in fact is required reading for every new Balance Point student who signs up for one of our golf swing schools like Great Shot! They read Dante, Boomer, Clampett’s book, the new Haney book, Hebron’s “Secrets and Lies”, Rotellas “Golf of Your Dreams” and a few others. All reading to be done prior to attending the school.
I think Mandrin has it right from a technically correct definition standpoint and since he is a scientist I can respect his concern over the proper use of language. I am the same way in how we use terms and language here at Balance Point. Words matter. For example, I never use the term “shoulder” as I don’t believe the shoulder as the term is commonly understood has any role whatsoever in a good golf swing. It has a role in a very bad swing to be sure. We prefer the term “shoulder girdle” or the top of the torso, a part of the Pivot.
My take is that Dante was trying to explain - way back in 1962 I think - what today we call the kinetic chain. He is describing the transfer of momentum from one body segment to the next, and finally to the club. I dont think that was an improper description - just the wrong term, ie COAM. And why is that so important to learning how to strike a golf ball better? Easy…its in the book and my own teaching experience backs it up. He was advocating what some call a “late hit” or late wrist cock angle release. Late is a misnomer, it is actuallly a “right on time” release of the angle.
Many of his golf students, like my own, just could not comprehend how such a “late release” could happen and still square up the clubface. It looks to be - from a common sense perspective - physically impossible. And yet the photographic evidence shows that the pros do indeed square the face up from the ABS P3 position, to impact, and most of that is achieved by simple Pivot Thrusting and then letting the momentum feed into the wrist joint to open up the angle. Or - you can actively use the forearm muscles to assist the momentum in opening up the angle even faster, like Lag prefers. Both ways can work, I prefer the passive way for most of my students. Everything else is identical between ABS and B Point regarding this part of the swing: tight arms, hands and club moving left, post-impact pivot, frozen right arm, etc.
So - Dante was using science (even though he got the term wrong) as a way of CONVINCING his many skeptical students that this Magic Move he was attempting to teach them was real, and concrete and not only possible to learn how to do well, but that even one’s intellectual mind could comprehend why that was so. My guess is that - like me and Lag and many teachers in the “modern” era, he had a lot of very analytical students who literally would not accept the concept and train with it, UNTIL and UNLESS you could convince them scientifically that the concept was 100% correct.
Which gets me to Two and some others’ points here. I can explain the WHY as well as anybody teaching in the game today - Manzella, Lag, Doyle, Bennet and Plummer, O’ Grady, Grober, HK, Leadbetter, Hebron, etc. But as the years go by I find myself having much better success with the analytic type students, to get them to throw away their mental crutches, ie the dependence on so-called 100% verifiable scientific truth, that actually is BY FAR the biggest obstacle to their ability to learn how to hit a golf ball well. Basically, I say something like this: “Do you want to spend your time and your money having a long, detailed debate over everything I am asking you to do - (at $130 hour or $1200 day for a Private School )- or would you like to make some really rapid progress here and start to really learn something that will help you to develop the skill of better ballstriking?” Most will say, yes to that new course. Then I test them for two things: mental focus ability and the ability to feel their body. I ALWAYS find that the analytic types have both poor mental focus and poor body awareness. No wonder they thought that the golf swing is an intellectual mystery, a puzzle, an enigma that has an intellectual solution!
Here is a real work example. I had a new student come to work with me this year who has been to pretty much every “name” instructor in this country over the past five years of taking up the game, including somevery well know names from Internet golf forums. His average score was still in the 105-115 range after all of that instruction and a ton of practice both at home and at the range. He was extremely intellectual and very well read and possessed more intellectual knowledge of swing theory than most golf teachers I know. The problem was that he had no sensory feel-based awareness for his own body and club motion during the swing. In essence, he was not present - awake and alive inside his swing. So even though he knew intellectually that he was succumbing to the Hit Impulse and several other Fatal Flaws, he never had actually experienced those flaws in his body. The flaw was literally only in his mind. Because his mind and body were split - light years apart from each other. We did a lot of body awareness drills and mental focus drills and very quickly he was able to actually do a lot of the body moves that the other teachers has wanted him to do, but which he simply could not do - because of his mind/body split and lack of awareness. As a result, his ballstriking improved dramatically - much better than I had expected.
My point is that the more I hang out at Internet golf forums and read some of the long-winded debates about the most incredibly tiny details of what may or may not occur during a swing segment that might last for a tenth of a second or even much shorter time duration, or with this body part or that body part, it makes me wonder if at least some of the people participating in those debates on a regular basis, are really just completely missing the point about what golf is all about and what learning golf is all about.
I really enjoy ideas being thrown around, and you are clearly as free as a bird to express yours here as often as you like. Long may it continue!
