After thinking about Fuyrk’s tee shot on 16… I think he really wanted to curve it around the corner… but with the modern driver and plastic golf balls… the ball doesn’t want to curve much… so he just really tried to make sure he did… and he sure enough did. If he was playing persimmon and balata… I don’t think that swing happens. I understand the way he swings… and how he releases the club… and it’s not that hard to work a balata a bit right to left off a driver.
Good theory except he did not hit driver he hit 3 wood it looked liked most players were hitting either 3 wood or Hybrid. Furyk just hit a bad shot at wrong time and it cost him big time
“So I’ll be quite honest,” he said. “It was 99 yards up from the back of the very back tee. I know the USGA gives us a memo saying that they play from multiple tees, but there’s no way to prepare for 100 yards. I was unprepared and didn’t know exactly where to hit the ball off the tee. And I took a little bit more of an aggressive route with that 3-wood.”
He ended up snap-hooking it into the trees and making a bogey to lose the lead. Ultimately, however, he did accept responsibility.
“The rest of the field had that same shot to hit today and I’m pretty sure no one hit as (crappy) a shot as I did. So I did the worst job of handling it and I have no one to blame but myself
That’s right, he did hit 3 metal. Strange that he felt he could not prepare for an up tee. It’s not really a hole he needs to birdie. Why not then just play a 3 iron off the tee? Just get it into the fairway. Do the same thing and then just hit a short iron in. Even a 7 or 6 iron should not be an issue from the fairway. Even if you could go for the green in two… I think it’s too risky to do so. Better to lay back and hit a 60 or 80 yard wedge shot.
I don’t think I have ever seen him hook a shot like that. Very strange. It would be interesting to have seen that swing slowed down from DTL.
Well, he slotted it great… which tells me this ball is not going to start left… and the tracker shows the ball flight started out perfect. Rotation was level… shaft worked left and the ball initially took off right where it should have. This was a hook, but not a pull hook… assuming that tracker is accurate.
He knew he missed the shot badly right when he hit it the way he dropped the club and all. I don’t see his right arm coming off the body… which suggests this was just a really bad off centered hit … like a big toe hook… and not much would feel worse than that.
He may have been protecting against a heel miss into the right rough… and over compensated and just toe hooked it.
If you look at the tracker in the last frame… you would think it would end up perfect. If he nailed it on the sweet spot, the ball would not hook like that. It was a weak shot that screams off centered strike.
My guess, based upon experience on Trackman was that he was playing for a draw so the path would be right of the target (inside-to-out) a little more than normal. He probably had the clubface closed at impact, which you don’t want for a push-draw type shot. I’ve found that you can hit that shot with only a 2-degree closed face. So he may have had something like a 2-degree closed face and a 3-degree inside-to-out path. I would also bet that he probably hit it a little off the toe as well. He had a previous shot that was a pretty sizeable draw that they showed in Hi-Speed the contact and it looked like it was contacted off the toe as well. And IIRC, that shot was also with a 3-wood. But, gear effect took over and since his face was probably not closed, he wound up hitting that toe-draw in the fairway.
This excerpt from Michael Allen after his try at this year’s U.S. Open:
It wasn’t that long ago that Allen was a teaching pro at Winged Foot—a lousy one, in his assessment—trying to get a job at a Donald Trump course. He figured out golf at (roughly) age 47, with the help of a California teacher named Mike Mitchell, who put him in clubs that are four degrees flatter than standard. “On my worst days I know I’m going to be in the ballpark,” Allen says. To borrow a phrase, he owns his swing.
A few years ago a fellow pro friend of mine Kris Moe showed me a swing sequence of Mike’s new golf swing and how he had worked hard on flattening it out quite a bit. I thought that was very good.
I knew Mike from college golf as we used to play against UN Reno where he and Kirk Triplett were teammates. He really grinded it out for years. We played together at PGA Tour Q school second stage one year and I remember talking to him about swing theory. He always had a deep interest in the underlaying mechanics. Micheal’s a great guy and I always enjoyed playing with him. It’s really been great to see him having the success he has worked so hard to enjoy.
